‘5EXi – Five New Powertrain Donors’
Many might have noticed that Marlin Sports Cars (Devon), have been keeping their heads down this last year while they have been fully involved in competition and development work with the 5EXi which has lead to innovative developments such as the latest 5 car manufacturer donor packages.
Ever conscious of the need to keep customers costs down and performance and reliability up. Mark Matthews – engineering director at Marlin, has developed new installation packages which allow fitment of a superb range of robust high performance engines from the VW/Audi group.
These fuel injected 1.8litre engines - as fitted to VW, Audi, Seat, Octavia and Skoda, feature five valves per cylinder and are available in various guises from 150bhp to 310+bhp, plus five and six speed gearbox options.
The hot package currently is the BAM blocked engines which will chip effortlessly, keeping the standard ECU’s, to well over 310bhp and is in fact the version that Marlin have been campaigning and developing in their factory EXi race team cars all season at the GT championships held at Castle Combe. Racing against the likes of Radicals, Ferraris, Porsches and Subaru’s.
So now it is possible to build a 5EXi with any of these readily available units, plus of course the previously popular Honda Civic range.
The latest generation 5EXi also features a new recently race developed front suspension package, and like all previous Marlin technical developments which have been inspired by racing their sportscars, these are available to all customers as retro-fitable packages.