A magical fusion of a motorcycle, a car, and a formula machine

At the Osaka Auto Messe and Tokyo Auto Salon events, where custom cars gather, cars built by automotive vocational schools have been attracting attention for the past few years. Here, AMW introduces some of the student-built custom cars that have caught our attention. One of the cars that caught our attention was a Honda Street-based ultra-thin, flat-topped machine built by students at the Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology.

The floppy wonder car!

Among the various custom cars on display, one that stood out from the crowd was a floppy machine with the body of a Honda Street minivan, built by the Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology. However, this was only the exterior, using the chassis and engine of the Formula Suzuki Hayabusa as a base.

Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology, in 2023, the flat-bodied, short-height “Sunny” was the talk of the town. This year, as part of the same series of flat, ride-height shorts, the Honda Street and Acty were combined with a Formula Suzuki Hayabusa to create the world’s strangest super-chopped flat machine.

The Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology has a tradition of flatbed machines, and looking back over the past it has produced several ground-crawling flatbed specs. And this year’s machine was a world away from the ones presented in the past. The concept was “The challenge to make it lower than ever!” The concept was “Try something lower than this!”.

The students at the Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology discuss their customization plans and work together to produce the car on a limited budget. The school provides a total budget of 1 million yen. When it comes to raising the cost of everything from vehicle procurement to customization within this budget, the biggest expense is the cost of the base vehicle. The key point is how much to keep this down. So, the first thing the students do is to walk around the campus and look for a vehicle that they can use.

Then, they found a Formula Suzuki Hayabusa that had been built by the seniors in the past. To keep the total production cost down this time, they recycled their past work and started to build a new machine based on it!　The team set out to build a machine based on past work to keep the total production cost down.

The ride height can be changed and the car can be driven

The official name of this car is “Hot Roti”. Ten sports car-loving students at the Shizuoka Professional College of Automobile Technology spent more than four months building it as a commemorative graduation project.

The structure, which looks unimaginable, is a pipe frame built on a Formula Suzuki Hayabusa chassis, with a Honda Street body cut, pasted, and welded over it.

Because the car was originally a formula machine and had a low ride height, we decided to build it because we thought it would have more impact if it was expressed as a flat car rather than just a box car, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of that base car. However, when work proceeded, it became clear that the street body dimensions were not wide enough at all and a widebody conversion was required. So, another cheap Honda Street was purchased, and the rooftop and parts of the body were diverted and modified. Further cutting and pasting were repeated to complete the wide roof, which was extended by 25 cm.

The height of the body, which has been chopped to take advantage of the low profile unique to formula machines, is said to be just 1.1m. The front, rear, and side windows are made from acrylic. Pop-up doors were fitted on the sides of the body to allow proper entry and exit. The front face was transplanted from the headlights and bumper of its Street sibling, the Acty. The entire body was designed with an American frame design, giving it a drag machine taste.

As for the interior, the engine and cockpit are the same as the Formula Suzuki Hayabusa, but if you look closely, you can see the bags for the air suspension set into the body mounts. The reason for this curious layout is to adjust the overall body lift. The system was designed so that the minimum ground clearance could be changed with the bags for the air suspension as required.

When we asked the students whether the car could be driven in this state, they replied that it was being built as a runnable model. However, they said they couldn’t run it on public roads, so they ran it for a little while on the school premises. However, there are still some modifications and improvements that need to be made, so at the time of the interview, the model was not yet complete.

translated by DeepL