AMMO

Some may have read about my quest for more power and more rpm from the 2 litre Duratec. I've been looking at flowbench figures, ports, exhaust system tests and all sorts of other things over the last week or so. I think the way to actually show why I have this obsession with rpm is the show you a graph from various 2 litre engines I have built. here The 220 bhp and 260 bhp spec engines were fitted to my own car. With the 220 bhp engine I was hitting the rev limiter through the gears all the time. With the 260 engine less so. 8,500 rpm with the stock crank on both the 260 and 280 bhp engines is pretty reliable. Not had any bottom end problems at these rpm. The 280 bhp race engine was built five years ago. If you look at the green power curve you can see that it hits 280 bhp at 8,500 but that another 280 rpm give another 6 bhp. You can tell from the power and torque curves that it still wants to go up. Taking the engine up to 9,500 should see it go over 290 bhp. With more modifications over 300 bhp should be possible on stock size valves. The reason for stock valves is that it would save quite a bit of money over fitting a big valve head. Everyone is on a budget and adding lots of money for a big valve head is money not well spent if you can get the power by other means. If you can do an easy and affordable porting job and bolt on the proven ancillaries for good performance then that is the way to go in my opinion. I have tested a big valve head on the flowbench with an 87.5mm bore adapter and with an 89mm bore adapter, the two piston sizes I regularly used. The increase in flow that the big valve head offers is somewhat negated by the shrouding of the 87.5mm bore. In other words the big valve head works well in the bigger 89mm bore engine rather than the stock 87.5mm bore. The big valve head comes into its own on bigger capacity engines with bigger bores. The 35mm valve is about right for a 2 litre, the 36.5mm valve I designed works well on my 2.2 and larger engines. I did some work on the Nisan Touring Car heads in the 90s. Thes Nissans made 312/314 bhp with 35mm inlets. I've heard that once the 8,500 rpm rev limit was removed and these engines went into private hands they made 324-325 bhp. I am friends with the people involved with this engine. When I asked what was it that made them make more power, the answer was "everything". I wouldn't say the budget was unlimited but big figures, running into millions were being bandied about at the time. The engines were made by IES, Judd and AER. Prices were between £53,000 and £75,000 + VAT each. A friend who was heavily involved in the development said they spent around a month working on just the bellmouths. They probably spent similar amounts of time on exhausts and various other parts. Port sizes is another thing I have been looking at a lot. My ports are not overly large and yet they flow really well. I found some flowbench figures for ports of various sizes and the larger ports flow less. It seem hard to believe but that's the way it is. Actually what happens is that a port that is too big the low lift figures suffer and the high lift figures go up. With a big port the flow doesn't stop until 16mm lift. As we don't lift the valves to these figures there is no point in doing this, especially if the low and mid lift figures suffer. Basically the port has to be in proportion with the valve. If the port is out of proportion the flow and gas velocity will suffer. If you are hitting the rev limiter at 8,500 with the power still rising I can tell for a fact you that your ports are not a problem. I seem to have new enthusiasm for these things. A two year break without building any customer engines was probably what I needed. Raceco was started by me in 1986 to go racing and to develop and build race engines. I'm not interested in building dozens of 210 -260 bhp engines, something that I was doing all the time. I want to do development which is after all my forte and has bought me success in the past. I've done lots of varied and successful projects. Stuff that has won races and championships. Recently I have been in a rut. To build the same spec. engines over and over again is no fun and a waste of my abilities, especially when you are competing on price and not making any money. I want to do new stuff all the time, things that tax my brain. Bolting engines together to a known spec makes you a fitter not an engine tuner. The frustrating thing is that all of the development work would have been done and dusted years ago had a budget been available. Another thing I realised is that building engines that go well on the dyno is one thing but the real buzz is seeing the car or bike with my work going around the track. I have two 280 bhp spec. race engines in two cars this year in the same race series. One in a Westfield and one in a Caterham. I haven't been to a race track to watch a race in a ages. Time I jumped in my Caterham and went to have a look. Hope you didn't nod off reading this. Edited to correct a typo. Thanks Mankee! Edited by - Ammo on 7 Feb 2013 08:28:50

I've run all three and would say that the stock Caterham fuel injection tank is probably best. I ran a low pressure pump, swirl pot and high pressure pump on my Zetec. It performed really well but I didn't like having two pumps. More weight, twice as many things to go wrong, swirl pot, etc. When I switched to Duratec I modified a stock carburettor tank to take an external pump, thinking that if it went wrong I could easily replace the pump. Although the tank had baffling it would surge on corners when the tank was a quarter full. I could have done more work to the baffling on the converted carb tank but in the end the Caterham fuel injection tank works fine so I opted for that. Hope this helps.

I have a l/h rear wing that came off my 1989 car. It is lighter than the one I have fitted at the moment but it is also quite star crazed.

As I am in full crank mode this morning I thought I would share what for me is some good news. A race engine customer has given me the go ahead to make a 2 litre Duratec crank. Using the same designer that designed my cranks in the past we will make a crank that can be reliably revved to 9,500. It will be based on my existing 2.2 88mm crank that has been incredibly reliable and shows none of the problems of the stock crank. The new crank won't be fitted until next year but that gives me something to play around with. I have to do some work at my end before I can give the data and specifications to the designer. I will also be designing some new parts to make the engine more reliable at high rpm. When I say reliable at high rpm I mean something that can be kept at maximum rpm for a long time. An American friend called Dr. John Wittner raced Moto Guzzis in the US and ended up being employed at the factory in Italy. I used to go to the factory often when my team was sponsored by them. The doctor bit in Dr. John was because after John did his stint in Vietnam he trained to be a dentist. He gave up dentistry and became a very successful engine tuner and designer. His idea of high speed engine testing was to put an engine on a dyno at full rpm, 9,200 rpm in the case of the Guzzi Daytona engine, and go out to lunch. Lunch in Italy can be quite a drawn out affair. So we are talking a couple of hours here. That's what I mean by reliable at high rpm. Looking forward to doing a 2 litre race engine my way with my parts even if it won't be raced until next year.

I've been thinking about cranks a lot lately so I thought I would add some comments to this thread. My personal opinion is to always balance. My way of engine building is to do the best job possible and to build engines for customers as if they were for myself. When I get to a point that I have to decide what to do on an engine I ask myself what would I do if it was my engine that was going in my car. I don't want my engines to vibrate. It is bad for the engine to have the flywheel and / or clutch cover out of balance. Crank balance is not something to save money on. No point in balancing the pistons to 0.01 of a gram if the flywheel is 10 grams out of balance. The only way to find this out is to put the crank assembly on a machine and check it. The vibration periods tend to be around 4,000 and 8,000. So for an engine that revs to 8,500 it would be pretty essential in my opinion. Especially if you are going to use the engine at that rpm at a regular basis in racing or on a track. Touring cars are limited to 8,500rpm. Do you think that the people that build these engines don't balance their cranks? Getting a crank assembly balanced is a pain in the neck if you have to drive miles to drop it off and again to pick it up, or if you have to parcel everything up and send it buy courier. I can understand that for a road car you might want to give it a miss. After all there is a good chance you can get away with it. I'm in a very fortunate position that an ex-employee and friend has a balancing machine 10 minutes up the road and can balance an assembly while I wait if neccessary. So for me it is not a problem. I also get the cranks crack tested on the Magnaflux machine and the journals micro polished at the same time. That goes to explain why my engines have always been that little bit more expensive than other people's. I just put more work and expense into them. It is also not true that nobody uses the vernier sprockets on the cams anymore. I had to order some of my own profile cams for two customers with race engines in Italy recently. Whilst I was on the 'phone I asked how many cams are sold with sprockets and how many without so they can be used with the original factory sprocket. The answer was that they sell ten times as many with the vernier sprockets as against the ones without. I have built 210 bhp entry level engines with the standard sprocket, but anything more expensive I always fit the vernier sprockets. Apart from ease of cam timing there is also another reason for using the cams with the sprockets. If anyone can guess what it is I will donate £10.00 to NTL.

Engine development is never cheap. Engine assessment, crank design and manufacture, new rods, pistons, cams, springs, valves, induction and exhaust, dyno testing, etc. Lots of money. You could do a cheaper job and try to improve what you already have. If you have an engine in bits you could bring it over for me to have a look at. I've always managed to make an engine more powerful one way or another. Some of the older stuff has been quite successful, old Kawasakis for racing, Guzzi Lodola 175cc for the Moto Giro and even a Honda C90 for drag racing would you believe. Give me a call if you want to discuss.

Tony was a very determined guy. He put some serious work into his cars. I got a wrong telephone call at 4am and never went back to sleep. So another sleepless night thinking about cylinder heads, valves, ports, throttle bodies, cranks and exhaust systems. Probably triggered by the fact that late yesterday afternoon I looked at a load of photos of sectioned heads, port shapes and port moulds. I remembered flowbench tests I did years ago with different valve sizes and bore sizes. I am now pretty convinced that the stock valve sizes are sufficient for the 2 litre. My port sizes must be right too. If they weren't the power wouldn't still be rising at 8,500rpm. If the ports were too small or didn't flow enough the power would be tailing off which it definitely isn't. Also the head work is very cheap compared to a big valve head that would add around another £2,500.00. With the stock 2 litre crank limited to 8,500 rpm the race engine engine has been reliable for four race seasons. As I have mentioned before another customer in Italy has done 16,000 km of mainly track miles also limited to 8,500. The safe mean piston speed should be 9,500 rpm. My old Moto Guzzi racer had an 82mm cranks similar to the Duratec's 83.1mm crank. We revved the bike to 9,200 rpm. The Guzzi factory made me a batch of ten cranks based on the 78 mm road cranks, some of which found there way into road bikes and some into our race bike. In the road bikes they have been 100% reliable. In the Guzzi racing video in ChitChat the engine failed after 9 hard laps due to the crank. After we had the crank re-designed the bike was 100% reliable for the next two years winning every race it entered. I have no intention of repeating the Guzzi episode with a Duratec hence my reluctance to rev the stock crank. Remember I am talking about racing where all the available revs are used all the time, not track days or sprints. There is still a lot of development work to be done on cams and exhausts. At the moment we are only in the ball park. I'm a bit frustrated as I know there is more to come and for five years I haven't been able to take this engine further. If there had been a budget available at the time we would be much further up the road by now. My first customer crashed his car and the money he had allocated for engine work got spent on chassis repairs. Maybe next winter we can get to play around a bit more. These are the things I think of at night when I should be sleeping.

Alan I'm pretty sure that the guy that I did all the MG work for was called Tony Price of T&L Autos based in Bedfont, Middlesex.

Tuning a 2CV engine is the sort of daft thing I could like doing. Can't be any more stupid than deciding that racing a Moto Guzzi would be a good idea! A lot of the Duratec engines I bought from the States had dual mass flywheels. Sorry, I don't know anything about Sigma engines.

mic is the man who knows more about it than me! 😬

I have a 5 speed box and so do many others with Duratecs. I can drive most tracks in just third and fourth. But then I don't race. Personally I would stick to 5 speed for now and see how you get on.

If you limit torque you also limit power. You could take the supercharger off perhaps? That would limit torque. 😬 I really don't know enough about forced induction to answer many questions on the subject. Hence the sigh of relief when I didn't have to do the supercharged Duratec. More importantly I am just not interested in it. I think you should be passionate and enthusiastic about something to do it well. The reason I am not interested in it is that I personally think it is wrong for the car. If someone came to me and said they wanted to put it in something that weighed 1,000 / 1,500 kilos I'd be more interested in doing it. At the end of the day it is not my speciality and I am sure there are people who know more about the subject that could do it much better than me.

Whatever floats your boat actually. I did a couple of supercharged projects but I never really warmed to them. Danny LT got me to buy a Rotrex supercharger that sat on my desk for maybe a year. Luckily he changed his mind and we never did that project. I gave a sigh of relief when I flogged it for him. I did do some sketches that I found recently to supercharge my Zetec. It was more of an exercise to see where you could put everything more than a serious attempt. I'm not sure if big torque is the way to go in a Seven. Big torque will have you off in the wet. OK in a 1000 kilo rally car but in something that weighs 500 kilos? When we talked about doing the supercharged Seven we were talking at least 400 bhp. We already had 300 bhp normally aspirated. F1 and Moto GP don't have a lot of torque. They chase the revs and the big bhp figures. Nothing new. I had lunch and a great conversation with the late Arturo Magni, head mechanic at MV at the time of the world titles with Surtees, Hailwood, Agostini and Read (I used to import Magni products into the UK). They were revving bike engines to high rpm in the 50's, 60's and 70's. My preferred route would always be naturally aspirated in a Seven. But that's just me.

Normally aspirated of course! Forced induction is cheating!

A 50bhp 2CV. Now there's a challenge! :-) If you have some budget you should come and see me. I did a tiny bit of work on BMW boxer twins and discovered a couple of interesting things. One of the things I used to do quite a bit of is engine assessment. Basically clients would bring engines in bits and pay me for my opinion. I've done work on rally engines, MGs Porches, GSXR 750 and 1000 for Rizla Suzuki (the year Jon Reynolds won the BSBK championship), old engines for historic racing. The historic racing guys seem very reluctant to try anything new. "Nobody has ever done that before" Is what we usually hear. They seem to think you need to do the same old stuff that was done in the '50's to a 1950s' engine. One of my ex employees has done some good work with MGAs. He done what he calls a Raceco job on it. He even asked if he could use one of my experimental Duratec cams which worked really well in the old two valve per cylinder engine (didn't work that great on a Duratec though!). The old MGA flies and has been doing a lot of winning over the past few years. When I said make the ports smaller I didn't express myself properly. What I actually meant was not make the ports as big as I currently do. In practice only alter the important parts of the port and not touch the areas that are probably doing nothing. I played around on the flowbench adding clay in Moto Guzzi ports years ago. You could get an improvement by adding material to the port. I am very reluctant to add epoxy as I'm afraid it might fall off eventually and wreck the engine. So I tend to do what I think is the best job I can with what I have. The GSXR 1000 I was involved in had epoxy in the ports. I didn't do the head work, just the flowbench testing, airbox and air entry duct assessment. I did design and supply the carbon fibre trumpets for the throttle bodies though. Hard to believe that was ten years ago. In the early days of owning my first flowbench I tested something like 30 heads for an MGB. The customer was very serious about his racing and had won his class outright but wanted to beat the V8s too. Something he could do in the wet as the V8s had too much torque for the conditions. We had an engine on a dyno and just swopped heads. A very interesting experience as we could compare the flowbench figures against the dyno figures. Emerald have now got their engine dyno up and running, a Superflow 901. Funnily enough the same dyno we used with the MG and Porsches back in 1988. What would be really great is to build a Duratec engine that could left on the dyno and swop heads. Then rather than try to guess what is happening we could have some actual proof. Last time we had a three day session at Emerald swopping bits was a few years ago. Probably five. The 280 bhp came to the dyno with my hand ported head and 45mm throttle bodies. It made 252 bhp. We put the 54mm bodies I had designed an had made by Jenvey on and the power zoomed up to 286 bhp. Jenvey said they were too big. I disagreed. The head and throttle body and trumpet had been designed to work as one. The 45mm bodies were restrictive on this head setup with the sort of cams and exhaust we were using. One interesting thing that Dave picked up on immediately was that there was no loss of torque with the bigger throttle bodies. We had already won races and a championship with a Moto Guzzi fitted with 54mm bodies in 1995 and won the singles race at Daytona on a Ducati Supermono also fitted with a 54mm in 1995, so it wasn't a new idea at all. We also swopped the experimental 54 mm taper throttle bodies running 8 injectors for my new 54 mm bodies running only 4 injectors. This was on Danny LT's car running one of my 2.2 engines. They worked just as well so we ditched the 8 injectors after that. We also tested the 4-2-1 against the 4 into 1 big bore exhausts and 2.75" silencers against 3" ones on the higher output engines. No real difference on the two different header designs. Swings and roundabouts you gained and lost torque and power in different areas but overall the results were so similar that either with have worked as well. Reducing the silencer from 3" to 2.75" lost us 10 bhp on a 312bhp engine. Again you need a different silencer size for each power output. Dave and I get along really well. We have friends in common from the old days of motorcycles. He still quotes the late Leon Moss on a regular basis. Dave laughs because when we get to certain stage of testing and it's time to start swopping things I say "OK, lets dick around". The first time I said that he commented that it wasn't a serious thing to say. But for me it is like playing with expensive toys. Coming from a creative background, you have to enjoy what you do to give your best. If you are not enjoying it then I can't see the point of doing it at all. Dave at Emerald had so much fun testing he only charged me £1,000.00 + VAT for the three days. With fuel, hotel and food for me and an assistant I probable spent around £1,500.00. It might seem expensive but I saw it as essential to my work. So knowledge is not free as some people think. It actually costs quite a bit of money. Anyway one thing I have come to a conclusion about in the last few days is that you really don't need bigger valves in a 2 litre Duratec. Yes in the 2.2 and bigger capacities if your ambition is big power. What you need in the 2 litre is more revs. The challenge is doing a good job designing the new bits needed and making it stay in one piece. Designing the new parts satisfies my creative side. It allows me to do my own thing. Copying others and using the parts you can buy off the shelf is no fun at all. As for "Ramblings of an old engine builder" maybe "Ramblings of an old ****" Would be more apt. I'll let you be creative and choose the word you think would be most appropriate. The one I was thinking of is not printable.

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of crank balancing and cylinder head porting! The bottom line is I still love engines and am still curious about them even though I don't build them professionally any more. I saw Dave Walker at Emerald a while back when we were dyno testing one of my 280 bhp 2 litre Duratec race engines. He says the older you get the more you realise that you don't know anything. I tend to agree. He seems to like to quote me on things and one of his favourites is "He's a teenager, quick, give him a job whilst he knows everything". Years ago when I was based in Surbiton we took on a young guy called Andy. He was 18 and knew everything. It took a while for me and my head mechanic, Max, to knock him down to size. Most of the young kids we had come through the workshop were totally useless. You gave them a job, they would do it badly and then sit down for a rest. We were supposed to be getting the cream of the crop from Kingston College. What made Andy different was not only was he a whirlwind and couldn't wait to get stuck into the next job, but that he was curious. That curiosity set him apart from the rest. I'm pleased to say that Andy turned into a top race mechanic. What makes engine building interesting is that there is always new stuff to learn. I'm still curious. My 2 litre 280 bhp engine reaches the 8,500 rpm rev limit with the power still rising and the torque still in pretty good shape. Another 1,000 rpm would be nice but that is when you probably start breaking things. So far the engine has been very reliable. I have one customer in the UK who has raced one of these engines with great success for four seasons. Another customer in Italy has done 16,000 km of track miles. I cut my teeth in 24 hour endurance so reliability is paramount. You could just rev the engine another 1,000 rpm and see what happens. When I have asked my customers if they wanted to rev the engine more and that they would foot the bill if it all went wrong they haven't been keen to do this. I don't blame them. That extra 1,000 rpm could be what kills what has been a very reliable engine spec. So I'm awake in bed and thinking. The ports are fine. They are not overly large and the 54mm throttle bodies offer a restriction to the flow. Even bigger bodies would work on these heads but that would raise the point of max bhp even higher. I've even thought of making the ports smaller to match the throttle bodies and raise the gas velocity and get some more inertia supercharge effect. Everybody is going for huge CNC ports with low gas velocity and throttle bodies that are too small so why not try something different? The ports on the heads on my own engines are not as pretty as the ones I do for customers. I use what I call a RAF finish (rough as f**k). I did an RAF spec head for a customer and he complained even though his 2.3 engine in an Elise made 273bhp. Dave Walker says the same spec. engines always make another 10bhp in Caterhams. So not too shabby. The engine was one of a batch of low mileage units I had imported from the States in the early days. It had been run so there was carbon in the ports. I didn't bother porting some bits that didn't need doing so some parts of the ports were clean and others still caked with carbon. It was one of the early, lower flow heads. The job was so cheap and had so little money in it that I left the inlet ports unfinished. I'd gone in with a rotary burr and left it at that. Just couldn't be arsed to do a BS job on it. The complaint even made it into press in Walker's column. The customer was happy with the power but unhappy with the way the port looked. My attitude is who cares what the port looks like as long as it delivers the goods? Unfortunately the customer wants to see it looking nice. From my testing the rougher port performs as well if not better, but try selling that to the customer. If you want to get technical look up eddy flow and boundary layers. But the smaller rough port flies in the face of the big smooth port that everyone thinks they need. The other thing is that every engine capacity, power output and rpm will have a different valve size and porting specification. The same head on different capacity engines with different power outputs is a bit daft in my opinion. There is one guy I know who turns 2 litre Duratecs into short stroke 11,000 rpm engines who makes the ports smaller and a successful motorcycle tuner in the 600 Supersport class who does the same. Everything is in proportion. A big capacity engine needs bigger ports and valves than a smaller one. The cylinder head aspect aside the main problem is the revs. There are all sorts of things that can happen with an extra 1,000 rpm. The current clutch will explode, so new clutch and flywheel. The stock crank is not adequate in my opinion. It has some flaws that would not make it suitable for continued high speed use. OK for the odd sprint or track day maybe. Would I trust it to do a 24 hour endurance race at Spa where you are at maximum throttle for a long time lap after lap? No. So straight away you are looking at adding another 4 or 5 grand to the price. Who wants to pay it? Nobody in my opinion. Another reason to stop engine building. The steel cranks that you can buy off the shelf are also not to my liking. They haven't been properly thought out. Some crank manufacturers are great at making cranks within tolerance but not designing them. I employed a proper engine designer who also designed a Moto Guzzi crank for me in the 90's to design my 9,000 rpm 88mm 2.2 crank. He wasn't cheap but after a year of heavy use the crank looked like it hadn't even been in an engine. Bob Vince, also an engine designer from Holbay, saw the used crank on the bench and and asked if I was putting a new crank in it was that good. I've built a lot of these engines which means that I am also in the fortunate position that I got to see them again when they come in for re-builds or upgrades. The stock crank from an engine that has been raced is never in good shape. It's OK, but its main problem is that it flexes. It was also originally intended to have a dual mass flywheel so the counterbalancing is wrong as you could get away with less material as the whole assembly with its 14 kilo flywheel was effectively externally balanced. The fact that you can get away using the stock crank for quite high outputs and high rpm doesn't take away the fact that it is not really suitable. Again think 24 hour endurance rather than 60 second sprint. The stock Zetec crank is a much nicer crank in my opinion. But that was intended to run with a solid flywheel. The Duratec crank looks cheap in comparison. The fact that you can take it out of a 145bhp road engine and double the output and it stays in one piece is a testimonial to the metallurgy, not the design. I bought a bunch of blown up Duratec race engines at one point. The cranks that had survived were not in great nick. When the engines let go they do one of two things. Either the bottom end or the top end goes. If you can stop them doing that everything will be fine. With all this talk of supercharging it seems that my route is considered passe' so it looks like I will never get to build the engine I really want to. Hope my ramblings were not too boring.

Interesting about the undertray and your oil and coolant temperatures Chris. I never fitted an undertary to my car. Might give it a try. From around 2005 all my Duratec engines have run oversized water pump pulleys that I had made. Temperatures on my engines fitted with my pulleys will be different to ones without. The idea behind the pulley was mainly not to have cavitation problems at high rpm (the engines in a Mondeo will be revving less than in a Caterham) and reduce parasitic losses. Even for my my old Zetec I had smaller crank pulley made to slow both the water pump and alternator. My own 260 bhp 2 litre Duratec warms up quite quickly on the coolant side but needs around 6 miles to get the oil at a temperature where I can start revving the engine. It runs a still under development wet sump and no oil cooler. The temperatures are fine once I am under way. Even on my own rare visits to the track I have not had any temperature problems. More spirited drivers would probably see different temperatures to me. I prefer not to run a Laminova on my own car due to expense, extra weight and complication. Having said that everyone should monitor their own oil and coolant temperatures and make their own mind up what is best for them. Not all engines are the same, run in the same ambient conditions or are driven in the same manner. One of the main problems I used to have was people sticking oil coolers on when they really didn't need one at all. Cold oil temperature worry me more than hot ones.

I agree.

Nice. A friend is the Birkin distributor for Australia. He reckons it has some nicer touches than the Caterham as standard. IRS springs to mind. He sent me some photos a few years back and I must say it looked quite good. Haven't seen a Birkin in the flesh though. From what I can gather it is probably the best alternative to a Caterham, especially for markets where Caterhams are prohibitively expensive. Much nicer than a Westfield in looks for starters.

Both great engines. I had a Zetec before my 2 Duratecs. Zetec is great if you want an easy conversion from a Crossflow. I bought a Crossflow car specifically to do a Zetec conversion. 190-200bhp with cams and head work is quite easy to obtain. If you are happy with that sort of output then there is nothing wrong with a Zetec. To make more power you have to do the usual things like forged pistons, steel rods, bigger valves etc. The best I've seen from one of my Zetecs is 240bhp. A customer in Sweden has been racing this engine for several seasons. It has won some championships too. It was originally built for Mike Riley years ago and has changed hands three times since I built it. It and still going strong with the usual re-builds. It's a very strong engine. I lost interest in the Zetec when The Duratec came along. If you want more normally aspirated power in a more modern engine with a nice head with large valves as standard then the Duratec makes more sense. On the downside it is a much more expensive conversion. Big N/A power is possible though. In 2005 I was invited to Cosworth by one of their engineers I was exchanging information on Duratecs with. Whilst there I had a look around some of their other engines. The WRC turbo engine was based around a Zetec rather than a Duratec. The cast iron block had been milled to lighten it and it was still putting up with the boost of the turbo. As I said it is very strong. I have heard of turbo Duratecs making 520bhp. A customer I sold a couple of engines to managed to coax 700bhp out his. But not for very long! If I hadn't got the Duratec bug I would still have the Zetec in my Seven. I had a lot of fun with the car with that engine in. Now I drive a Ford Focus with a Zetec engine in and a Caterham with a Duratec. As I said I like them both.

I also use Eneloops. Very good battery. They work better than any other brand I have tried. I use a Maha charger that takes up to eight cells and charges them individually.

Price now to include four brand new injectors, fuel rail and four coils (coil on plug type). Total value of around £400.00.

The plan was to fit this engine to my own car but I have decided to de-tune the engine I have currently got installed instead. The donor engine is based on a used low mileage unit and includes many new parts: Rods, pistons, rings, shells, ARP rod bolts, oil pump, steel flywheel, clutch etc. It has a crack tested and keyed crank, a dynamically balanced crank assembly, etc. It also has a mechanical chain tensioner, head work for 210 bhp, Raceline sump, DTEC 10 cams, single springs with steel top collars, etc. I'm basically using just the block, crank and head. Pretty much everything else is new. I have built dozens of these Raceco 210 engines for Caterhams, Westfields and Elises. My 210 spec engines usually make a little more bhp on the dyno. Graph of a fresh engine from Emerald's rolling road is here After running in another 5 or 6 bhp is normal. Ben Willis' engine, one of the first I built (and long before Caterham started fitting Duratecs), made 226 bhp after a year of use when it was re-tested on a dyno day at Emerald. 210 bhp is on the conservative side. I prefer to give a low figure. Anything over 210 is a bonus. It is similar to a factory fitted R400 engine but with a few more things done to it. I stopped building engines professionally almost 2 years ago. At today's prices I should be selling my engine for something in the region of £5,500. I'm asking £4,500.00. Any questions please ask.

Speak to Simon at Meteor. From the conversation I had with him he definitely knows his stuff and has more of a clue than most people who just suggest a brand of shocks and a spring rate. It's a lot more complicated than that.

"Lots of contrradicting theories on this subject including engaged thread length should be 1.5x the thread diameter. When did you ever see an M10 nut 15mm long?" That is more to do with bolts in blind holes Arnie. The amount of engaged thread required is also to do with the size and pitch of the bolt and whether it is in tension or in shear, what material it is going into, helicoils, etc. Carroll Smith covers the subject in Engineer to Win. here Something all the mechanics in the 24 Hour Endurance team I worked in in 1986 were expected to own and have read cover to cover.