As a fun project but also for serious performance models
Nowadays you can give a street car a Formula 1-like acceleration thanks to super powerful electric motors. Think of the Tesla Model S Plaid or the Lucid Air Sapphire. A few decades ago, however, manufacturers used to hang Formula 1 engines in road cars for fun.
Renault Espace F1 (1994)
Who doesn’t remember him? In 1994, in the heyday of the Williams-Renault combination, a beat-out Espace coach was draped over the technology of world champion Alain Prost’s racing car. Result: a family van with a more than 830 hp strong V10 between the rear seats!
Ford Transit Supervan 2 (1984)
Renault’s idea was not new: in 1971 Ford already screwed a Transit coach onto the GT40 Le Mans car and in 1984 it did something similar with a Group C car and a Cosworth DFL V8 block, derived from the F1 car. engine. The Transit body this time was not steel but carbon fiber.
Alfa Romeo 164 Pro Car (1988)
The idea was great: to race as a support act for the F1 with cars that looked like street cars but were pure racing cars under the skin, so-called silhouette racers. Alfa Romeo, together with Brabham, prepared a lightweight 164 body and chassis for this Pro Car series, including their own 3.5 V10. Unfortunately, it remained with beautiful plans and two prototypes.
Ferrari F50 (1995)
A car with F1 genes that did go into production was the F50. At its heart is a 520 hp 4.7-liter V12, a derivative of the 3.5 V12 engine that served in the 1990 F1 car of Alain Prost and Nigel Mansell.
BMW M5 (2005)
BMW has built beautiful F1 engines and in the E60 generation of the M5 you will find a nice memento under the hood of the V10 that the Germans supplied to Williams in the noughties. The stroke volume grew in the road car from three to five litres. Perhaps not the best M5 of all time, but one of the most intriguing.
Porsche Carrera GT (2003)
Where did Porsche suddenly get a V10 for the Carrera GT in 2003? Not from any other street-legal car anyway. No, that 5.7-litre ten-cylinder came from Porsche’s Le Mans car and was a further development of the engine that was built in the early 1990s for the Footwork / Arrows F1 team, but was not very successful there.
Yamaha OX99-11 (1992)
This is basically an F1 car with the body of a sports car and the cockpit of a fighter jet on it; a carbon fiber chassis accommodates the 3.5-litre V12 that Yamaha supplied to Brabham’s F1 team at the time. The project failed in 1994 after three prototypes.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl