New British sportscar Breckland Beira

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The Beira is a hand-built, two-seat roadster with unique styling cues, based on proven GM architecture and powered by GM’s LS2, 6-litre V8 engine, tuned to produce just a whisper short of 400bhp.

Tipping the scales at some 1,400kg, the Beira’s impressive power-to-weight ratio ensures invigorating performance, with the promise of a sub-five second sprint to 100kph, coupled with tremendous torque and a governed top speed of 155mph.

“Beira carries on from where Marcos and TVR left off in terms of providing maximum performance for money spent, and real individuality”, says Breckland Director, Mike Rawlings.

“We wanted to showcase Breckland’s design and engineering capabilities and produce an exciting driver’s car, with excellent handling dynamics, terrific performance and great looks,” he added.

Beira is designed to run on Liquefied Petroleum Gas as well as petrol. This not only helps to reduce running costs and emissions, but also means Beira is capable of a range of some 700 miles between refuelling stops - that’s the equivalent of travelling non-stop from the north to the south coast of France.

Beira is based on the well-developed General Motors Kappa platform, on sale in the North American market. Basically it is very similar to Pontiac Solstice.

Beira differs in many significant respects from the GM products however, the most radical departure being the installation of the potent, 6.0-litre, LS2 V8 engine, more commonly found in Corvette and Pontiac GTO models. It replaces the four-cylinder Ecotec engine and, by comparison, produces more than twice the power of the original unit.

The mighty, fuel-injected, aluminium V8 and Tremec six-speed manual gearbox are neatly packaged under the Beira’s swooping bonnet, with a bespoke wiring harness and ECU, the latter being reprogrammed to allow the V8 to deliver close to 400bhp, combined with a dual-fuel capability.

Other key considerations involved significant attention to chassis dynamics, to ensure the car corners, steers and brakes effectively with the significant increase in engine output.

Stopping power is provided by impressive, 325mm ventilated discs on all four corners, the fronts being grasped by six-pot callipers, with four-pot at the rear, both from UK specialists, HiSpec.

Steering is via power-assisted rack and pinion, whilst the dramatically styled 18″ cast alloy wheels are 8.5″ front and 9.5″ rears, shod with Bridgestone ultra-low profile tyres. Customer options include an upgrade to 19″ diameter rims and tyres.

Beira features a custom-built interior, including electric windows, air conditioning, twin airbags - in the steering wheel and in the passenger dash - combined with clear, concise instrumentation, and hand-stitched leather/Alcantara seats and trim.

Breckland stresses that the Beira’s interior can be customised to specific buyer requirements in terms of materials and equipment - one significant benefit of the company’s inherent flexibility as a low-volume producer.

The stylish central instrument cluster incorporates a double DIN showcase of mobile entertainment from in-car specialists, Clarion. Its immense specification includes a 7″ TFT colour touch screen, DVD player, direct iPod and Bluetooth connectivity, and an in-built 30Gb hard disk drive (HDD) navigation system with full European mapping. Beira buyers can also opt for the rear reversing camera, which relays the view behind onto the same in-dash display.

A GM manual cloth hood with heated rear screen is retained on the Beira and, when folded down, stows quickly and neatly out of sight under the deck lid for a smooth,
integrated appearance. This is further accentuated by the sculpted deck lid, incorporating individual fairings behind driver and passenger.

The Breckland Beira on-the-road price will be confirmed shortly but is expected to be in the region of £55,000 in the UK.

Source: Brecklands Technology