Leading Edge Sports Car Company
Encyclopedia
Leading Edge Sports Car Company was a British car company based in Dereham
Dereham
Dereham, also known as East Dereham, is a town and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. It is situated on the A47 road, some 15 miles west of the city of Norwich and 25 miles east of King's Lynn. The civil parish has an area of and in the 2001 census had a population of...

, Norfolk
Norfolk
Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...

 established in June 2002. The company was dissolved in September 2005. It outsourced the manufacture of its cars to fellow Dereham company Breckland Technologies.

Leading Edge 190 RT

Leading Edge was established in 2002 by Paul Mickleburgh to market its first new car, the 190 and 240 RT in Europe and the US. The car was a lightly updated version of the Tommy Kaira
Tommy Kaira
, formally , is a Japanese car tuning and manufacturing company founded on May 1, 2002 and headquartered in Minami-ku, Kyoto, Japan. The company was named after its two founders, Yoshikazu Tomita and Kikuo Kaira. Its parent company was originally founded in 1968 as...

 ZZ, a popular car in Japan, but made in Norfolk, and it suffered from the Japanese recession and the company became bankrupt. The receivers sold the tooling and inventory to neighbouring Breckland Technology Ltd, run by ex-Lotus
Lotus
- Botany :*Lotus , various botanical taxa*Lotus *Lotus Flower, Nelumbo nucifera- Motor cars :*Lotus Cars, a British motor vehicle manufacturer**Team Lotus, a British Formula One racing team that competed between 1954 and 1994...

 engineer Mark Easton, who continued to manufacture the cars and sold them on to Leading Edge to distribute from the summer of July 2002 at a price of around £26,500.

The car featured a mid-mounted Nissan 2.0 L twin cam engine (1998cc), producing 180bhp @ 6900rpm and torque of 142lb ft @ 4900rpm. Top speed was claimed to reach 140 mph and acclerate 0-60 mph in 4.8 seconds. Its open-top body was glassfibre, with an extruded aluminium central tub topped and tailed by tubular metal subframes and weighed only 763kg.

Leading Edge 240 RT

The 240 RT was also launched in 2002 as a high-powered version of the previous Tommy Kaira ZZ. The 240 shared the same Nissan 2.0 L engined as the 190 RT, but with a higher output of 240bhp, producing an accleration time of 4.4 seconds to 60mph. With the addition of a hard top roof in 2004, the weight increased to 809kg.
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