Vintage Thing No.21 - Toniq R
Here's another Vintage Thing that's happening today - and again in Cornwall. And that's not the designer but his mum and dad. As well as being a family affair, the Toniq R is a road legal track day car built at Trebudannon near Newquay. I’d heard of it from Peter Tuthill’s book Cornwall’s Motor Industry but never seen one until I encountered this one on show at Royal Cornwall. It’s a 21st century interpretation of the classic Lotus Seven. It’s a road legal track day car and comes in two forms. This particular example has a Honda Fireblade engine but there's another demonstrator with a Ford Duratec engine. I understand that the on paper performance is about the same but the driving experience is totally different. On this Fireblade powered example, the engine has been completely rebuilt. The red and green buttons on the steering wheel take care of gearshifts. Red goes down for first and then you frantically press green to keep changing up for the other g...