The world's tiniest, least-macho car is a giant hit at Summernats

But the big car hit in this year's festival is tiny. It has less power than a lawn mower. It doesn't screech around the skid pad. Nor does it burn rubber. 100kmh? Forget it.

Oh, and it doesn't have a reverse gear. If Adam Povey, the owner and driver, wants to turn it round, he has to pick up the back and swivel it round to the right direction.

His Peel P50 struggles to get up much beyond 40kmh on its 50cc engine. It's so small that he struggles to get into the fibreglass three-wheeler.

But when it chugged past, towards the end of the 500 car Summernats opening parade, the little machine and Adam got the loudest cheer. And on the show ground itself, there is a continuous stream of people peering at it.

"I haven't had any negative feedback," Mr Povey from Cooma said.

This is his second year with the car at Australia's biggest car festival. He's a car nut and has entered other vehicles in Summernats but the Peel P50 is now his thing.

About seven years ago, he decided that he was going to acquire the world's smallest mass-produced car. He would find it and buy the parts and recreate it.

The car turned out to be the Peel P50, recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest road-legal car ever produced.

It was manufactured between 1962 and 1965 in the Isle of Man between Britain and the island of Ireland. The Peel Engineering Company made fibreglass boats and decided that a little run-around might sell.

He tracked one down to Britain and then scoured the world for spare parts. Some of them he made himself.

It was designed as a car to drive around cities - not for the long haul. The idea was that it could contain the driver plus a shopping bag - though looking at it, the driver or the shopping bag would have had to have been small.

Either way, Adam Povey loves it. It is registered to drive on the roads, although getting it into Australia was a bureaucratic nightmare. It didn't have a vehicle identification number so one had to be obtained.

"It's 40, 50 kilometres an hour, top speed - and all over the place," he said, apologising to anyone he holds up on the road.

"I don't want to go any faster. It's not built to go faster."

The fibreglass body would make a collision very bad news.

The model on show at Summernats is one of the originals but the company has restarted production - with mod-cons like a reverse gear.

There is a 49cc petrol engine or an electric model. The top speed is 45kmh.