Is everyone familiar with the Skelta? Just in case there were a few "nos", here's a little potted description of these "super-light, ultra-tough" Skeltas. Their chrome-moly steel spaceframe is reinforced with a centre tunnel and sidepods made of carbonfibre/aluminium sandwich. The body is made entirely from carbonfibre composite. The result is a dry weight of only 720kg.
Power comes from either a supercharged 2 litre 4 cylinder Honda of a mere 340bhp or the 3 litre Hartley V8 of 460bhp, both engines driving through a Honda 6-speed. Suspension comprises rose-jointed double wishbones front and rear with inboard spring/shocker units, fully adjustable for track, camber, caster and toe-in. Brakes, front and rear, are four-pot calipers on ventilated discs.
The Skelta is available in 2 styles, the Spyder and the G-Force. The Spyder is a wide-bodied open two-seater and the G-Force is a 2-seater with detachable gull-wing targa top. Both styles have heavily finned front air intakes and large rear wing and diffuser, which exerts 200kg of downforce at 90mph. Couple all this with the 50/50 weight distribution, it's no wonder that the cornering power is described as phenomenal.
These cars were born out of former Australian rally champion, Ray Vandersee's determination to win the Targa Tasmania outright. His first assault was in a cleverly modified Westfield that was almost as quick as the dominant Porsches and Nissan GTRs. However, for outright victory, it was going to take something more than a clubman no matter how modified. Starting with a clean sheet of paper, he created the Skelta. Since that creation, Vandersee and his customers have won countless events across Australia and New Zealand and Vendersee himself is getting closer and closer to that elusive outright Targa win, with class wins and many quickest stage times to his credit. An even faster Skelta is under constant development and Targa 2010 can't come soon enough.
Now I feel compelled to tell you about the Hartley V8.
3 comments:
Ray was recently at Mt. Cotton lending Dean Tighe a hand with the Warwick TAFE students, although not in a Skelta.
He was telling John Davies that if he sells 2 more cars the Skelta would be eligible as a CAMS Marque Sports Car.
John's comment was "Wouldn't that put a cat amongst the Marque Sports pigeons?"
Would it ever!
You should tell us everything you can about the Hartley V8 John. They sound like fantastic engines!
Do you know if there's a distributor for them in Australia? I was just talking to someone a couple of days ago who's keen to put one in an MR2 SW20.
Cheers
GlennK
How many cars are required to be sold to qualify for Marque sports classification?
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