The Quickshift
- The BMW Isetta was an urban mobility solution from 1955.
- YouTuber Westen Champlin wanted to make this Isetta more powerful. How? He commissioned a Yamaha R6 to do the job.
- The finished product is fast, loud, and clearly a safety hazard.
The BMW Isetta was BMW’s “urban mobility solution” long before people needed urban mobility solutions. It debuted back in 1955, and was the first production car to have a fuel economy rating of 94 miles per gallon.
Clearly, this is cool for some people, like grandmas, geeks, and nerds—but it’s by no means badass.
But you know what is badass? Stuffing a high-revving, 100-plus horsepower engine from a Yamaha R6 into a BMW Isetta. Why? Well, why the hell not?
This is exactly what YouTuber Westen Champlin set out to do. And the best part is that he and his crew only had one day to do it, as they wanted to complete the build in time for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Naturally, coming up with a packaging solution for an R6 engine in the BMW Isetta would be quite the challenge. Out of the factory, it came equipped with a 300cc single-cylinder engine—about half the displacement and a quarter of the cylinders of the Yamaha R6’s engine.
And so Westen and his crew had to get creative. They purchased a rather good looking early year-model Yamaha R6, and tore it apart (which I honestly felt pretty bad about). But instead of just taking the bike’s engine and stuffing it into where the Isetta’s engine used to be, they decided to go for a different approach.
They created a three-wheeled abomination, with the front end and cabin of a BMW Isetta mated to the frame, engine, swingarm, and rear wheel of the Yamaha R6. So yeah, they basically just stuffed whatever was left of the R6 into the Isetta’s trunk, and used the corpse of the R6 as a 100-horsepower powertrain for the miro-car. Pretty crazy, right?
Westen and his team made the whole swap look pretty damn easy, but clearly, these guys have been around the block when it comes to creating weird and wonderful vehicles. And when he takes it for a test ride, it’s clear that he has quite the appetite for backyard-built deathtraps.
All things considered, the R6-swapped Isetta runs surprisingly well, save for the fact that you can’t really change gears—something they’d find a solution to, albeit a janky one, later in the video. And Westen even said that it’s smoother than the original Isetta, which actually makes sense given the longer wheelbase and silky smooth four-banger.
Unsurprisingly, when they took the R6-swapped Isetta to Sturgis, it got quite a lot of attention. Whether that was good attention or bad attention is a different question. But hey, if I ever saw this thing in the metal, you can bet that I’d be down to go for a ride, or maybe even take it for a spin.
What do you think of this crazy three-wheeled deathtrap? Would you ride it, or would you steer clear at all costs?
