I always thought it was silly that cars are so heavily targeted at little boys in toy stores. Cars are pretty much the best things rendered by the hand of humankind, and should be enjoyed by all, right? And while toy stores tend to be the most aggressively gendered stores around, I’m glad to see some hard-core gearhead-ness permeate into the traditional girls’ aisle, like with what’s going on under the hood of this very archetypically girly ride-on car.
First of all, this thing appears to be some kind of Bugeye Sprite-inspired car, with maybe a touch of Austin A35 in the front end. Whatever it is, it’s very British.
That British-ness continues under the hood. Look what we have here:
That fake plastic engine looks really, really familiar to me. That row of three dome-shaped things on the left there—those are dead ringers for the dashpots in SU carbs, aren’t they? And that sure as hell looks like a twin-cam setup in the middle, and I see six intake manifold runners there—this is a twin-cam straight-six with triple SU carbs.
This little pink toy wonder has a remarkably good version of a Jaguar XK6 engine under the hood. Here, see for yourself:
That’s a pretty damn good likeness for a kid’s toy. They even got the bolts on the head right!
Clearly, this engine of this funny pink sort-of Bugeye sprite is based on a 4.2-liter twin-cam, triple-carbed straight-six Jaguar engine. That should give us all some hope about the future of hardcore women gearheads with a strange, deep-seated predilection for old British iron.