By Peter Fitch, November 21, 2018
This has to be the mother of all engine swaps. And this is what you get when you cross a 1995 Fiat Cinquecento with an engine taken from a Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14R. We don’t know what a Ninja ZX-14R is but we do know what a Kawasaki is. It’s a Superbike, right? Correct.
The Fiat Cinquecento’s styling in early 1998 and relaunch it as the Seicento, which continued until 2010 and enabled the Cinquecento’s basic design and most of its mechanicals to survive for nearly 20 years. Not anymore, this is 2018 man, and now this modified Fiat Cinquecento has 250bhp offered up at 12,000rpm. The original power, back in the day, would have been between 39bhp and not much more. That’s what people put up with during the 1990’s. The car has been widened, stripped of unnecessary weight and somehow the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14R’s motor has been shoe-horned into the Fiat 500’s engine bay. It is an engineering marvel. And it looks like so much fun.
