This website details the build/restoration of a 1961 Austin Healy "Bugeye" Sprite. The car is being built to both compete in the Grassroots Motorsports $2006 challenge and to be a fun weekend driver. The car had been found sitting in the same spot for 15 years until I bought it for $500 in late July 2005. Initially, I was referred to the car, and decided to have a look for the heck of it. Naturally, once I saw the heavily hot-rodded Bugeye in it's sad state, I had to have it. It was purpose-built to be an autocross car. The modifications that had been done to the car included a wicked-up 231 Buick V6, Muncie 4 speed transmission, some kind of chevy rear end and 5 link with rod ends. The front suspension is apparently all adapted from elsewhere, MG-B hubs/ brakes, and scratch-built upper control arms with rod ends.
Plans for the car include a resto-mod, keeping the 231 V6, adding a bit here or there, and mostly bringing the car back up to par.

 Indeed, you might have figured that the most daunting part of this project will be the many hours necessary for body and paint-work. I think this makes it ideal for a challenge car, as it needs many hours of labor, but not a tremendous amount of money.

- Kent Finnerty

(kentfinnerty@gmail.com)

The latest update & photos will always be below.

My spring break fell on the first week of March (hardly spring), and since I don't drink or get a great deal of satisfaction out of spectating wet T-shirt contests (hold on, I didn't say no satisfaction, I just said not a great deal), I took some time to work on some of the finer details on project SuperSprite between my busy schedule of naps, TV watching, siestas, and even some summer internship hunting. [Shameless promotion: I'm still looking for an interesting internship, will relocate. Note that I'm a "Finance, Insurance, & Business Law" major, though it's not necessary I intern in that field.]

I digress, when the engine came out, I saw about the ugliest firewall imaginable. Aside from having holes all over the place (read: unsafe; a firewall is to be a wall against fire), this one had rivets everywhere, and more dents than a, uh, really dented firewall. The rivets really drove me nuts, as the patch metal was steel. It would have been fine with me had it been aluminum, but why rivet steel to steel? I'm quite picky with having a certain level of quality/workmanship, so I just cut out ALL the metal that wasn't up to snuff. I'll start with some fresh sheet steel, do it right, weld it all in, and put the few holes where I need them, this will clean things up a whole lot.

Note that I also sliced off what was left of the inner fenders, this was just for convenience in measuring, aligning, & generally working on the suspension (you'll see below), they may just get welded back on later when I'm done up front.

There were about 25 holes all over the sheet metal of the car. I filled them in with the welder, and ground them flush. The cowl area was especially bad, as there were holes for wipers, slots for defrosters, and another 7 smaller holes which had been drilled for who knows what.

Here you can see the start on one of the defroster slots. On the larger stuff like this, I first tack-in a backing piece of metal to fill on.

This is after a little bit of grinding on a wiper-arm hole and defroster vent that had been filled-in:

Here you can see the cowl all smoothed-out, now with no holes, nor any hint that there ever were any:

In the previous picture, you can see the seat that I threw in happens to fit okay. What you are looking at is the back seat from the $2004 challenge car. Rummaging for another part, I re-discovered this and thought, since it would be valued at $0, I might see if I could use it (as I already recouped the full value of that car by selling parts off of it past the initial price paid). Here, you can see that the lateral butt support is quite good, though it lacks upper-body and head support, so it might not be the safest thing if I make use of it. A center chunk would also get cut out to clear the center tunnel and make room for the shifter. After having a sit-down though, I must confess, the comfort level was quite high, lovely seats to snuggle into:

Moving on, here is the front suspension setup:

The upper control arm was done from scratch by the previous owner, and, along with the shock, attached to this obscenely heavy mount (the mount bolted to the car), produced with, what I'm assuming was an arc welder. The whole thing (control arm included) contains some welding that is downright scary:

A year or so ago, fellow GRM challenge competitor Andy Nelson (winner of the drag race portion of the challenge for 2 years running), was kind enough to let me tag along on a couple of freezing cold 4:30 AM flea markets where racers unload their used equipment from the previous season at prices that, frankly, might as well be free. (Keep in mind that they can't afford to put used or questionable parts back on their race cars, because if they lose, they don't get paid. Conversely, for guys like us, it's equipment in great shape at next to nothing). Anyhow, I bought tons and tons of miscellaneous stuff at these flea markets to use on the $2005 Challenge locost, much of which, I wouldn't need. Fortunately, I have a use for this surplus. I just grabbed a couple of control arms out of the bin, and can adapt them to work on the SuperSprite (I paid $5 each for these; retail is $70 or so):

Mounting these, though it's extremely important to how the car will handle, was a snap, I just made a template of where I wanted the center of rotation of the arm to fall, made up a couple plates, and welded them in, they still need to be braced on the outside, just to be overkill:

Here you can see the lower arm and hub bolted on. This is so I could figure out how I'll modify the upper control arm to work. It should be pretty easy, but tedious. The hub is just resting there, that's why you can see all the positive camber, don't worry, when I marked the arm for cutting, the hub was at 0*.

If you're wondering what was wrong with the whole original assembly to begin with, I'll spell it out. (In my opinion) It wasn't up to standard, it was ugly, the mounts were heavy, the rod ends needed to be replaced, and I didn't have any from the flea market in that size, so I would've had to buy 4 new ones at $15 each, and the old ones were a nightmare to adjust camber on. These new arms are adjustable with shims and can be done much more easily (though the roll center is altered too blah blah). The main idea here is that when one of the hot shoes drives my car at autocross portion of the challenge, and comes back saying the car could use more (or less) negative camber, I remove 2 bolts, and add (or remove) a shim or two, and have it back for the next run in 10 minutes.