A year into her CTCRC career, and it’s time for Helen to come of age. We need upgrades, to everything. Time to move from “fast for a roadgoing class” car to become a fast car.
I can lose a quarter of a tonne of weight within the regs, give or take, and I know where a fair amount of that is. The regs allow a fair bit of freedom, so long as the car still looks like a Jaguar, but they are also a bit picky about what you can or cannot cut away. In addition to whatever the rules are, there are also the Andrew Rules, which make it more difficult again. Helen was the “ultimate” roadgoing class car, and nothing may be done to her that compromises that identity, no matter where we go racing, so no metal may be cut. Nothing, nowhere. The shell must remain inviolate.
Then, she must be road legal. That means an MOT, and a tax disc. Nobody requires this in their rules, but they are in my rules. She will drive on the road. I don’t care if it costs me weight and time, but she alone on the grid will have the ability to drive in from a race, straight out of the front gates and up the M1 home if I so choose, those are my requirements.
We’re also not allowed to go to a full-on bespoke ECU. We are retaining standard old 3.6 ECU, the same one that came with that car I bought way back in 2007. You can play with it, if so minded, using period technology, but that means no laptoppery to play with it, because there weren’t any in 1983. I like it. Old stuff is just more classy.
That brings the lighting up to spec. A Westfield washer bottle, selected because it’s tiny, goes in the passenger side of the cockpit –because that location gives me the shortest pipe run to the single jet in the centre of the (facelift – they’re plastic, so lightweight, shhh, don’t tell anyone) wiper panel. Wired to one of the bank of rocker switches I fitted last year as if somehow I thought of this back then and made David wire the car accordingly. The assembly unclips from the car in seconds for race use, if I get concerned about the 250 grammes that this weighs.
Horn – torn off an old XJ40, tie wrapped inside the front wing for the shortest wiring run in though an old rivet hole in the footwell straight to another switch, as if I planned for this all along. Tie wraps merely so that I can cut it out in moments.
That she is polished up like a show car helps a lot. Anyone wanting to advertise a race series take note, get a couple of cars on the road and you will be noticed. Those valve guides aren’t making this a subtle journey though, that smoke will need swift attention, which is an expensive shame.
Within hours of this Helen was at a wedding reception. Well, if you’re going to put it on the road, use it with some style...
2 things here - where's the engine gone, and why is there a numberplate hanging around? Well, funny story....
Sometimes Bear gets technical.
What's he doing? I have no flaming clue.
Shiny, let's be bad guys. New engine is surprisingly something you could eat your dinner off.
This wasn't cheap, but it did make me touch myself.
Posted in t'ole. The new alloy mounts will make this rather louder than before, but they are race-proven and they're staying.
Installed and running, time to start tackling the rest of the car, which is going to get a lot of attention, though not all this time.
3.77 diff in one of our strengthened subframes about to get stuffed up the back.
New headlights. Or rather old headlights and new indicators.
Those hinges won't be here much longer.
This cannot end well.
Some teething issues, but that's to be expected with 30% more power than I've ever had before. Brand new timing chains turned out to be crap.
Clever people discuss clever things they are doing to make this car go faster, cleverly.
Strapped down hard and abused, but it was well worth the trip, and within a day of this we were carrying out a little road testing....
There is also the sneaky cost saving element to that, because track time is very expensive, and what if you want to try your new clutch, or brakes, or whether you’ve fixed an overheating issue? Drive it to work in the morning and find out, rather than show up to the track and find out it you haven’t fixed it after all. Road tax is cheaper than a rolling road session, or wasted track time.
I am allowed to know about the superlight flywheel, the twin plate clutch, and the Bear-engineered aluminium front pulley. The car sheds nearly 20kg of rotational weight from here alone. It must help.
I am allowed to know about the shiny new distributor. I am not allowed to know what David is planning to do with the inlet manifold – the Touring Car rules are a bit funny in that they demand retention of the original plenum, but it can be modified, and the inlet manifold is free, but of course on the Jag 6 pot plenum and inlet are one item. He has a plan, but not yet, and I’m not in on it.
Next on the list, some power. A tuned 3.6 engine, because we need a 3.6 to get into the pre-83 rules. Tuned because we don’t want less power than the stock 4 litre we had. The target to beat is the 248bhp the old engine had when it still had all its bearings intact, and that was 3 years ago.
So, more power, lighter weight, but road legal, is the brief.
Engine first. Bear and Dermott came up with that. I paid the bills. I am not allowed to know what’s in it, where the bits came from, or what it all does. I’m allowed to choose the colour scheme, and to fit it in the car. That’s it.
The engine, in my choice of black block, but zinc-plated appendages, is meant to look like an older, XK unit. Just because. It fits with this older category in a way that a colourful powder-coated cam cover wouldn’t. The clutch, flywheel and inlet are, for now, standard, road items, but they will come later. For now this is proof of concept, do the ingredients make a cake?
.
We post it in the hole swiftly, onto new, solid alloy mounts, no more rubber in this car now, and it fires up first push of the button. She is immediately whisked away to West Riding’s rolling road at a top secret location. The numbers are good, it runs in pretty quickly, but the head is a bit dicky, worn guides make it a bit smoky
Good enough for now. I do have more power than before, the torque isn’t bad either. Sorted, for now. There will be much more playing to do here, but she’s a runner. That is a start.
