Automotive journalist and impresario Jay Lamm is a comic genius who sees all motoring manifestations in terms of their potential ridiculousness and then invents brilliant ways to share his skewed points of view. His absurd racing series for $500 clunkers, the 24 Hours of LeMons, has been a huge success, so he decided to expand his bad-car concept to include a pointed parody of the stuffed-shirt, big-bucks automotive potlatches known as concours (contests) of elegance. Held last August on Saturday afternoon between Friday's Concorso Italiano and Sunday's Pebble Beach lawn party, the Concours d'LeMons drew the expected coterie of Pacers, Pintos, Peugeots, and other horrors, but the runaway winner of Worst in Show was this 1980 KV Mini 1.
The cool confidence of its owner, Michael D. Harrell, Ph.D., of the University of Washington's Department of Earth and Space Sciences, who towed the flimsy tin box all the way from Seattle - behind his MGB - specifically and uniquely for this event, was justified when nothing else could measure down to its near-subterranean level. Between 1970 and 1984, 2000 of these single-cylinder city cars were built by Les Equipements Eléctriques KV in Chassieu, France. Dr. Harrell has two KVs, both 125-cc coupes, the second as a parts car (KV also made a station wagon, believe it or not, and an "economy" 50-cc model). Licensed in Washington, the fright-pig winner is often driven on Seattle streets.
Styling might be characterized as "origami," albeit paper-folding as practiced by an especially slow Japanese child of, say, three years. There is virtually no structural integrity, so a collision with a Smart would probably totally flatten the angular Mini 1. On the other hand, the chassis elements are quite sophisticated, in a touchingly naive way. Suspension is independent on all four wheels, with a lot of travel for the Citroën-like front arms but relatively little for the rear wheels, so as to keep the industrial grinding wheels that serve as final-drive torque transmitters in touch with the tires.
Yes, really. Those rugous cylinders are held against the top of the rear tires to force them to turn by friction. The direction of travel is determined by the rotation of the two-stroke engine. To back up, one stops the engine, switches an electronic control box under the driver's seat, then restarts the engine in the opposite direction of rotation (amid clouds of smoke). The KV goes as fast backward as forward - all of 37 mph (60 kph).
Think about that. When the KV was built, 60 kph was the maximum speed allowed within French city limits. And remember that we all marveled at the first Lexus LS400, some twenty years ago, because it reached the gentleman's-agreement 250-kph (155-mph) top speed respected by European sedan manufacturers without any electronic limiters; it simply ran out of power at the statutory velocity. As does the KV. QED, engineering mastery. Magnifique. ...next page >>