What IS a Hacker Maroc anyway? (Other Cars...)

Member Name: zero

Product:	Other Cars...
Date:	08/02/01 (1111 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Distinctive. Affordable. Practical. Convertible.

Disadvantages: Difficult to re-sell.

This Hacker Maroc was the car I had been looking for. Four seats, convertible (hard and soft top), nippy, well appointed, rare and individual (most important) and… …affordable. The cost: about £3,000 more than a Ford Fiesta. The drawback: it’s a kit car. Do I dare to take the leap and buy my first kit car?

Eventually, I decide the answer has to be Yes. Actually, it is Y-E-S! Nowhere else can I get a distinctive four-seater convertible that is practical and will cost me around £9,000. That was five years ago. How has it been?

First, to explain about the car. Technically, it is classed a “kit car conversion.” Basically it is a Fiesta with the roof cut off, reinforcements added, minor modifications to the doors and windscreen, and almost all the body panels replaced with custom glass-reinforced polymer (GRP) panels. It is that last bit, replacing panels, that makes it look like a Hacker rather than a cut-down Fiesta. All the bodywork goes except for – and this is the clever bit – the doors and the rear quarter panels. This means the doors shut right (a rarity on kit cars), and there is no messing about with electric windows, central locking or petrol fillers.

Another feature of this kit is that the end result is mechanically unmodified from the Ford. You can lower the suspension to make it look better, but you don’t have to. I didn’t. I have a distinctive, rare car that is 100% Ford in all its oily bits – which means it is easy to get MOT’d, serviced, repaired and so on. And all the electrics are a standard Ford loom too. Of course the interior is Ford too, so it does not have that home-made kit look; but mine has a black vinyl-covered panel stuck atop the dash to make it look less Fiesta-like. You could choose alternative seats to make it look different if you choose to.

You can base it on any Mk3 Fiesta – a turbo, a 1.1s, a Ghia, whatever.
Mine happens to be an RS1800, which is great. The idea is to find a donor Fiesta. Ideally, you find one with bodywork and roof damage. I found instead a stolen-and-recovered car which had been comprehensively stripped by some miscreants; I bought it cheap then spent a lot of time tracking down and buying all the bits I needed – seats, interior trim, engine management unit, oh the list went on and on… but my tip from all this is that don’t trust kit car manufacturers when they tell you “oh, it’s easy to find a suitable lightly-damaged donor car” – it isn’t. The decent cars all get snapped up by the trade before a mere customer can get in. If you go down this route, find a donor before buying the kit (and I suppose this applies to all kit cars).

Once the conversion is done, you can register the car with DVLA as a Hacker. My V5 registration document from DVLA actually says Hacker Maroc, no mention of Ford at all. And all the Ford nameplates visible inside and out are covered (except for the engine).

And how has it been? Well, I have enjoyed the car hugely. A real head-turner, fast, fun to drive, cheap to keep, and individual (have I said that before?). With its nice RS1800 seats and its practical heated front (and rear!) windscreen, I have found it very usable – except, of course, that the roofs leak. That’s both the soft top and the hard top. I can see why – it is not easy to engineer a join between roof, windscreen “A” pillar and window glass that does not leak and still allows the door to open, unless you have a budget as big as Ford’s. The leaks are not catastrophic, in fact they are not always present – I think it depends how hard it is raining. Still… And of course the soft top takes a few minutes to erect or put down – no push-button stuff, no easy up-and-over like with a production convertible. But its worth it.

After-
sales service was excellent. I hardly had to contact Hacker at all. When I did, it was after a few years because I wanted some cosmetic retouches to a bit of paintwork. I brought the car in, left it for a week; and when I picked it up, not only was the work free of charge, but also a couple of other minor bodywork "dings" had been sorted too! Outstanding.

My biggest disappointment: saleability. I have no experience of selling kit cars, but have felt really let down. I tried quite hard to sell it – advertising in a variety of magazines and going to specialist shows – with no success. Maybe I should have dropped the price even lower, but instead I have decided to keep it for now. Moral: expect to sell a car like this for very little.

Hackers were designed and produced by Tim Dutton (oho, yes, he of Dutton kit car fame). There have been three versions, S1, S2 and S3; they vary only in minor bodywork details. Very few were sold in the UK, and even fewer fully assembled – I would guess at less than 20. The rights to this kit have now gone to Novus Group, who market it as the “Minos” (having changed the bodywork a bit more, improving especially the headlaights). And if you like the concept of re-bodying production cars rather than truly building a kit, look up Paul Banham – he does a range of similar concepts based on donors ranging from a Jaguar XJS to a Skoda!

Picture at http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~marc/hacker-S2.jpg.

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