We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s better to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.” This highly modified Fiat 126 is the ultimate evolution of that philosophy. While its extensive upgrades do improve performance and make you feel like you’re driving a rally car, it’s still dog slow. That means you can get all the sensations and thrills of driving fast on public roads at something resembling the speed limit.
As Tom Woodward tells Twin Engine Corsa, he was looking for a Mazda Miata, which is always the answer and one of the ultimate slow cars to drive fast. Instead, he found a “baby sick yellow” Fiat 126 with pink wheels for sale. He recognized it from a local pub parking lot, where it had been sitting for years. Woodward “made him an offer IÂ didn’t really want to pay,” which the owner accepted, so now it was his.
Woodward’s Instagram account for the project shows much of the story. In addition to the usual rust repair, he tackled many of the standard tasks associated with restoring an old car, such as fabricating massive aluminum fender flares and having a full roll cage installed by a friend who worked for a little company called Prodrive. You might have heard of them. The interior also gained a custom aluminum dashboard, transmission tunnel, and even door cards that look amazing. Woodward runs a little shop called Woodward Motors Fabrication Co. Its Facebook page has more pictures of Porsches than Fiats, which says something about the quality of his work.
The ultimate ‘slow car fast’
At the heart of this build is this 740 cc inline-3 engine from a BMW K75 motorcycle, replacing the stock Fiat two-cylinder. An inline-4 wouldn’t fit in the tiny engine bay, but the K75 engine is basically a K100 with one cylinder chopped off, making it a perfect fit. Its 75 horsepower didn’t hurt, either, more than twice as much as the original Fiat unit, which certainly didn’t rev to 10,000 RPM, either. Woodward still wants a little bit more power and has already acquired a tiny Garrett turbo to add to the mix. A little bit goes a long way in a car that weighs only about 1,100 pounds.
One of the advantages of a motorcycle engine swap is that it’s an easy way to get a sequential transmission. Woodward completely ignored this, opting instead for a six-speed sequential transmission used for Fiat 126 and 500 race cars. He fabricated an adapter plate to put the two pieces together. Another friend completely rewired the car, using an ECU Masters computer to run the engine and add a digital dashboard. Tiny 13-inch Superlite wheels are a big upgrade from the original 10-inch units, making room for tiny four-piston brake calipers in the front and two-piston calipers in the rear.
This is all fun to talk about from an engineering perspective, but how the car drives down the road is what matters most. The video is well worth watching, mainly because at least half of it is pure engine sounds from that BMW triple. It looks, sounds, and drives like a race car, but it feels like you’re going 100 mph when you’re only going 40. Woodward hasn’t taken the Fiat to a track day because he knows he’d be a rolling roadblock for other traffic, but his Instagram shows he has taken it drag racing at least once. I imagine it feels like a scene from “The Fast and the Furious,” where it takes three minutes of movie time to complete a “ten-second” quarter mile. Driving slow can be fun in itself, especially in a car that still feels fast.
