People tend to gravitate toward the era of motorsport they grew up with, but we suspect an above-average number of people would say there’s something special about motor racing in the 1990s.
This was the era where F1 cars still had a choice of eight, ten, or twelve cylinders, when the British Touring Car Championship echoed to the scream of 8500rpm repmobiles, and when incredible GT1 cars from the likes of McLaren, Porsche, and Mercedes dominated endurance racing.
In rallying, the 1990s also played host to the golden era of Group A and the beginnings of the WRC class, and made legends of cars like the Lancia Delta Integrale, Escort Cosworth, Subaru Impreza, and Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.
But there’s another category that also defined 1990s rallying, and it’s one whose excitement is increasingly recognised today, thanks to YouTube videos and the cars appearing at live events: the kit cars. Typically small hatchbacks and coupes of either 1.3, 1.6, or 2.0 litres in capacity, these cars were homologated with a “kit” of parts to turn mild-mannered grocery-getters into fire-breathing rally machines.
And fire-breathing they were. The top-spec 2-litre “F2” cars made close to 300 horsepower, not far off contemporary super touring cars, and in the right hands and on the right surfaces – usually asphalt – could match and even beat the full four-wheel-drive WRC machines. Among the most successful of the period were the Citroën Xsara Kit Car, Peugeot 306 Maxi, Renault Mégane Maxi, and SEAT Ibiza Kit Car, each of which won championships throughout Europe during the 1990s.
There was plenty going on in the lower levels too, though, which leads us to rally driver Matthew Jackson and his Nissan Micra kit car. Avid British Rally Championship fans might remember the blue and white factory-backed Micras back in the day, driven by the spectacular Geoff Jones in particular, and it’s a car like this that Jackson has been building for the past couple of years.
“To cut a long story short, I’ve had a couple of Micras before” explains Jackson, “but I sold those to go rallying in an Impreza, then a Fiesta. But I’d always wanted to build a kit car from my old Micra and could never quite justify the cost.
“A friend who also rallies had a spare Micra shell available, and along with a few other factors, like buying a house, I decided to take the time out from the competing side of rallying and slowly build the Micra into a kit car.”
If you’re wondering what constitutes a Micra kit car, then you need to start with a three-door K11 Micra shell – that’s the bubbly model sold between 1992 and 2002 – powered by a 1.3-litre four-cylinder engine. To oversimplify things a little, you then strip it down, attach a wide body kit and wider-track, rally-spec suspension, weld in a roll cage, and fit a set of upgraded brakes behind (in tarmac spec) 16-inch wheels and tyres. The 1.3-litre, meanwhile, is taken apart and rebuilt with upgraded valves, rods, and camshafts, equipped with a set of individual throttle bodies, and run on specialist engine management. The original works cars, depending on who you ask – naturally, nobody at the time would ever confirm an exact figure, and the crystal ball has only got cloudier over time – were rumoured to make as much as 190bhp.
The impressive thing is, there are companies today making almost all the parts you need to turn this three-decade-old-car into a period-correct kit car. “There are quite a few different companies out there building parts for Micras, because the car has been around so long,” says Jackson. “And while rallying is never cheap, many are available at a reasonable cost, and everyone knows which parts are the best to use.
“Some aspects have taken longer than others – it took about seven months to get the [wider than standard] rear axle sorted. That’s only because I went with a fully adjustable one, but if you wanted to do it more easily and for less money, you can pretty much weld extensions into the standard axle. But all the bits to make the car wider can be bought off the shelf.” Geoff Jones is still around too, and Jackson says he’s a great resource for those building these kit cars (and apparently, still a dab hand behind the wheel).
One thing that makes the process easier is that these old kit cars no longer run to homologation in the UK – scan the FIA database and you’ll find the K11 Micra’s homologation ran out in 2007. Instead, the car has a Motorsport UK passport which allows it to compete in events, and from 2025 it’s eligible for historic rallying too.
Jackson’s car is partly built with the BADMC Micra Challenge in mind, which runs events in Northern Ireland, and as such it bridges the regulations for a couple of different series. It’s not identical to the works cars – missing out on the hugely expensive sequential gearbox for one (“you can double or triple the cost of the build just from the ‘box”, says Jackson), and the engine being built for the car will be 1386cc, as the Micra series allows up to 1.4 litres. Jackson expects it to make a “reliable, driveable” 150bhp or so. That’s against an expected kerb weight of around 950kg, so it’ll have a reasonable turn of pace whatever the surface.
We’ve brought a standard K11 Micra along to see Jackson’s car (you’d almost think we planned it) and the difference between the pair is stark, the road car’s extra pair of doors and the rally car’s bright yellow paintwork notwithstanding. The kit car comes in at 1740mm wide, which sounds tiny until you consider the road car is only 1585mm between the arches, and the rally car sits lower too, despite it appearing to ride high in profile – mostly an illusion of the large wheel wells designed for extensive suspension travel.
There are fabulous details everywhere you look, from tiny carbon door mirrors to the motorsport-spec fuel filler neck (with its own cutout in the rear arch) and heat-extracting bonnet vents. The current placeholder engine looks lost in the crisp white engine bay, while the cabin is all business, from the bucket seats to the high-set gearlever and handbrake, to the reflection-avoiding flocked dashboard. At the same time, the somewhat conventional driving position and great visibility make it seem far less intimidating than the more claustrophobic environment of a modern rally car.
As for when we’ll see this little yellow bolide in action, Jackson plans to have the car ready for events in 2025. “Well be starting with a few tests, and then hopefully a couple of events in the Micra Challenge, then see where it takes us.”
With increasing interest in rally kit cars from the 1990s and beyond – and off-the-shelf parts meaning it’s simpler than you might expect to build one in your garage – perhaps we’ll see a few more builds from the golden age of front-wheel-drive rallying appearing on stages in the next few years.
