| With engines running on carbs you have to be very careful
about cam selection if you're to avoid a car that won't idle and is
gutless below a certain rpm.. 200 bhp sounds great in a magazine article
but the engine coughs and farts like the world champion brussels sprout
eater after a successful record attempt, it's really no use on the road.
With an electronically managed engine these problems go away. And to prove the point we're going to fit 285 degree duration, high lift cams to the Elan and then ship it up to Dave Walker's rolling road for re-mapping. Both Dave and Andy are confident it will still idle smoothly at 800rpm and pull cleanly from low revs in fifth gear. Charlie at CTM Cylinder Heads will do the gas flowing and we'll cover that in the next issue. |
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| With the head mods and the cams we should have at least
200bhp to play with, which should make the Elan very lively indeed,
bearing in mind that it went pretty well with the old Lotus lump in it,
and that only made 126bhp.
You might get 180bhp out of a Lotus Twink, but you'd have to tune the nads off it and it would never last anything like as long as a Zetec. Andy's bought a secondhand Mondeo engine and it's the head from this that we'll be taking to CTM next month (that way he can keep the car running). He's already got the head off and we had a look at the bores. The engine's covered 170,000 miles, yet theres no wear ridge in the bores at all. How many Lotus engines ever do that kind of milage with out a rebore? It's hard to say exactly why a Zetec can do this kind ogf milage without showing any bore wear - after all it's just a cast iron block like the Lotus Twink. Andy reckons it's to do with the special honing used on Zetec bores and modern oil technology. Either way, the one in our Elan will be around for a good few years yet. |
