K swapped Smart Car Pushes Out Over 500 Horsepower!
With their K-swapped Smart Car in running order, the Fasterproms shop looks to use factory panels to hide the ultimate sleeper.
We all love K swapped cars. Whether that be into another Honda, or something rear-wheel-drive and outside of the box. But we most like when K swapped cars are mid-engine. And to set a new bar of lunacy, the guys over at Fasterproms have a mid-engine K powered smart car. With a turbo. It makes 537 horsepower.
As you would expect, trying to cram all of that power into a tiny space at the back of a Smart Car causes some problems with cooling. Jeremy Formato explains how they will use a top mount intercooler with a roof scoop. “It’s incredibly important how we shape this [roof] because we want to grab a large amount of air, taper it down, and speed it up.”
When we say “roof scoop” think a scoop essentially the entire width of the roof, as that’s the width of the intercooler. Most of the back will be open, however, to allow air to escape cleanly. But the Smart Car bumper and back engine cover are modified and re-purposed to make it a bit of a sleeper. Cooling is such a high priority that even the rear sections of the side windows have scoops on them. On the driver’s side, one scoop is purely for the engine intake. Five-inch tubing goes into a four-inch turbo inlet. “When you shut it down, you can hear the turbo spooling down,” Formato says.
Fasterproms take an exploratory approach to the initial design of the roof scoop. As hilarious as it may sound, the initial design is fabricated with cardboard. Although made intricately, we can all predict what happens to a cardboard roof scoop as you start adding load to it. “The intercooler stayed really really cool… all the way up until we lost our roof,” Formato sums up succinctly. But all it needed to do was serve as a test to the theory of taking air from the top of the car and routing it to the intercooler. The concept is successful, so expect a sturdier fiberglass or composite scoop to appear soon in its place.
If you want to see it driving during some firs-shakedowns, clink the link here. It’s fair to say the engine is incredibly strong, but those brakes sure do make you think ahead.
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