Sommaire pour May 2017 de Classics World

Classics Monthly: “Ant, your project is a very different from Mike’s hot Ford, can you tell us something about it?” AA: “As my skills and also day job are designing and building cars from scratch, I decided to construct a 1950s inspired open-wheel Grand Prix winning racer. It’s not going to be an exact replica, as that would obviously bust the budget, but the finished result will make whoever buys it a very rapid track or hill climb car.” Classics Monthly: “That sounds very exciting, but why not just restore a down-at-heel car like Mike’s doing instead of building one from scratch?” AA: “As we’ve a finite budget, I’ve chosen a car with no expensive bits on it. There’s no glass, no bumpers, no interior and a minimum of wiring.…

Back in 1969, rather cleverly, Ford billed the new Capri as ‘The car you always promised yourself’. And, as far as a young Francis Ellingworth was concerned, this statement rang true, very true in fact. He spied his first Capri in 1972, in an Observer Book of Cars, then, later that same day, Francis saw the real thing: a 1600 GT XLR basking under the warm glow of a street lamp. He was smitten. So much so he vowed that, one day, he’d own a Capri. Well, almost a decade later, that day arrived and thus began a love affair with the Capri which, despite a few brief flirtations with other marques, has not only endured, it has actually strengthened. “I bought my first Capri in 1982,” recalls Francis smiling.…

Recently I was out in the 1989 XJ6 in the fog. When I was parking up my wife drew my attention to the fact that one of the rear fog lights was not illuminated. No problem I said, must be a bulb. That’s got to work for safety and it may well be an MoT fail point, so I decided to replace the bulb the following morning. Trouble was, that when I removed the red lens and withdrew the bulb it appeared undamaged. I connected it to a battery and it illuminated perfectly. Must be a broken wire I thought, so I got down under the rear end of the car and checked the wiring but all appeared in good order, so I noted where the wiring entered the boot…

Destined to be the last product to be produced by the ashes of what was once the mighty British Leyland, the MGF was still in production under modern-day Chinese ownership of the brand, meaning it outlived even the Rover 75. The idea of a new MG sports car had been on the cards for years, but budget constraints and the need to concentrate on mainstream saloon ranges saw it sidelined until the launch of the MX-5 in 1989 left everyone rushing to catch up. Like most European makers, MG wanted a slice of the sports car market and knew it had the strongest brand going. Three different concepts were worked up, including a front-engined fwd concept based on a shortened Maestro platform, a Reliant-developed concept using a Scimitar chassis, rear…

Why does it happen? Whining diffs were once part and parcel of motoring - Cortinas were known for it and a lot of bread and butter cars were built to a very approximate standard meaning that many whined from new. The Series Hillman Minx was a serial offender and often, removing the diff and shimming it up properly would cure it. But you’d be surprised to learn that even now, modern cars have iffy diffs - the 2004 onwards BMW 1-Series and 2005-on 3-Series with four-cylinder engines are well known for howling diffs at low mileages, mainly because they regressed from taper roller bearings to ball bearings again to reduce friction. But enough about this modern nonsense, what about older stuff? Is it really the diff? Firstly, is it the…

As practical ownership prospects go, it’s hard to beat the Triumph Herald. Parts support is excellent, engineering is conventional and the flip-front bonnet gives unrivalled access to the running gear. And if you need to do more involved restoration work, then the separate chassis means it’s possible to lift the body off in a single garage. As a classic this is all good news but when the car was launched back in 1959 the separate body and chassis were regarded as a retrograde step when the industry was rapidly moving towards unitary construction. It was a shrewd move by Triumph though, which as a relatively small maker was in a tricky position, its regular body supplier Fisher & Ludlow having been acquired by rival BMC and the alternative supplier Pressed…

While the road testers were busy christening the MX-5 the ‘Elan for the ’90s’ Lotus was in fact producing its own replacement... which when it reached production would be called, curiously enough, the Elan. Until recently it’s been difficult to find reliable details on the development history of the M100 Elan but longtime Lotus (and TVR) designer Oliver Winterbottom’s recently published autobiography A Life in Car Design gives a fascinating insight into how it came about. The idea for a smaller, more affordable lotus in the mould of the original Elan was floated as early as 1980 and with Lotus forging closer links with Toyota at the time it was designed around the Japanese firm’s componentry – specifically, the 2-litre Celica engine. With Winterbottom giving it a typically ’80s wedge…

