Vintage Thing No.95 - Kilo Sports

The Kilo Sports was a no frills, doorless roadster based on a Morris Minor and produced in Cornwall.

When I was still at school in the late seventies and early eighties, there were still some after shocks from what Peter Filby called The Fun Car Explosion. Kit car manufacturers sprang up everywhere, it seemed, and offered the eager purchaser all manner of extrovert motoring experiences. Many used a common basis like a Beetle or a Triumph based chassis but the Kilo Sports used the organs from a dead Morris Minor.

The Kilo was designed by David Stiff and built by a local Morris Minor specialist known as the The Thousand Workshop. Production began in 1983 and lasted for a year with a brief revival in 1986 and estimates of production top out at about 14 cars.

I had a very good friend and neighbour who about this time ran an ex-GPO Minor van. My first ever car was a Morris Minor, which I've still got (more about that another time) and we visited The Thousand Workshop because it become world famous in Cornwall. This was a time when the media was just starting to latch on to the twilight world of the classic car movement and the Morris Minor was the ideal candidate to focus upon, being a classic design that even non-enthusiasts could appreciate. The Thousand Workshop became quite successful and by the time the Kilo was in production it had moved to Bodmin from Nancegollan where John and I visited it and sparred with the workshop staff in a friendly argument over triple flared brake pipes. (I still say you can only ever get up to a double flare but - as we say in Cornwall - there you are and there it is.)

My mate John had already expressed an interest in Morris Minor based kit cars. Until the Kilo came along, there only was one and that used the LCV van chassis, which made it even more attractive in his eyes. This kit was called the Griffin and was an up-to-the minute sportshatch device based at one time in Poole and at another at Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex. Compared with the Kilo Sports, the sharp styling proved even more at variance with the performance on offer and the manufacturers subsequently offered a version based on a Beetle floorpan. About 20 or so Griffins are thought to have been made but I have never ever seen one.

For its final flowering the Kilo moved to Tintagel but throughout its life it had the same ladder chassis (i.e. not a Minor LCV frame) and a moulded GRP body.

If you were going to offer a Moggy based kit car, Cornwall was probably the place to do it, for the Morris Minor is beloved throughout the west country, even up to Bath (which, as we all know down here, is really in the Midlands).

The Kilo was well executed and neat rather than glamorous

However, most people preferred to restore Morris Minors as Morris Minors. Another problem with the Kilo Sports was that it really needed something  a bit more powerful than the standard 1098cc engine. The obvious thing to do was to fit a 1275cc unit from a Spridget or a Marina but that meant even less of the Minor would contribute towards the build up, which also required a BMC 1100/1300 radiator and Bedford HA van pedals.

That is not to say, though, that the relatively long-stroke 64.6 x 83.7mm 1098cc unit could not be tuned, as outlined by Minor Mania. It just took an awful lot of work to get that sort of performance.

As the finished car weighed only 595kg they were a lot nippier than a Morris Minor but they just weren't as fast as a contemporary Dutton.

3 Kilo survivors are known to exist of which the example pictured is the prototype. It turns up occasionally at shows in Cornwall and demonstrates that the Kilo was a well made kit even if its lines are a bit square.

The Kilo came even closer into my orbit during its production life but still didn't quite manage a direct connection. I had friends at Camborne Technical College and one of their classmates undertook the graphic design of the sales literature as a project while they were still a student. I'd already started my industrial design by then and knew quite a bit about the Kilo from the kit car press. However, it wasn't until production had been over for many years that I finally came across this one in the 90s at the vintage show at Healey's Cider Farm not far from where I grew up.