Lotus Europa Community
Lotus Europa Forums => Off Topic Subjects => Topic started by: Pete on Tuesday,June 01, 2021, 02:50:08 PM
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Anyone in the U.K. should watch the more 4 program. With Phil glenister. They are restoring a lotus elite.
Great show.
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Anyone in the U.K. should watch the more 4 program. With Phil glenister. They are restoring a lotus elite.
Great show.
£40,000 to buy, and £40,000 to restore to racing condition sound expensive to me.
I didn't realise it has no chassis, just a fibreglass body monocoque.
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I think there was some dispute at one time over the authenticity of the car's history and/or its identification, which was resolved in the end.
What a lovely little car!
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Sounds interesting. I'd tune in to that, if it was available. Love the Elite.
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Very strange for such a valuable car to have the engine coming from a fire engine's water pump.
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There’s a bit of info that may be of interest on the Coventry Climax engine here;
https://www.hagerty.com/media/hagerty-magazine/coventry-climaxs-inline-four-evolved-water-pumper-to-racing-live-wire/
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Very good article! Are we to conclude from it that they never upgraded to five main bearings even in their F1 engines?
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Very strange for such a valuable car to have the engine coming from a fire engine's water pump.
Considering the Climax's excellent specification, necessary for it's designed application, its being repurposed as an F1 or featherweight sportscar engine was a stroke of genius in thinking 'outside the box'.
When I was an apprentice at the Navy Dockyard in the late 80s/early 90s, I was surprised to find a plethora of portable Coventry Climax powered fire pumps laying around. The pump units were regularly abused by their operators in ways only a sailor can, and so the engine shop was overhauling them on a regular basis. In those days my head was more focused on American muscle cars than sports cars, but I liked sports cars too, and the significance of these engines was not lost on me. Eventually they were superseded by more modern units, and one day I went snooping around the shop to see what obsolete bits might be hanging around. I learned that all of the pump units (possibly 20 or more) went to a Crown Assets auction (where they would have been picked up for a song). But horror of horrors, I also learned that just a month earlier, during a shop clean-up, dozens of OEM overhaul kits and hundreds of spare parts of all description (pistons, cranks, everything) went straight to the dumpster. :o In amongst that lot would have been a significant number of parts that I imagine would be exceedingly difficult or impossible to find at the time, not to mention, today.