a bug as a race car?
If you ask why someone would want to turn a bug into a race car, stop and think about it for a moment. The three key elements that go into making a car faster are to decrease the weight and increase the horsepower and reduce wind resistance. Since altering a car's aerodynamics usually provides minimal gain and is difficult and expensive to get right, most drag racers focus the bulk of their efforts on horsepower to weight ratio. A bug starts out life around 1750 lbs (varies by year / options). To give you a comparison, a stock 1969 Camaro Z28 weighs in at 3765 lbs, over twice the weight of a bug. And that's the stock weight. A fully race ready bugs weighs far less than that. The ECPRA minimum weight requirement for Pro Stock is 1300 lbs, and most racers have to add quite a bit of weight to get up to that. So it's not too difficult to make the bug very light, but what about the horsepower? The bug's not exactly well endowed in the engine compartment. True, but its engine design has a lot of possibility for horsepower gains. The bug's horizontally opposed engine design works as a natural vibration dampener at high speeds. The design of the pistons and heads also makes it easy to increase the displacement of the engine. The barrels slide on, so to bore a bug engine, you machine the opening on the block a little bit, then slide on larger pistons. You throw in a stroker crank, and put on some larger flow heads to top off the mix, and you've got some serious power. The bug's high reliability also comes into play when adding performance gains. How far can you push it without breaking something? You'd be very surprised. Oh, and the bug's air cooled engine design means you don't have to give away power to run a water pump. Nor do you have to worry about a failed cooling system sending your engine to an early grave. There are also benefits to having the engine in the rear of the vehicle. For one, the center of gravity is closer to the drive wheels giving you better traction. Another positive is should there be a catastrophic engine failure, the driver is not in the path of any flying debris with a rear engine. Just look at a top fuel A-frame dragster. The engine is in the rear... where it should be.