MOONCRAFT MC/RT - 16
Shooting for the stars
Daytona Prototype meets Japanese GT300, as aerodynamic design and bodywork specialist, Mooncraft, develops a whole new concept
W
hen Japanese racecar
manufacturer, Mooncraft, decided to
enter the Super GT series, it was never going to be a simple case of adapting an existing production car into a high performance competition vehicle. The company, founded in 1976, has a long history of developing bespoke racecars, with its first competition cars appearing in the early 1980s.
In 2005, Mooncraft was
approached by Kazuho Takahashi, an enthusiastic gentleman driver, about producing a car for Super GT’s GT300 category, where he already campaigned a Vemac Sportscar. ‘He wanted to drive something that had the look of a Le Mans car, like a Bentley or Toyota GT-ONE,’ explains Takuya Yura, the president of Mooncraft. Yura’s firm is well known in Japan for its aerodynamic design and bodywork development capability, which currently are used by a wide range of constructors, including B-Max and Tokyo R&D for their F4 projects. But the company
is not so well known for chassis development and construction, so for this project Yura’s
engineering team decided to look outside Japan for a suitable basis for the new car. ‘With the chassis, we needed
to find something that had real reliability, and at the right cost. By 2006, many Daytona Prototypes had been built and they were all shown to be very
BY SAM COLLINS
strong. Also the cost of their bare rolling chassis were not that high,’ reveals Yura. ‘The reliability of this car is very good –this is the sixth year it has run, which is way beyond their estimation of its life.’ But a Daytona Prototype
could hardly be considered a GT car, even with the very loose Super GT regulations. It is, after all, a purpose-built racecar, and at that time even GT500 cars had to utilise the core chassis of a production car (though today they use purpose-built composite tubs, see RE V21N12). But Mooncraft had thought of a way around this
problem – it would create a very limited run of ‘production cars’, just as Takahashi’s Vemac, which had been allowed to compete in GT300 for some time. ‘At the time, Super GT
technical regulations said that the car must be based on a
commercially available series production car,’ explains Yura. ‘So we had planned to get a Daytona Prototype chassis, make our own bodywork and then register it for the road, so we could take part in the series. A bit like what Toyota and Nissan did with GT1 in the
The Mooncraft team was spoiled for choice when it came to selecting the running gear, but the Riley Mk XXII proved to be the most suitable for the driver combination
16
www.racecar-engineering.com • February 2012
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