Throughout the 1970s the British motor industry was crippled by what seemed like a never-ending series of strikes and cars that did reach the showroom were plagued with quality control issues. Poor management failed to get to grips with these problems and exasperated the situation by unleashing a string of new models onto the car buying public without sufficient testing. More and more car buyers in this country were being tempted away from traditional prestige marques such as Rover, Triumph and Jaguar and opting to buy what they perceived to be better-built and more reliable Continental and Japanese marques instead. One upmarket brand rapidly filling this self-inflicted vacuum was Audi and the German carmaker had achieved a considerable amount of success in this country’s extremely competitive mid-sized prestige saloon market…

Last month I‘d hoped to complete fitting the Stag’s new ignition switch and making the modifications to the wiring but the combination of slow parcel post and record temperatures here in Australia where I live resulted in missing both the magazine’s deadline and an intended club run. As I’d managed to previously fit and test the switch to the column lock assembly, this was then bolted to the column. Next, the wiring was run along the underside of the column to allow the wiring channel to be refitted while using a handy bit of string to maintain the column’s position until the clamp could be fitted together with the new panel. I had initially planned the switch panel to contain a starter button plus a radiator fan override switch, but…

Spring is here and the show season has started, the first one for me being the Rover Sports Register Ice Breaker at Whitewebbs museum in Essex, alway a good mix of Rovers from pre-war to the last 75s. I’d taken the 2000 the last couple of years so this time I decided to drive the Tomcat as it hadn’t been out to many shows. Some 100 miles later I decided the P6 is much nicer on the motorway than the newer car, so maybe I’ll save it for B-roads! The MR2 welding has been on hold as it lives under cover outside and most of my days off have been rainy, not ideal for working with bare metal. The V8 engine continued to put up a fight. I tried heat…

One of the more urgent jobs we needed to sort out on our Triumph estate was to replace the worn crankshaft thrust washers and fit a new set of big end and main bearing shells while the sump was off the car. Worn thrust washers will allow too much crankshaft endfloat, a common problem with the Triumph’s straight six as the mileage mounts up. If we ignored the problem for too long, the lower part of one of these ‘C’ shaped washers could eventually drop out with disastrous consequences if it didn’t find its way to the bottom of the sump. The excessive crankshaft endfloat was the most serious problem Colin Radford, a knowledgeable member of the Triumph 2000/2500 Register, found wrong with our car’s engine when he cast an…

BMC’s fluid suspension was first introduced in 1962 on the Morris 1100 under the name Hydrolastic. The system uses a displacer for each front wheel where a spring and damper would usually sit. A fluid transfer pipe runs from the front displacer to the rear one. When the car hits a speed bump, the front wheel rises, pushing fluid along the fluid transfer pipe to the rear displacer. This fluid transfer expands the rear displacer, pushing the rear wheel downwards and the effect is that the car stays level. The original Hydrolastic system used rubber springs in the displacers, but when the Allegro appeared in 1973 it introduced a refinement under the name Hydragas, which used displacer spheres filled with pressurised nitrogen. This acted as the springing medium in the…

It’s become something of a running joke in the Kelsey offices that I’ll drive anything as long as the radio works. Over the years I’ve set sail from Peterborough in some frankly sketchy vehicles but you’ll only hear me moaning if the onboard entertainment doesn’t come up to scratch. To some extent that’s a product of having started driving in the ’80s when car audio was still a new and exciting thing. I also end up doing rather longer journeys in our assorted company fleet than is the norm for older cars and it’s here that some relief from gearbox whine, wheel bearing rumble and the silence of your own company is welcome. These days it’s probably impossible to buy a new car without at least a basic FM radio…

Colin Chapman’s Austin Seven Special has always been referred to as the MkI rather than the first Lotus. This famous name was first applied to Chapman’s 1949-built Ford-powered MkII Austin Special and in 1952 Chapman and Michael Allen formed Lotus Engineering Ltd. One of the first cars the new company produced was the kit built Lotus Six (1953-55) and the Lotus Group, consisting of Lotus Cars Ltd. and Lotus Components Ltd., was formed in 1958. The following year was one of rapid expansion and saw Lotus move its design and production facilities to a purpose built factory in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire; the extra space being used for the in-house production of the troublesome glass-fibre bodied Lotus Elite. In 1962 Lotus launched the Type 26 Elan and a year later Ford commissioned…

