Early Flounderings
(working my way towards a plan)
Having broken the car at the Street Racer Championships in 1984, the car languished in a delapidated shed for 19 years as house building, kids etc took precedence.
Around 2003 Julia (my wife) suggested that I get the car working before I became too old to drive it! We had just remortgaged and had to increase the loan in order to get a good rate. Julia suggested that I use this £10k to rebuild the car. This seemed more than enough at the time, little did we know......
Anyway, I draged the car out of the shed and moved it to a new home in a specially prepared section of the barn.
I then had to decide what I was going to do. initially I thought that I would strip and rebuild more or less as it is, but with more power than the 168WHP it presently had (ignoring the fact that the engine was broken). However, even with fuel injection and mapping I would be lucky to get another 20-30BHP and shopping trollies have more power than that these days.
So, what to do? After a little research it seemed the easiest route was a Cosworth YB turbo engine. Being a Ford Pinto block the mounting points are indentical to the twincam so mounting wouldn't be an issue. Also, it is a DOHC and Ford, so similar to the existing lump.
I found a written off 3 door Cosworth in a local breakers with an alledged 400BHP engine. On speaking to the original builder this seemed legit so I bought it.
400bhp engine from a wrecked 3 door I originally planned to use.
Elan just pulled from shed and given a qiick wash.
Elan in its new home. 12 years later and still in here :-)
I sourced a good condition chassis as mine, although it turned out to be in not a bad condition, needed some work. I took the replacement chassis to Graham Hatherway Racing in Mundon, Essex (approx 10 minutes from me) to have it modified to Lotus 26R spec.
Whilst this was being done I had many chats with Graham about what I needed to do to make a fast car. He suggested that I talk to Geoff at Geoff Page Racing. He specialised in building YB engines at the time. In fact, when working for Hoyles, he built the first RS500 engine. This I did and ended up commissioning a 520BHP engine from him.
Geoff Page building my engine.
All sorted, or so I thought. Deciding to go down the YB turbo route proved to be a lot more interesting and challenging than I could have possibly imagined. The following pages chronicle my trials and tribulations along the long road to my goal.