Darren and Thomas UK RHD 818S Build

[DJWalker]

I have been wondering whether to start a build thread and have decided today that it would be a good idea because this forum seems such an amazing source of help and information.

As a bit of an overview of our project, as the thread title would suggest, we are building an 818S in the UK. We are based near York, in the north of England. This will be a right hand drive car and will need to pass the UK’s pretty stringent IVA (Individual Vehicle Assessment) in order to be street legal. As far as I can tell a reasonable US comparison looks like the Californian requirements.

This is intended to be a father and son project, me Darren being the father and Thomas being my 12 year old son. I’ve always wanted to build a kit car and finally have the opportunity to achieve that dream. Being able to do that with my son over the next couple of years would be awesome.

This is possibly the first home build of an 818 in the UK, but the UK agent for Factory Five (Tech Autos) is about to start building an 818C early in 2022. This means we have never seen an 818 in the flesh and don’t have any fellow builders we can meet up with and compare notes.

We don’t have much experience so this is going to be a steep learning curve for us. Actually, we don’t have any experience at all, so it’s going to be the steepest of learning curves!

Our story is being documented bimonthly in the “Running Reports” section in the magazine Complete Kit Car and also on my Instagram account @dj_walker_818