Old Esprit V8

THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY

Back in 1990 I was racing a Maguire Stiletto Imp Special Saloon and realised it was not going to get me much further up the grid even if I threw a lot of money at it, whilst I was wondering what to do a Lotus Esprit Silhouette Race car was being sold as a rolling shell, I could just about afford it and decided to buy it.

The car had previously been used in Hill climbs by Alvin Ravenscroft who had built the car in the workshops at Paul Matty Sports Cars. The car as run by Alvin is shown below.

ENGINE

I needed to choose an engine I could afford; I wanted the cheapest horsepower per pound ! I looked at 2.4 litre Pinto engines, Warrior Engines and Vauxhall twin cam engines but in the end, I chose the Rover V8 engine as the best option.

The only way I could afford a half decent engine was to build it myself, so sourced bits from Real steel and Oselli Engineering and built my first 3.5 litre race engine. I even went to the lengths of making a clean room in my garage so I could do it in a clean environment as using the kitchen wasn’t an option !

A slideshow of my first V8 engine build is below

GEARBOX

I needed to source a gearbox and came across a Hewland FT200 being sold by John Brannigan who sold a lot of March F3000 and F1 parts. The gearbox had initially been used in the March 87P F1 car which was a modified F3000 car and had been hastily created to allow March to turn up at Rio de Janeiro. It qualified last and engine failure meant it never raced. The gearbox was however ideal for me, I sent it to Pete Smith at PDS racing who checked its credentials and he rebuilt it, there were a few exotic bits in the box that Pete exchanged for new standard bits, so it worked out quite well for me !

Pete was also a really great guy and he gave me lots of advice on many things which helped me enormously.

CAR BUILD

Between 1990 and 1994, I built the engine, got the gearbox sorted, had a bellhousing made, stripped and refurbished the spaceframe, repanelled it with new aluminium bulkheads, refurbished the suspension and tidied up the bodywork, before getting it sprayed in my MK1 loud colour scheme ! see the slideshow below.

FIRST TEST AT WOODFORD

The car was finally completed in 1994 and being lucky enough to work at British Aerospace at Woodford with its nearly 1.5mile long runway I asked to be allowed to use it one Saturday morning. After confirmation that there was no flying that day, I got the OK to run my car from the Poynton end of the runway.

FIRST RACE

I took the car testing at Oulton Park on 9th March 1994. I can’t remember anything about that day, but it must have gone well as I raced the car for the first time less than 2 weeks later on the 19th March 1994 at Oulton Park, racing in the BARC (NW) Sports/Saloon Championship. My records show I qualified near the back of the grid but only lasted 6 laps in the race before the engine had valve gear failure….. NOT A GREAT START !

THE REST OF 1994 DIDN’T GET ANY BETTER

I then bought a complete 3.9 litre Rover V8 race engine and fitted this to the car and went for a 2nd attempt on 14th May again at Oulton Park, this time I qualified dead last and then only lasted 3 laps before I had yet another engine failure !

I then rebuilt my original 3.5 litre engine using some good bits off the 3.9 Litre engine and entered at Oulton on 20th August, surely, it would be 3rd time lucky? …… No chance, this time the engine dropped a valve in qualifying !!

Fortunately, the failure was found to be a defective part supplied to me and the supplier kindly paid for a new pair of cylinder heads ….. so the 3.5 litre got yet another rebuild in time for the last race of the season at Oulton on 8th October. This time there were no engine problems as instead I managed to crash the car at Knickerbrook during Qualifying !!!

The only trophies I have from 1994 are shown below:

REAR AEROFOIL TESTING

Over winter I decided to fit a rear aerofoil instead of the spoiler first fitted to the car and to check if the airflow over the wing was clean, I attached wool tufts onto the wing and then got the OK to use the runway again. I had my mate John drive my trusty Opel Monza 3.0 GSE (what a brilliant car that was) and Rick tried to video the wool tufts …. it was good fun, the video evidence wasn’t great, but we did establish that the rear aerofoil worked, however we also established that the front splitter didn’t, I had made it too thin and it fluttered !! captured in the video below.

1995 THINGS GOT A WHOLE LOT BETTER

I decided to again compete in the BARC (NW) Sports/Saloon Championship, a few people were surprised to see me again after my 1994 disasters.

The first 2 races at Oulton Park went great in comparison to the previous years outings as I finished both races, all be it near the back.

One problem I had was the car was very unstable when braking hard and the position of the steering wheel wasn’t great, so I modified the mountings and beefed them up. On completion I was showing John how much better it was when he said, “Hmm we should swap places !”, what we saw was that if you pushed down on the steering wheel the whole front of the car went up ! basically the car had a very flexible hinge in the middle of the chassis ! That explained the instability under braking, some additional bars in the spaceframe soon fixed the problem. One of my many early spins captured below!

The season then took us to Knockhill in Scotland, where I had great fun and finished another race.

I then had a small fire and DNF at Mallory, followed by a puncture and DNF at Cadwell Park, but despite this myself and John were developing the car very quickly and by early June I managed to finish 4th out of 16 finishers at Mallory and was now scrapping in the mid field.

2 races later in August at Oulton Park, I qualified 3rd out of 27 starters, I finished 5th overall at the end, but finally I was racing near the front, all the hard work was begining to pay off.

I had a bit of a hiccup in the September at Donington Park when my throttle jammed going into Redgate corner resulting into a very quick trip into the gravel trap and a fire !

Things got a whole lot better at the season finale at Oulton, I had another good performance and managed to finish the season with sufficient points to finish 2nd in Class A , however my performance was to lead to greater things to come !

Whilst my trusty 3.5 litre Rover V8 engine had performed well, it did only produce about 250 BHP and I had already started to look towards building a more powerful engine. My searches led me to having a few conversations with a certain Ian Richardson at Wildcat Engineering. Ian was interested in my car and said he might pop along to see me at the last race, which he did.

Ian did most of the engine machine work for the top level Rover V8 engines at the time used in Racing and Rallying and was working on his own design of high performance cylinder heads, he brought the first prototype heads with him to show me.

A week or so later he phoned me and said he wanted to let me use a pair of his heads on my Esprit, the Wildcat Esprit years were about to kick off !

For information on my Wildcat engines click on the links at the top of the page.

THE 5.0 LITRE WILDCAT YEARS

The engine produced a genuine 400BHP at the Flywheel and transformed the performance of the car, the car sounded absolutely great.

I did 34 races with this engine between the start of 1997 until mid 2001.

THE END OF TESTING ON THE RUNWAY

I did get to use the runway a couple more times, but then one day when I asked to use it I got told that Farnborough needed to be made aware so had to wait for agreement from them, a few days later I got a phone call in the office from the chief test pilot ! He was not happy as he had to tell me I couldn’t use it again, and that they weren’t going to let him blast his motorcycle down the runway either !!