Classics Monthly: “Mike, can you tell us what Lancaster Insurance’s Classic Rumble challenge means to you?” MB: “As you know, Lancaster Insurance gave Ant and myself a generous budget to go out and source a pair of classics and restore them to their best condition possible. After all the hard work’s been done we’ll display the finished cars at the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show in November where they’ll be auctioned off to the highest bidders, with all proceeds going to our chosen charities. It’s always a delight to bring a classic car back to life and even better when we can raise money for a couple of worthy causes at the same time”. Classics Monthly: “How did you find the car Team Mike will be working on?” MB: “After…

The complex heritage of Audi's distinctive four-ring badge can be traced back to 1889 when the German engineer August Horch started up his first engineering enterprise. In 1904 Horch went on to form August Horch & Cie Motorwagenwerke AG near Cologne, but a boardroom squabble resulted in Horch departing the firm in 1909 and forming a new company trading under a similar name. This resulted with Horch being sued for trademark infringement, so he changed the name of his new business to Audi, a close Latin translation of his surname, which means Hark in English. Horch ended up departing his new enterprise in 1920 and eight years later the owner of Dampf-Kraft Wagen (DKW) acquired the majority of Horsch’s Audiwerke. In 1932 Audi and DKW went on to merge with…

Just when you’re getting to grips with your lengthy ‘to-do’ list - and with three cars, it’s very long and always growing - something usually comes along to scupper progress. And this month, that came in the form of the need to start moving the contents of current lockup to new premises. I’ll be sad to leave the old place, I’ve achieved a lot and sorted a fair few cars over the nine years we’ve been there, but it’s time for change. It’s only when you start to move, you realise how much you’ve accumulated and forgetten about. First job was to transfer the ‘living’ cars to their new home, which included the Landcrab and the NSU. I’m always surprised by the Landcrab’s ability to reward months of neglect with…

With our Jaguar X-Type having reached the end of its surprisingly short to-do list, it was time to shuffle the project car fleet once more and with our other current project being the Triumph estate, we decided on something more sporting this time round. Buoyed by the success of the cheap-as-chips Jaguar, I was keen to repeat the trick of buying a modern classic for peanuts and the one which sprang to mind initially was the Mazda MX-5, in either Mk1 or Mk2 guise. The stumbling block here though was that so many of the early cars are now suffering from significant rot at the rear of the sills and having seen what goes into making a neat repair I decided to either nudge the budget up far enough to…

Regular readers will already be aware of the origins of our budget Mini project but to recap for those who missed the first couple of instalments, the plan was to acquire a rot-free Mini by buying one from sunnier climes: Italy to be exact, where intrepid Mini fan and editor of our sister title Mini Magazine Jeff Ruggles found a likely candidate at Milan specialist Just Minis. To cut a long story short, Jeff flew out with a suitcase full of tools and Mini parts and promptly drove the car 1059 miles back home. The 31,000-mile Mini completed the journey without drama and once back home the NOVA declaration was sent off to HMRC and the car was taken off for a UK MoT test. This was done with the…

Believe it or not, there was an era when every single car – even the most mundane of shopping carts – wasn’t powered by a lovely sixteen-valve, twin-cam-headed rocket plant. Maybe for Ford, all that began at the tail end of the ’80s, when everything had gone a bit stale. Their engine inventory, mostly developed from others, was dated: even the Escort and Fiesta’s relatively new Compound Valve-angle Head (CVH) really wasn’t loved. A new model of Escort was looming – now known as the Mk5 – and planned with it was to become a really fabulous twin cammer in the shape of the Zetec-E. Back then, it wasn’t a Zetec-E but Zeta – in fact, its name history is a touch confusing, since the last versions, were labelled Duratec…

ELAN 1962-73 The Lotus Elan was intended to eventually take over from the Seven and slot in under the Elite, while a larger two-plus-two version would replace the Elite. Unlike the latter’s bonded body, the Elan was to have a one-piece glassfibre body that would, in drophead form, require a considerable amount of strengthening. The solution was to utilise the one-piece steel backbone that had been used a rolling test bed for the new car’s mechanical components as the ‘chassis’ for the new body. Power was provided by a quickly upgraded 1.6-litre twin-cam Ford based engine and the front suspension and steering rack originated from a Triumph Herald. The Elan’s rear suspension was designed in house and pop-up headlights would go on to become an Elan trademark – and handicap.…