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Two years ago Andy Bates secured a deal on Dragons' Den to build his own bike-engined track cars. Darren Moss finds out how his business is getting on
Sitting in front of Andy Bates are the toughest investors in business. The Dragons. His plan? To get them to invest in his prototype kit car, dubbed Sabre. More than a rivals for the likes of Caterham and Radical, it's an entirely new take on bike-engined track cars and costs about £30,000, depending on spec.
Getting to Dragons' Den was the end of a long journey for the former firefighter and motorcycle sidecar rider, but it almost didn't happen at all. Following a 170mph crash in 2001, Bates was left with an injured neck, multiple broken ribs, a back that was fractured in two places and a year of painful recovery. Barely able to move and forced to give up his career in the fire service, he began to design a new type ofbike-engined car.
With 170bhp coming from a tuned 998cc Honda CBR1000RR engine, all sitting on a spaceffame chassis and clad in LMP-style bodywork, it was going to take a lot of time and money to bring to light. However, Bates already had a small but successful business rebuilding bike engines for the racing community.
"People just seemed to accept the fact that bike engines went wrong," says Bates. "I was amazed that people could spend the kind of money that was involved in racing these things, suffer a trivial problem that could be fixed, and end up on the trailer...