Welcome to the Spitfire Archive. A place where cars from the past of Spitfire and all of its subsidiaries are kept and remembered, be it for good or bad reason. The first of these cars I will post isn’t actually a Spitfire. It’s called the Transport G509, and it could have sparked an entire revolution.
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[size=125]1990 Transport G509[/size]
The G509 is most remembered as the last car Transport ever made before it went under, but that’s not what made it such a famous car. This was the car that started the whole “budget supercar” movement of the 1990s that carries with it the scent of Honda/Acura NSX. Whereas NSX production started in August of 1990, production of the G509 started in April. As a whole, the G509 was much more focused on performance than the NSX ever would hope to be, while still pursuing the ultimate goal of affordability. To do this, the genius German engineers at Transport devised many clever ways of minimizing cost and maximizing power. The only downside to the car would be fuel economy, at around a dismal 11 mpg, but that wasn’t the concern. The main concern? Affordable performance.
A car like this had never been done before by Transport. The entire reason the company came into existence was to provide dirt cheap transportation for the average German working man. Making a supercar was a huge leap for them, but nevertheless, they succeeded.
The finished product was a car of impressive numbers.
6.1 liter V8.
509 horsepower.
474 ft-lb of torque.
0-60 in 4.4 seconds.
A top speed of 185 miles per hour.
And the base price for all this performance? $35,000. Just about half what an NSX cost. How were Transport able to do this?
One word.
Magic.
However, that didn’t stop the car being killed off in 1994, just at the time when the entire Spitfire company closed its doors. Transport broke free and tried to go independent, but they couldn’t managed and closed their doors 5 months later.
