Ha!
"...so Mr Spigot, you are here for the role of Tarzan... It's not that I have anything against your one leg, but neither have you." Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, one of my favorite sketches with Dud corpsing all the way through.
Thanks for all the suggestions so far. I would love to build another spec built car but regardless of our experience it will be still a long drawn out affair. Especially if we then try to make it as good as it possibly can be which is why we would do it. So it would end up being probably another ten year project.
The idea here is simply to do an experiment by making a new body that attaches to the chassis with absolutly minimal additions to the chassis which essentially would be the addition of mounting points, an extension to the exhaust, and the addition of a bolt on nose frame to pickup the reversed radius rods.
I certainly do not want to damage the physical car in any way so don't wish to make major changes. Upon removal of the body the car can be returned quickly to bellytank state, potentially at the same meet.
I believe I can build the body here in the uk and fly over Dr G and the colonel to assist in the attaching of it to the chassis (or vice versa) and test it at Elvington prior to shipping back to Bonneville and Oz.
I'm sure that this body will have plenty of issues and things to learn, (especially not having built in composites before) and so i would consider it an experiment of short duration. Also there will be heaps of aero issues to conquer which will mean there is already more than enough to think about. What we can learn from it we can then take into a fully fledged new car which we can develop into our retirement with me being back in oz.
I also doubt that the car would look like this if I were to start from scratch too so I don't buy the argument that a car that looks like this deserves it's own chassis as it would then not look like this anymore! It only looks like this in response to having the bellytank chassis.
In regards to getting too large to fit in, I am the skinniest I have been in years. The 5:2 diet is a cracker and I'd recommend it to anyone, including you Stew. If you want to continue driving the bellytank you need to continue fitting in regardless of the streamliner.
The arguments that I'd consider are that if the bellytank chassis is unsafe for purpose, or news rules required compromise it's use so that it becomes untenable (eg. The colonel has mentioned the addition of the Hans device has compromised its ease of use already) and perhaps the main one is the fact that at present the colonel himself cannot drive the car due to its configuration and I very much would like him to have the option to drive given all his work on the project thus far.
But as I say, I see this as an experiment and a short term one, can be up and running quickly and what we learn from it would be fantastic for the design and build of a completely new car.
When finished I guess we could pass the body on to someone who wants to build a chassis for it so it can continue racing.
Dik