When you do something new, it's exciting. But it also means that almost by definition, you're going to have completely new problems to diagnose and deal with.
I mean, it makes total sense. Whether it's with a recipe in the kitchen or following a tried-and-true procedure for doing an oil change in the garage, someone else has already done it before in both cases. That's why you have written instructions to follow and can expect certain results if you follow them correctly.
But if you're creating something, or trying something that hasn't been done before, it's unexplored territory. For every solution you find, there could be a new problem lurking just around the corner that you'll need to solve.
Consummate DIYer and YouTuber Vasily has a channel he calls, very simply, Vasily Builds. Many of his builds are motorcycle and/or powersports adjacent, and frequently involve motorcycle engine swaps. This one is the latest chapter in his ongoing Hayabusa-swapped CitiCar build, where he took a wedge-shaped electric car from the early 1980s and slammed a 1,300cc Hayabusa engine inside.
As you can probably guess, it was not a direct swap. Instead, it required plenty of supporting modifications, starting with the suspension and including the engine mounts in the rear. Vasily's resulting creation is still chain-driven, just like the Hayabusa that gave up its powertrain for this build.
And that's where the issues came home when he took it to the drag strip. He says it was a nice, new chain that he'd put on, but it ended up shearing and breaking the master link out on the 1/8th-mile strip.
Not exactly ideal for a first test run, but he chalked it up afterward to driver inexperience, plus needing to perform a few more tweaks to his car to get it fully up to snuff for its intended purposes.
And just what are those intended purposes, you might ask? There's the drag strip, of course. But if it turns out to be too slow, Vasily thinks that he could also maybe repurpose it into a fun little off-road ripper. Maybe do some rallies or something. Though honestly, I have no idea where you'd begin to put a roll cage in here, given how tight the space is in the cabin of this thing.
Toward the beginning of the video, pretty much all Vasily could keep commenting on is that it's a lot smaller in that cabin than he remembered. He said that he hadn't worked on it in about three months, which is plenty of time to forget about the physical dimensions of something, so fair enough.
Still, now he gets to go home and figure out how to fix his build so it overcomes its current set of issues, and hopefully only develops completely different issues in the future. (A lot like humans in general, I'd say.) No matter which way it goes, here's hoping this isn't the last we see of this particular Hayabusa-swapped mini-monster.
