A few months back the new American dream was born, the Saleen S5S Raptor, a concept supercar running on bio-ethanol. Many of us expected it to stay in as a concept but the car got so many positive reactions that Saleen thinks about the production, probably a limited number, of it’s new supercar! Chris Theodore, CEO at Saleen, told in an interview that the S5S can make it to the showrooms and that within 6 months the first car will be ready to test.
Saleen only needs to find a partner for it’s 5.0 liter V8 supercar which produces 650 bhp and then we might see it doing some laps on the Nurbürgring soon!
[via Autoblog.nl]
It’s a new body on a GT chassis. This car will never be built unless they build there own chassis. Ford no longer makes the chassis. Theodore needs to come up with a new design, instead of using old ideas and other manufacturers products.
@frank: Agree about the chassis part but you must admit that body looks quite good!
the body will only fit on a GT chassis. Hard to build a new chassis and retain the body.
How can they build this car? Hasn’t anyone noticed it is the same size as the Ford GT. That is because they put a new body on a GT chassis. Ford has quit making the GT, so chassis will have to be made and Saleen has no fabricators to do this. They just laid off a bunch more people from Irvine including fabricators and tech guys. There is only 2 engineers left, no S7 guys, leaving 5 people on the floor. Saleen is hurting big.
Maybe they can use second hand GT’s?
It seems rediculous to me too, Saleen where on the edge of bankrupcy recently I seem to remember, it looks OK but they would have to make it handle if they were to compete.