Joint track car

[Daryl]

Both me and a good friend of mine are moving into new houses this year,and we have some space to keep a car. Its been a fairly long ambition of my mate to get a cheap mk1 Elise,and turn it into a trackday car. As he has little mechanical experience, this would involve input from me. So it would be a joint venture turning this car into something pretty handy round a track, and improving our own driving in the process.

 

Has anyone had experience of doing this as a joint project at all? I know there maybe things that we wont always agree on, but accept that. We both love cars,and i know he would like to get his hands dirty abit.

[mbs]

Just one word of warning, work out before you start who pays. Taking a car to the track and possibly doing sprints hill climbs etc is not cheap. I shared several mini coopers back in the 70's with my then brother in law, he was the mechanic and did 95% of the preparation so we agreed I should pay a greater proportion of the costs, it worked out well, even after I rolled it!

[Daryl]

I think it will be a 50/50 split,but we will talk about it towards the end of the year when we have both moved in and settled down abit.

Thanks for the heads up.

[Ekona]

I've done it too.

 

You need to work out first off who pays if the thing is damaged (driver or 50/50, and then what happens if one hasn't got the cash to do it?), and what happens in case one of you wants out. Bearing in mind the cost of clams on the Elise, even a slight brush with the scenery is going to cost a bit. Just make sure you get everything in writing and signed by both parties. Wear and tear on tyres, brakes, suspension etc, all stuff to consider.

 

Has he ever driven an Elise before? They can be a bit twitchy if you're not used to them, and that makes those car to scenery incidents a bit more likely to happen.

[rabbitstew]

My mate does this. Has a track / hill climb scooby with a mate of his. They both own 50/50 of it and work 50/50 on it. His mate is more mechanical, but between them they split the work out.

 

Not sure if id go for a mk1 Elise. I really wanted one for a long while based up on the looks & concept, until I actually test drove one and was amazed at how sluggish it was. In fact I cut the test drive short and took it back and asked them if the car had some kind of problem. When I got home I actually then checked the stats and realised that my Renault 5 GT Turbo which I was driving at the time actually had twice the power to weight ratio of the mk1 Elise. Of course, I know the Elise is more about handling rather than performance, but even so, id have expected it to be better. I seem to recall people doing turbo conversions and that the later cars did actually get the more power it needed.

[brillomaster]

me and a mate bought an old 328i and trailer for track use - the original plan was that everything was a 50/50 split - we did 6 days together, and shared the driving on the day as equally as possible.

 

Luckily we were in the situation that the car was so cheap that if we did bin it, we'd just split the losses and buy another one - we didnt have anything in writing though.

 

In the end we had to sell it as my other car at the time was costing me more and more money so i could afford to keep it going, also (although i didnt say this) my friend was charging out petrol at a business rate per mile - admittedly he was doing all the towing, but if i was doing any towing, i would have just charged for petrol, rather than petrol plus wear and tear on his car.

 

Another point was he was keen to buy things that i was less keen on - such as new tyres for the trailer, new ratchet straps and a couple of other bits and bobs.

 

I'd do it again, but as i say, make sure you both know what you want before you start, and also i'd plan out what days you'd wanna go and how many days you'd be doing a year, so you have an idea what the costs are going to be.