Sprint car chassis have evolved tremendously over the decades where it used to be a humble two-seater that used the components of Model T Fords to what we have today. Now we have all the advantages of purpose-built, light-weight chassis to our disposal. During time though has the configuration and basic sizes not change too much.
Unlike Formula One and Champ cars that uses high tech, expensive composite materials, sprint cars and mini sprint cars use simple yet proper engineering principles that guarantees us that it can withstand high speed impacts and incredibly strong too. Various types of chassis are readily available for your mini sprint with the most common design the High-Bar and it gets its name from the two tubes running down from the roll cage’s top down to the chassis’ front.
It looks like a fancy cage as it basically is a cage, a very small cage I might add as a sprint and even more so a mini sprint one have to add is certainly not built for comfort. A Low-Bar chassis do not come with the down tubes you find in the high bar, but it is rarely used especially when used for competition racing.
The wheel base is quite short with a normal sprint car having a wheelbase between 83 to 90 inches whereas a mini sprint’s wheelbase between 66 and 74 inches maximum. You can imagine when you compare this to the 120 inches of a regular Champ car that this is indeed short.
When you buy a new chassis you will pay around $3000 maximum and when compared to the chassis of a Champ car you will notice they sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The advantage you have with the similar designs from various manufacturers is that the components are interchangeable.