The Suzuki Hayabusa is a motorcycle and an icon all wrapped up in one, and at the heart of it is a 998cc inline-four cylinder screamer. But does that engine suit something else, too?
Yes, as it goes. Namely, a Toyota Starlet. The Finnish hillclimb driver Mikko Kataja set out to prove the point, with a bit of help from the sportscar manufacturer Radical, which takes two Hayabusa engines and basically stick them together at the crank to create what it calls an RPE-V8. Kataja took one of these Radical V8s and planted it in the engine bay of a Toyota Starlet.
All of this should be of interest to reigning World Rally Champion Kalle Rovanpera, who has his own Toyota Starlet that he drove last year as a ‘zero’ car on a winter round of the Finnish Rally Championship (meaning, he drove through each stage, untimed, before the competitors set off). Rovanpera also owns a bike, but his BMW S1000 RR’s engine is more suited to a Fiat 600, of course.
Kataja’s Starlet is built for hillclimbing, unlike Rovanpera’s rally-ready car, and it sounds - as you might expect - absolutely superb. It is made to sound even more aggressive than it perhaps is in reality by some particularly short gearing.
The car has previously been entered in and driven up Pikes Peak and makes 340bhp. Additionally, the engine is only pushing along 740kg thanks to some particularly aggressive dietary work, and that means it shifts pretty well - on-board footage from Hillclimb Monsters on YouTube shows Kataja reaching nearly 100mph on a fast section before the finish of a German hill climb in Wolsfeld in this double-Hayabusa-powered Starlet.
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Image credit: Hillclimb Monsters/YouTube.
