A few months ago news broke that two British sports car experts who have worked for Lotus and Caterham, Ansar Ali and Mark Edwards, have set out to make their very own car. It’s an ultra-light track machine called Zenos E10, and it is now all ready and set for its big debut the 2014 Autosport International, Europe’s largest dedicated motorsport trade show.
Zenos E10 would feel right at home amongst the racing and competition cars at the Birmingham show, as it boasts an innovative body and a single aluminum backbone, resulting in an immensely strong, yet incredibly lightweight car weighing in at just 650 kg.
The car features a carbon composite monocoque, constructed from recycled carbon fibre as a skin with a thermoplastic core. This cost-effective construction method id combined with an aluminium rear sub frame and a safety cell incorporating twin roll hoops and side-impact protection. So it is safe, flexible, very rigid, and cheap to build. Talk about British ingenuity.
The engine powering the Zenos E10 is, in true Caterham fashion, a mid-mounted 2.0-litre Ford unit developing 200bhp. It gives the car a power to weight ratio of 300bhp per tonne, and a 0 to 60 sprint time of under five seconds.
The Zenos – a name they made up from combining ‘zen’ to represent purity, and ‘os’, loosely Latin for ‘vertebra’- will enter into production in late 2014. Over the next five years it’ll also spawn a Roadster, Project E11, and a GT Coupé, Project E12.
