Clark Lincoln’s Sports Racers

 

My passion and interest in sports racers began with the purchase of a Lola Sports 2000. I bought the car and raced it for a season and decided to re-body it to improve aero of the dated design. The process consisted of adding and subtracting from the existing body with wood, foam and bondo and then making molds.  I sold three of these bodies as well as my car a couple of years later.

 

During the years with the S2000, I teamed up with Mike Devins to build a DSR based on a Formula Continental Van Dieman fitted with a Suzuki GSXR 1000 super-bike engine. We modeled the body over the chassis in Mike’s garage, made molds, produced a fiberglass prototype, and sold several bodies to other builders doing the same conversion. That was the LSR1 (LincspeedRacer 1)

 

With the proceeds from selling the S2000, I bought my first DSR. This was a Formula VW Ralt RT5 chassis that had been fitted with a Honda 929 super-bike engine, and a very light-weight fiberglass/kevlar body.  Of course, I couldn’t leave that body alone either, so off it went and as you can see from the photos. We built a new body over the Ralt/DSR chassis, using front and rear fenders from the LSR1.

 

One of the biggest engineering challenges in developing formula car chassis-based sports racers was mounting the front splitter which could develop up to 800 lbs. of downforce. I designed several, ending with the carbon fiber one shown in the photos. Our strength test consisted of standing on the outer ends of the splitter without it bending or breaking. This body saw some small modifications and various paint schemes before I sold the car to a customer in Australia where he won a national championship.

 

Mike Devins and I then decided to build a serious contender in the DSR field. Mike engineered a very serious rear chassis and suspension to attach to the Van Dieman Formula Continental. We modeled a new one-piece, low-drag body for this car to be full carbon fiber build over a full tunneled chassis. This was the LSR II. We built and developed the prototype with me driving, but it never realizing its full potential. This car had a 200 HP Suzuki GSXR 1000, weighed 780 lbs., and made 1,000 lbs of downforce at 100 MPH.  This was a seriously fast car that was beyond my skills to drive it at its limit.  Mike built another of these LSR II cars which was sold to another customer in Australia.