TRIO! TRIIII-OH! I wanna Trio and I want one...

What a car....Ultimate sleeper!!! :-)

Superb! Thats a combo I wouldn't think of marrying together.
Nicely done, lovely sleeper!

Needs hubcaps FTW!

Superbly qwalitay

OMFG!!!111111 That thing is TEH SECS!!!!11111

I've sent the owner this link. Wait to see if he posts here.

Er, hi everyone!

That is spectacularly cool. Mega restecp.

10/10 for thinking outside the box and that is cool on a stick. Love the whole sleeper thing.

Er, not really! I've owned several newer Accords and a friend had a Type-R which had simply the best factory 4 cylinder noise i've ever experienced by a country mile! 309's have been my passion for years and i've grown very fond of Honda's engines and gearboxes. Originally I was going to use S2000 running fear to make a RWD 309, got all the S2000 bits and by chance stumbled across Will Gollop's 1993 309 Rallycross shell. I bought it (naturally, very cheap too) and did all the design work but got cold feet about the fabrication, it was going to be huge. I hatched on the idea of putting the ATR (Accord Type-R) in the back instead, mid engined RWD as the packaging would be simpler. I sold the S2000 gear (at a loss naturally) to a friend who's putting it in an E30 3-series.
I paid what I now know to be too much for an ATR engine and box etc with 44k allegedly miles. The whole Gollop 309 project started to go sour on my taste though, can you imagine trying to sneak about in that when you don't want to be noticed? The other issue is we enjoy cars as a family and if it has no back seat, the kids can go in and my wife would quickly lose enthusiasm! So I started to think it would be easier to sell on the Gollop shell and start with a fresh, unmolested 309. I ebayed the Gollop shell, but ended up selling to a club friend, who's having the work done by my fabricator and i'm still heavily involved in the project (he's going S2000 as orignally planned).
So I ended up with this ATR power unit in my front room for quite a while. Some ex-James Thomson '97 BTCC Accord throttle bodies came up cheap and I grabbed them. They are direct to head and fortunately bolt on to the ATR engine. Divine providence I reckon!
I left my nice safe sales job and Company Accord behind last year to work on competition cars (mostly Peugeot) full time and had bought a 309 Goodwood as a run about and flirted with putting the ATR lump in, even offered it up, but it was too rusty and I hate the green paint and being pointed at all day amazing how many people gasp at a Goodwood GTi!).
Providence came good again last summer in the shape of an ebay bargain 3 door 309 1.1 Trio for the damn reasonable sum of £166. The car had been in old bloke care for a few years and needed a good wash, but was largely clean and importantly rust free. The 1.1 engine was a gem and dragged us around for a few months sipping petrol at between 45-52mpg, no matter what! It suited the pace of my new career perfectly and I was loathed to pull the healthy 1.1 out, but I had a plan.
The guy I work with mostly is a great fabricator and something of a suspension genius. He's built and set up most of the best hillclimb cars down here and several circuit and rally cars too. He always tried to drag me back to building a decent Peugeot engine, but that wasn't what I wanted! I proved to him that it fitted ok and he set to making the engine mounts (bushed with Mk1 Escort leaf bushes), made the hybrid shafts (Accord inner, sleeved and rosette welded into 307 outer ends), fabricated the exhaust front end (interesting note, the ATR manifold collector necks down to 41mm internal diameter!) and extensively re-worked a 309 subframe to fit 306 arms, widening the front track 70mm and I've had to rotate the eccentric top mounts outwards fully to get an acceptably low amount of negative camber!
That was the lion's share really and i'm glad I just paid him to get on with it. I then made the engine loom and sorted out all the plumbing. The radiator is a Civic 1.4 job, which is a tad small in traffic, but fine the rest of the time. You can't drive flat out for long enough on the road to build up any heat really and i've fitted a huge Pacet fan that just about manages traffic issues.
I did all the initial mapping myself on the road (fair bit of mapping experience and wideband lambda) then we put it in the rollers to finish the ignition map and get some idea of figures.
It came as a bit of a shock when we loaded it up at 5500 rpm and settled on 155bhp at the wheels! At 6000 we saw 173bhp at the wheels and by 6500 is was hitting 200 at the wheels. These engines typically peak at 7500 rpm, but at 7000 the power was over 200bhp at the wheels and we couldn't strap it down well enough for it to grip properly, so who knows, but we estimated 230 ish at the flywheel, going by similarly powered FWD competition cars that have been there.
I did alot of planning to make sure I wouldn't harm the delicious balance and pliable handling of the 309 (with GTi suspension). The widening of the front I estimated to offset the extra polar inertia of the engine/box and we mounted it as far back as practically possible to ensure weight distribution wouldn't suffer. It worked out well and the corners weights are:
noboost.com/temp/sandy/Corner weights.JPG[/img]

The front springs are 135lb/inch form the S1 106 rallye and the rear bars are 20mm (approximately 115lb/inch) form the 309 GTi. I run a 20mm rear ARB and without on the front. The dampers are Bilstein 205 challenge (monotube) fronts and Bilstein 309 sprint rears. The rack is 2.7 turn manual. It's a great set up, I love it! You don't need stiff springs if the geometry works and it's so much more liveable.

It's important to me to maintain the incognito nature of the exterior, i'm sure some well informed people would recognise it, but i'm happy to go un-noticed as much as possible!