Sport 900

"Sport-900" was created on an initiative basis by a group of NAMI employees, which included design engineers (designers) Eduard Molchanov and Felix Khaidukov, engineers Igor and Lev Durnov, artist Vladimir Yeltyshev and chemist Anatoly Serumkin, with the active assistance of the director of MZAK in 1957-1965 years of Kuzma Durnov (from his initials the name "CD" came from). The number of cars built - six copies that slightly differed from each other - corresponded to the number of co-authors of the design who, upon completion of the project, received them for personal use (this form of cooperation will subsequently become very widespread in the framework of the Soviet "auto").

In fact, it was homemade , but professional design, the production of several copies and the use of production facilities of a large industrial enterprise clearly distinguish this series from the usual technical creativity of those years. Cars are widely known, they were devoted to numerous publications in the press. Earlier, with the participation of the same group of specialists, NAMI developed the project of the microcar SMZ-NAMI-086 "Sputnik".

"Sport-900" was a car of a particularly small class with a capacity of "2 + 2" - two adult seats and two children. The car body is a frame-panel, with a frame-integrated load-bearing system - a spar frame of steel pipes with a diameter of 70 mm, structurally combined with a spatial frame of thin-walled 30 mm pipes - and fiberglass cladding made by contact molding from reinforced glass-cloth TSZH-0, 7 polyester resin PN-1. Thanks to the rational body structure and the use of fiberglass, the car turned out to be lightweight - the mass of the body itself with the frame was a little more than 100 kg, so that in sporting condition the Sport-900 weighed 125 kg lighter than the Zaporozhets with its all-metal body. At the same time, much attention was paid to ensuring passive safety: the passenger compartment was surrounded by powerful tubular arches protecting the driver and passengers in the event of a collision, and the extremities of the body were zones of energy-absorbing deformation.

The units were fully borrowed from ZAZ-965 or ZAZ-965A (on various vehicles of the series): a rear-mounted V-shaped four-cylinder engine rated at 23 or 27 hp, a four-speed manual gearbox, a front suspension on transverse torsion bars with double trailing arms and spring back with swinging half shafts.

The large size of the Zaporozhets engine in height forced the designers to give the car body a pronounced wedge shape, with a low nose and a high rear, which was also beneficial from the point of view of aerodynamics, reducing air resistance and reducing drift by side wind. In order to smooth out this unusual feature of the body shape for those years, Molchanov applied a characteristic side profile - with a diagonal going from its front upper corner to the lower rear surface difference.

In the upper part, the sidewall had a kind of hole running along the front two-thirds of the body length and turning into the air intake of cooling the engine compartment - from a structural point of view, this element played the role of a stiffener. Another characteristic feature of “KD” is the use of the arched power structure of the roof, which in our time has also found widespread use. The gutters of the roof were formed by the protruding pipes of its frame. The car had integrated fiberglass bumpers painted in body color. The interior was decorated in a sporty style, had bucket-shaped separate front seats and a developed center console, compositionally combined with the instrument panel.

All cars in the series had slight differences among themselves. So, the later “KDs” received a redesigned roof - with a flat rather than a dome panel and a wide rear pillar (while maintaining the configuration of the frame), as well as a number of other differences in body decoration, such as the design of the front panel and rear lights.

• E. Molchanov. Car and design.