Our Compound Charged R53 Cooper S track car.

So this whole project started a couple years ago in essence (Circa 2017). We purchased an R53 mini as a track car. We were not even planning on it to be fair. But it came along half smashed up, and was cheap. We fell over it essentially, so thought ‘why not’. They are meant to be decent enough on the track. So off we went, and collected our £600 R53 with a dented door, and rear quarter panel!

The car already had a 15% pulley, an uprated top mount intercooler, some cheap ebay coilovers, and some Federal road legal slicks.

We completely stripped it out, and threw in a set of bucket seats.

We took it to Castle Combe on a couple of open pit lane track days, fully expecting it to blow to pieces. Sure as hell, she was fantastic. Completely bulletproof.

We’ve since thrown on a 19% pulley, some bigger injectors, some Bilstein B16 coilovers, and an Mfactory Diff. We’ve uprated the brakes somewhat too. Stock engine still.

Fast forward two years, and the thing is still going well, still faultless, and she gets a caning.

So we decided more power was in order. We’ve dealt with a few Turbocharged R53’s on the rollers. So this was certainly an option. About 300bhp is what we’d ideally like. Well out of the M45 supercharger range. So that had to go for sure. Baring in mind the thing only cost us £600. So this whole project is about value for money. How much fun can we have for as cheap as possible.

So plenty of people have been down this path before, with various levels of success. One of our battles with the present state of the vehicle has been heat. Inlet temperatures are just ridiculous at combe, continuous lost horsies.

We are hoping with the twin charging setup, we should be able to control temperatures somewhat ‘easier’.

I won’t go into why we selected various parts, mainly because the main priority as I said in the beginning is ‘bang for buck’. So make no mistake, most of the decision making process is down to cost.

Basic Spec List:

K03 Turbocharger from an ST250 Ford Focus ST. (Will support up 300bhp)
Charge Cooler for turbocharger,
Intercooler for supercharger,
MaxxECU Race
Various extra sensors, for boost and temperature.

First things first I suppose, lets work on a budget manifold:

So I’ve decided to embed some videos we did of this project: