Dave Walker Lotus 7 Rolling Road Test

[edmandsd]

I would have liked to have attended this, and the weigh in.

 

What were the results ?

[greg]

Dave are you refering to the Se7en's list Emerald Rolling Road Day a few sundays back ?

 

 

Greg, Q 880 RAE (Green/Ali XF)

[edmandsd]

Yes - That's the one Greg.

[greg]

Ok, Thats usually organised by Dave Andrews (oily?) on the Se7ens list. He usually puts out an invite email a few weeks before. They are usually held in sept/may in Brixton on a Sunday.

 

I keep meaning to go to see what my car(s) do, and its a good referance for comparason either with other cars, or over time.

 

I think PC does the spread sheet, and Dave has sent a summary to the Se7ens list that should be in the archive.

 

Greg, Q 880 RAE (Green/Ali XF)

[Peter Carmichael]

Only a few cars were weighed, because of the appalling weather. A few experiments were done with inlet trumpet length and there were a few cars that received some setup attention.

 

The best summary is from Dave Andrews report to the Sevens list:

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The day dawned wet but we had a good crowd of cars and car wallies. We

arrived a little late in deepest Brixton due to delays from her indoors and

there was already a clutch of cars ready and waiting to hit the rolling road.

 

Dave Walker and Karl Paton were both available all day to run up the cars,

offer cheerful advice and wield spanners / PCs/ ECUs where necessary.

 

Some had made quite an effort to get to Brixton with Dave Jackson and Graham

Ford trailering their cars in from some considerable distance.

 

There was a good mixture of cars, the usual crowd of Caterhams, Steve

Wisemans Cosworth engined striker, Dan Jermyn's K engined Fury, a couple of

W*******ds, a couple of Elises including Steve Butts's stonking VHPD , Neil

Wains Tiger with newly installed Zetec running on throttle bodies and Rob

Turnocks GTM Libra sporting a home tweaked 1600 K series. The full results

will be published in a spreadsheet but I've scribbled some notes from memory

about the high spots of the day.

 

Serious competition cars.

 

With two Arnie Webb bashing cars present it was bound to be an exciting day,

first on the rollers was Graham Fords immaculate Yellow Caterham JPE sporting

a ground shaking, stonking 2 litre Vauxhall, freshly built by SBD. Graham

recently took the car to Curborough sprint circuit for the Lotus seven owners

club sprint where he crossed the finishing line at an astonishing 111MPH a

full 6mph faster than Arnie webbs VX Caterham and 5MPH faster than Dave

Edmands purpose built drag racing 320BHP BDX powered Caterham.The torque from

Graham's engine was phenomenal. Each time the car was run up the wheels just

span freely on the rollers whenever we got near peak torque, Graham had to

remove the rear roll bar, jack the rear end of the car up and seat two or

three large persons on the back in order to gain sufficient traction.

Eventually a clean run was managed but spikes on the rollers on the coastdown

meant that some of the top of the power curve had the losses estimated rather

conservatively with the car making 275BHP and 185ft/lb torque.

 

Later we had Peter Carmichaels orange Superlite fresh from a recent rebuild

of both car and engine. Peter has recently triumphed at the 'Clash of the

Titans' at the previously mentioned L7OC Curborough sprint where he and his

car were pitted head to head against Arnie Webbs Vauxhall powered monster.

There is quite a lot of good natured needle between the Vauxhall powered

Caterham camp and the K series powered camp. Despite Arnie being tipped

(mainly by himself) to thrash Peter , it was Peter who triumphed in a nail

biting final run setting a time of around 59.5 seconds beating Arnie by

around .3 sec. Peters car ran up easily and immediately clocked 253BHP, I've

never seen his grin look so broad, for some reason he had felt the power was

tailing off but the rollers said otherwise and I think it was a worry off his

mind. A second and third run confirmed the power was no fluke with the car

clocking 254BHP and 167ft/lb. An experiment with longer trumpets was tried to

see if some extra BHP or torque could be found (greedy b*gger) but these made

little difference. It was during one of these runs that bolt holding one of

the trumpets came adrift.. perilously close to the open trumpetsb&.

 

Dave Jacksons 1600K powered superlite was run up a couple of times with

varying lengths of trumpets to see if anything could be gained over his

previous runs, this engine was originally in Rob Walkers car where it made

186BHP on 740 (276deg) cams. Since Dave bought the engine the cams have been

upgraded the now ubiquitous 1227s and the head has had a little more

attention. The best run produced 210BHP with the power still climbing.. what

a peach of an engine. Needless to say Dave managed a cheshire cat sized grin.

 

Steve Wisemans Cosworth powered Striker caused much amusement by periodically

setting off the alarm on Karls Audi with its barking exhaust. This made over

210BHP and more importantly 246ft/lb at around 3500, it also sports a

discreet '1300 GT' decal on the back just to increase the humiliation felt by

other road user who may be overtaken.

 

Other notable runs were Neil Wains Zetec powered Tiger which made over

170BHP, Dan Jermyns pretty Fury with 1400 warrior tweaked K series made

151BHP.. damned good from a 1400 engine.

 

Steve Butts Elise was rolled on and made a creditable 223BHP, superb from a

home built engine. K series engines as installed in Elises tend to make

around 10-15BHP less than the equivalent engines in Caterhams due to the

exhaust configuration and intake air temperatures so 223 is a brilliant

result for Steve. His is currently the most powerful transverse engined K

series Dave Walker has measured.

 

Kevin Woods Zetec powered W*******d made a surprising 175BHP from a basically

standard 2 litre engine running 45DCOEs, the carburation had a stutter around

progression which looked like weak idle jets combined with problem

progression drillings, but the main circuit must have been pretty much on the

ball.

 

Geoff Northcotts Caterham FB .. .err sorry SV with EU3 engine and Emerald

ECU (Geoff made his own loom to adapt the EU3 loom to the M3D) delivered

153BHP on just supersport cams and a mapping session, later on his ECU was

borrowed by Daren Ball who's MEMs had developed a fault, the M3D ran the

engine perfectly and it made over 150BHP, again on supersport cams.. buy that

ECU Daren!!!

 

It was good to see Hoopy who has recently had a heavy collision which wrote

off his Caterham and damaged his wrist breaking several bones, movement in

the wrist is still limited but he looked (and sounded) perfectly well

otherwise. Needless to say he is already making plans for tweaking the

Caterhams replacement.

 

During the course of the day some fun was had tweaking cars that experienced

problems. Allen Paynes 1.4K supersport gave some cause for concern when run

up, last year it had made about 135BHP and hads since been upgraded with a

fully ported head and yet still made only 135BHP in a rather strained

fashion. General concensus was that the cam timing was incorrect and so it

proved to be with the inlet cam advanced about 20 degrees, however half a day

of filing sprockets and attempting to re-time saw the engine with an

unsustainable idle. The cam sprockets were then swapped back for standard

ones with the engines idle returning as a result. The car was marked for

further investigation via a set of vernier pulleys.

 

Rob Turnocks K engine GTM Libra had its cam timing checked and corrected and

subsequently had the ECU firmware upgraded. Following this the engine was

spectacularly over-fuelling for no apprent reason, this was still being fixed

when we left so I've yet to hear the outcome.

 

I have only noted those runs and cars that I can remember clearly, so

apologies If I have missed too many.

 

All in all a very enjoyable day, thanks to DW and KP for doing their usual

stuff and to Mrs DW and KPs mum for laying on the refreshments.

 

Full results will be published in a spreadsheet as soon as I have them to

hand.

 

Roll on the next RR day.

 

Dave

 

 

Peterid=teal>

253 BHP K-seriesteeth.gif, no gearboxbum.gifid=red>

[oilyhands]

It's been pointed out to me that there is a cockup on the over the line speed between Dave Edmands Caterham and Graham Fords.. sorry.. Grahams was faster but not by such a large margin.

 

I usually do the basic results spreadsheet and PC does a more in depth analysis with the resutls normalised. Both these spreadsheets with results will be uploaded to the se7ens list server in a day or so and distributed to those who attended, there may well be another similar day later this year if anyone is interested in attending, its always good value for money and a real sevens fest. The results acheiuved are also directly comparable with a raft of results from similar cars so the RR is a good benchmark.

 

Oily

 

Edited by - oilyhands on 6 Jun 2002 12:45:48

[edmandsd]

That's right Oily, I think you'll find it was 110mph v 108mph.

 

I've also never pretended that my engine makes 320bhp - 295bhp is probably more realistic.

[oilyhands]

The rumour machine produced a figure of 320BHP :-)), like I said at the beginning of the text, it was from memory, the 111MPH, was the over the line figure from the next day...

 

Oily