Davrian Reviews and Road Tests

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Davrian Car Company


Londoner Adrian Evans was a structural engineer, who designed and constructed his first Davrian in 1965/1966 for competition use. He used an Imp engine as he had one readilly available -- having just written off his Imp against a brick wall. He made up a prototype body from plywood and fibreglass and put the running gear of his late Imp in it. Two more plywood prototypes followed. Subsequent cars, based on these prototypes, had a fibreglass construction. Like the Lotus Elite and the Rochdale Olympic, it was designed with an all-glassfibre construction, even the chassis.

The concept consisted of a highly contoured interior moulding to a very comprehensive one piece undertray. The shell (sills, numerous bulkheads) were filled with poly-urethane foam to provide additional rigidity. Imp suspension components were used front and rear, although some later cars featured Davrian made swinging and trailing arms. The majority of the cars were rear-engined, powered by variants of the Imp engine mated to an Imp transaxle. However the design of the Mk7 and Mk8 cars allowed use of a variety of engine and gearbox combinations.
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Davrian Imp Sports

Davrian Imp Sports

1966 - 1974
Historically speaking, the mid 1960s could well have been the apogee of the type of small company which took 'off-the-shelf' items from standard cars and arrived at a vehicle specification which proved to be simple to construct yet which endowed the finished motor car with reserves of power, road-holding and handling far in excess of the rather prosaic motor cars produced by the big companies. A typical example of this kind of approach was in the products of Davrian Developments, a small company, which specialised in producing a light, extremely quick, two-seat coupe which uses, as its basis, the mechanical components of the Chrysler Imp of 875 or 998 cc, or of the Mini or Volkswagen. More>>
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