The brief was to build a trackday car using an S2 Spider owned by the customer for many years as the basis. The owner is a huge trackday enthusiast with experience driving many extremely high performance cars. He requested that we build the car top be as fast as possible with only the very highest specification parts used. The specification for our Alfaholics GTA-R became the basis, to which extras have been added.

It was very clear from the start that in order to achieve not only a fast car in a straight line, but also a car which could genuinely compete with our GTA-R on a circuit, significant chassis modification would be required to stiffen the renowned weak Spider chassis. As a result some form of rollcage would be required to stiffen the shell, speaking to the owner, he requested that no cage be visible above the door line to keep the car looking as stock as possible from the outside – the stiffening challenge just got harder! From initial seat fitment in the car it also became clear that shortened Spider floor pan would create some difficulties of its own. The rear chassis legs which encroach into the floor area prevented race seats from being mounted correctly in the car, indeed the rear floor pan height was not going to be suitable as the driving position as standard would be too high by several inches.

The donor car – a tired 2000 Spider Veloce in need of proper restoration – you can see that previous sill work not done on a chassis jig had allowed the car to bend in the middle resulting in poor rear door shut alignment and incorrect chassis alignment.

Initial mock up of how the front of the cage might work in the car

Initial floor design mocked up

 Final T45 ultra lightweight cage fitted. Main tube runs the length of the floor inside the sill structure from the front to the rear firewall. All visible bars tie into this bar for maximum triangulation benefiting rigidity massively. The bar which enters the inner a-pillar runs diagonally up to the front firewall where it is fully welded in place. Diagonal bar seen entering floor directly welds into the shortened rear chassis leg directly where the rear suspension trailing arm picks up. Prior to rollcage fitment, the chassis was bolted to a flat jig bed and the shell was straightened back to its factory alignment to close the door gaps which had opened up from previous poor quality sill repair work. Once this was correct, the T45 cage was fitted ensuring a very rigid structure.

Floors finished with ribbing to increase panel stiffness.