1957
Following a dispute with Mark Jasper, Luke realized there was just no time to revise their new car. The ‘budget’ car had been built around the new engine, which meant replacing it with one of their traditional straight-six engines, or the inline-triple or four-cylinder made between '51 and '56, was just not possible.
Which meant the 1957 Sinistra Raider was, well, carrying an engine not quite befitting a budget car. A 4 liter V12.
Configured as a bit of a lazy engine, the new V12 was designed by Mark Jasper of the Engine Design Team after running into complications with the crossplane crankshaft needed for a V8. Despite being relatively low-revving and seemingly underpowered by horsepower alone, the V12 made up for that with astronomical torque for such a small engine.
As a result of the high-torque V12, the Raider can still break 100 miles per hour, despite having less than 100 horsepower. The improved brakes eliminated the obnoxious brake-fade problem, and some attention to detail with the suspension helped with reducing the understeer issue.
As an attempt to save some money in the design of the Raider, the unibody design of the previous cars was traded in favor of a traditional ladder chassis. Luke’s comment for the year was, “We built the Raider with a ladder chassis to save money, and then Mark Jasper put a fucking V12 in it.”
Still, in the end, it wasn’t all bad. They had a new engine that no one else was offering, and a car that was actually easy to drive. The front-wheel-drive still had some teething problems to work out regarding understeer, but it was much improved, and the new engine was smooth as silk, even compared to their proud inline-6 engines.
As for Mark Jasper, he quickly found himself having to adapt what would become the 1958 Raider to fit a new 2-liter inline 6 based on half of the 4-liter V12.