Back home, and time to set about an MOT. First things first though. On the rollers she was developing a little extra transmission drag. The diff is knackered, has been for three years, it doesn’t really lock, which was a bit of a problem at Cadwell last time out when I tried to pass a Cossie on the grass, and stopped moving as the unloaded wheel stole all the power.
Now, there is a complete subframe here, with a 3.77 diff in it, complete with all the parts I need to fit a handbrake. It is hiding in the back of Christine, the Bear’s car. Well, it was. It is quite quickly persuaded to change car, after a damper swap, Helen’s springs and dampers set for her more weighty all-steel nature.
That fixes the diff, and handbrake in one go. I still have to invent a handbrake lever and cable, but how hard can that be?
Lights are all there already, but racing cars don’t have numberplate lights. Helen soon does, the wiring was laid last year for this, the solution is a pair of those tiny led lights that are also bolts. Quick and cheap is my favourite combination for many things.
Front indicators have to be fitted, and because of the regs, I need quad headlight appearance once again – they are fine with my lexan stoneguards, but do want to see 4 lights behind them, not two – so the opportunity to slaughter two fowl with a single rock presents itself. I don’t have any inner lamps, and the car wasn’t designed for 4 lights in here at the minute, but if I move the outer pair outboard slightly it allows space for the inner pair, which I, erm, well, made. I had two spare bezels, just no headlights. I have aluminium, I have mirror/chrome vinyl, and I have lexan sheet, so I have headlights. I’m not buying them when I have all the bits! The indicators, amber LED units, go inside the fabricated lamps, making the inner lights the indicators. Looks like quad headlight, but it isn’t.
Modifications that look like one thing but do something else are also high on my list of favourites.
A quick recon job on the brakes all round, new pads, bled, done. Need some road-legal tyres, but I constantly surf Ebay to pick up used 888s, and a set of rather good 245/45/16s show up for modest cost, all well above the wear indicators we ignore on track but which Mr MOT man doesn’t.
That just leaves the headlights to set – back the saloon into the garage, mark the front wheels on the floor, mark the headlight pattern on the door, repeat with the XJS to set the beam pattern, done – and the handbrake to finish. We’re using X300 gear, and reason that all the cunning linkage used by Jaguar is to give sufficient mechanical advantage for a pretty small girl to be strong enough to apply it without sustaining a hernia. I am not a small girl, I’ve had my Weetabix, so can we throw out some of that and give it a straight pull with the handbrake alone – it’s still about a 5:1 gain. The way the Bear set the cables up on the subframe is like a giant version of a bicycle’s brakes, I just need to give the joined cables a bloody good pull in the middle.
One hole in the tunnel to poke the X300 handbrake through, link the cable up both ends, and pull on it like Hercules, it seems to function. The cable runs close to the prop under tension, so a swift flash of the welder fashions a small crossmember, attached to existing captive nuts inside the car, to guide it through a more acceptable route.
And that, really, is all it takes to turn a racing car into a road car. It’s about a 5kg penalty to pay, which is a lot, but not when you’re starting at 1450kg and you’ve plans to shed 200. Fortunately, to offset this, and coinciding with the onset of the summer heatwave, Helen sheds her window motors to save another 6kg, and is fitted with manual winders. Regs say the windows have to work, so this is the solution.
A quick MOT later and we have a tax disc in the window. An MOT centre, FYI, is wildly confused by a proper car. The moment the bloke goes underneath to check the fuel and brake lines and can’t find any is quite funny. The brake tests weren’t exactly a problem either on race pads and 888 tyres, though there was a 2% imbalance in the front brakes. The ride on the road is something else. It’s not unduly harsh, oddly, but by God does she grip, and that makes legal speeds something rather dull, except for the fact you’re sitting low, strapped in tight, and what seems like excellent visibility on track is rubbish when you want to pull out of an offset junction and all you can see is rollcage.
The solid mounts and angrier engine make the sound inside something to be savoured, above 3000rpm and she howls and barks like you’re wandering through Crufts with a chainsaw. At 5000 it sings as if the dawn chorus consisted of dragons. The reaction of other road users to what is, in fairness, a loud and shiny blue Jag covered in stickers is something quite enjoyable.
The reaction of pedestrians is also quite amusing, never had so many cameraphones waved at me.
The performance of this thing as a road car is something else. Wildly impractical, and boring because you can't use the car as it wants, but those moments that you can open the taps, that you catch yourself apexing a roundabout at 2am pulling what you know are far too many rpm to be legal, well that's when she comes alive. She hates travelling slowly now, the increased power and that featherweight flywheel make it eager to skip forward, hard as hell to drive but immensely rewarding. Stupid? Yes. Would I do it again? Hell yes.
Sneaky road test
Added to the increasingly eclectic collection of British cars lurking about the place.
Lurking in a Barnsley multi-storey car park. Nobody asks me for lifts anymore.
Doesn't she sound good now? There is another 1000rpm to go if we want it. Sometimes the traffic clears and you can really open it up. We don't video that...