Insane V8 Fiat Abarth 500

There have been many, many crazy builds over the years involving Suzuki Hayabusa engines.

The lightweight motorcycle is among the fastest in the world, so its engine is often stolen to power vehicles such as the Radical SR8LM, which had two Hayabusa engines engineered to be one V8.

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And that’s what this little Fiat Abarth 500-based rocket you see here houses.

Built by Austrian Georg Pacher (no, not MOTOR’s man in Europe), the PRC-Abarth is a hillclimbing weapon that has our curiosity piqued.

According to a few sources, the video above included, it’s a 680kg, tube-framed hillclimb racer based fairly loosely on a Fiat Abarth 500, though it kept some of the bodywork.

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Without an official figures list – Pacher’s work doesn’t have a huge online presence – we can only go on the ‘400+hp’ (or 300-ish kiloWatt) figure in terms of power output, though we know that a Hayabusa-based V8 can rev up into the 11,000s.

The little Austrian-Italian rocket is also said to have a 6-speed sequential paddle shift gearbox, as well as launch control.

Couple that with the low weight (we’re talking as light as a Caterham Seven), and you’ve got yourself an unstoppable, albeit bizarre, hillclimbing monster.

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It sounds like a handful to drive, though the driver (who we assume would be Pacher) seems to be handling the thing like it’s on rails.

Unfortunately, some further research revealed that Georg Pacher passed away in 2014 at the age of 61, and this Abarth-based hillclimb beast was his last build.

Thankfully, he left the hillclimb community with something epic to aspire to, as well as the physical remnants of his incredible engineering creativity.