2009 Mara Zora Mk3 4.6 AMM Prototyp
This is a concept car that resulted out of a bet at AMM, Mara’s performance division, between a junior engineer and the chief engineer that it was impossible to put Mara’s Ekonom V8 into their city car, the Zora Mk3.
The junior engineer recruited a couple friends among the AMM employees and started a skunkworks project to prove the chief engineer wrong, while the chief engineer generously provided a former test mule engine and parts to support the junior engineer’s supposedly fruitless endeavour. In the end, the junior engineer won the bet with a working transversely-installed V8 into the FWD Zora.
Graciously accepting defeat, the chief engineer decided to go all-in and decided to have the rest of the car - exterior and interior - get the full AMM treatment (at least, as far as possible) by the same crew ‘for educational purposes’, and AMM displayed the concept car at the 2010 Kronagrad Autoshow to a puzzled reception.
The car was drivable, with topspeed exceeding 300 kph, as some trial runs illustrated, but a number rough edges remained, of course, such as braking capability, the limited wiring on the interior, or the electric non-variable steering stemming from the Zora’s city car roots.
All photos taken during the sole public appearance of the V8 Zora during the 2010 Kronagrad Autoshow
With no plans to put the V8 Zora into production (or even offer it as an AMM conversion project), what exactly became of the concept car after that is unknown… until it surfaced on c(omrade)Bay earlier this year.
(A beneficial side-effect for Mara was that some of the lessons learned from the Zora V8 project were integrated into the next-generation Kavaler which was also going to be transverse-FWD for the first time. There, they had an easier time engineering the regular production version of a transverse-V8 variant, but into a much more spacious engine bay designed for it, of course.)