TC block castings

[literarymadness]

rjbaren: Thanks for posting your specs. Our builds are fairly close. My block is marked LA on the front. My engine is bored .20 over and I have a stroked custom 76mm EN40B steel crank which increases the engine capacity to 1.655cc. My Compression is 10.5:1 and my original cams were reground to .383 lift (Hot Street spec). Stock cams are .349 (Fed spec and UK TC) and Sprint cams are .360 (UK Special). My Strombergs have Euro High Balance bar intakes with adjustable needles (B1BT).  Plus aluminum flywheel, mild steel headers, Borla exhaust, and 123 Bluetooth electronic ignition. 

[rjbaren]

It appears we do have similar setups.  I have a header too and the RD Enterprises performance muffler.  I think the big difference are the carbs.  I was going to try some other setups I have read about and JB Collier mentioned the Mikunis.  We talked back a forth a bit and I ordered them.  I believe they are an improvement over the Strombergs.  The engine builder was glad I removed them.  I had freshly rebuilt carbs from Joe Curto I removed with only 500 miles on them.
The engine builder was not used to the Mikunis, he mostly works with Webers.  But he said the power output with the Mikunis is right there with the Webers once he got them dialed in.

[literarymadness]

The best real world way for us to compare oranges to oranges is for us both to do rolling dyno tests at the rear wheels.  The summer seasonal rains have been relentless down here in South Florida for the last month or so. Soon as it lets up, I plan on putting the car on a rolling road dyno.  The only dual HP numbers I have seen from a built Europa TC is a car from New England that tested 135 HP at the crank and 103 HP at the rear wheels. The guys on the Lotus Elan forum who seem to offer more dyno data also see similar 20% losses from Crank HP at the rear wheel. I don't know my Crank HP, so I would have to reverse engineer the RWHP data to estimate Crank HP.  A normal stock Fed-spec new only dynos about 80-83 HP at the rear wheels down from about 97-98 HP factory at the Crank (the quoted 113 HP Lotus quoted was Chapman folly to sell cars). So if you could please test your are on a local rolling dyno. By the way Pfreen's Stromberg head TCS tested 130 RWHP with Hitachi carbs.

[rjbaren]

Aren't the Hitachi carbs are similar to SU carbs?

[jbcollier]

Yes, they are SU copy/clone.