Life is full of what ifs. For Daniel Cummings, he wondered, “What if I made something out of a rusted-out shell of a Subaru microcar? And what if I turned it into a low-slung prototype racer?” That line of thinking led him to win the $2000 Challenge last fall and earn national attention with his wild Subaru LMP360.
It Started With a Shell
“I’ve wanted to a build a project for the $2000 Challenge for years,” says Daniel. “I had a couple of stalled projects that never made it.” Case in point: This project dates back more than a decade.
“It was in ’09 when SV reX posted this Subaru 360 shell for a dollar,” Daniel says, referencing a fellow GRM forum member. “At the time, cars with tube frames didn’t meet the requirements. It was up on the forum for a few months, and [Grassroots Motorsports’ staff members] David or Tim on the forums said, ‘If someone brings this car [to the $2000 Challenge], they get a T-shirt. So I had to go get it. I brought it home and I had no idea what I was going to do with it.”
So it sat, eventually winding up hanging from the rafters of a new garage Daniel built. Then, inspiration hit.
“A couple years ago, a rendering of a Volkswagen Beetle as an LMP car showed up on the internet,” says Daniel. “I was like, ‘That is what I want to build for the Challenge.’”
Some dreams, though, don’t come true easily.
Daniel Cummings, wearer of the famed blue blazer that gets handed down among $2000 Challenge champions, started his build with ones and zeroes–plus a paper model, too. The Subaru body was hung on his home-built chassis.
“I started making drawings of the Beetle [as an LMP car],” Daniel says. “I started measuring it. This Beetle would have to be 9 feet wide, because Beetles aren’t little. This wasn’t going to work. The car would be 2800 pounds and would need 300 horsepower.”
Then it struck him what he could do.
“A co-worker of mine was asking about [the Subaru] hanging in my garage,” says Daniel. “Another guy at the table asked, ‘What’s a Subaru 360?’ I told him it’s like a three-quarter-scale Volkswagen Beetle. At that moment, I knew what I had to do.”
A Design Takes Shape
The Subaru 360 took the place of the Beetle in Daniel’s vision. “It…
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