Engine Punk

It probably won't be as sunny as it was on the 2015 LET I am just getting into the Christmas spirit. It's a time of year when you can connect with perfect strangers by simply wishing them a Merry Christmas. And then it'll be Happy New Year, which has always struck me as an odd cause for celebration as there's nothing to stop you celebrating the time at any point in the year (old or new). It's still a good excuse for a party. But then there's the Exeter Trial. I SAID AND THEN THERE'S THE EXETER TRIAL! Sorry - I'm getting  a bit shouty becasue the Candidi Provocatores are in the 2016 Exeter Trial and starters from Popham Airfield are not bringing up the rear this year - we're running towards the front of the pack for cars at Number 109 so your brave boys Binky and Ginger will be pretending we're flying a Messerschmidt. It'll be interesting to see if the sections are easier or more difficult than they were running as tail-end-Charlie...

The Raven 4WD in action I was strolling nonchalantly round the paddock at Wiscombe the other day... No that's not right. Let's start again. I was running round the paddock at Wiscombe in an over-stimulated state of febrile excitement caused by all the amazing rolling sculpture when something stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a Hillman Imp gearbox. Not only that, it was upside down and attached to some wheels. This could mean only one thing - it must be in some sort of mid-engine device. As my senses struggled to take in what they were seeing, I realised it was connected to no Hillman Imp engine This was no Vixen ! Instead, there was a crossflow Ford running twin 40s. Then things started to get really weird. There was an extra alloy case on the back of the imp box that ran to the nearside and sprouted a shaft that ran forward. My mate Pete Low was quicker on the uptake than I was. "It's got four wheel drive," he said. "Look, it says so on...

Our nighbour in the camping area this year was the supercharged Rawson Riley As usual I went to the VSCC hillclimb at Wiscome Park this year. I met up with my old mate Pete Low (he who constructed the Super Vee ) and we made a weekend of it. The weather was wet but still better than last year when there were rumours of the meeting being cancelled - although nobody really took these seriously. Besides the cool, dense air enhances power and the track soon dried out. In fact I even manged to get surnburnt on the Saturday. Slippy slider in the wetty gripper as Mr Stanley Unwin might say As usual, the paddock was bursting with interesting stuff on 2,3 and 4 wheels. The sun shines on Miss Bacfire I could stand and stare at the constructional details of Formula 3 500s all day, it seems. It's always good to see RIP An old favourite is RIP or the RIP special. Described nowadays as a four wheeled Morgan, it's going better than ever and Charlie Martin's derrin...

Vote for me! Thanks everyone for your messages of congratulation on my re-election as MP for Harrow East. I will admit to being a little surprised but am encouraged to think that I’ve been doing something right recently – although, on reflection perhaps I should say, instead of "right", the ethically proper thing to do. However, I am saddened to see my views so mis-represented in the press, the TV and other anti-social media. My views on gay marriage have been completely mis-represented . Let’s be quite clear – I am in favour of it. As a heterosexual man, I see marriage in the cultural and historically British sense as being a field of open and underhand conflict in which one spouse stops the other from doing the things they like. See how marriage is depicted in the media, the language on the street and moaned about in the workplace. Let’s face it – marriage needs reforming. Two people, who genuinely harbour affection for each other, should enable and support t...

People are complaining about it already but it's a cracking film. I saw it Plymuff on Thursday nite and although there wasn't much a sense of occasion (nobody dressed up for instance) it was a very impressive film. Too many people will pick holes in it.  I could mention the the seven foot bloke pulling a supercharger off an engine with his bare hands but I won't.  The whole point is to revel in stuff and enjoy it, so I do. Mad Max Fury Road makes it easy. Great cars, great bikes, great stunts, a good story and action all the way. Mad Max has had its imitators before but this latest incarnation (see what I did there?) will surely spawn a who lot more. Got see it! It's got the last of the V8 Interceptors in it.

Looks quite innocent don't it? Many people remember the turbocharged 2CV that Car magazine featured back in the eighties. It famously caught fire but showed what could be achieved in squeezing out more power from these little engines. This supercharged 2CV6 belongs to Alan Mills and although he didn't build it, he's still developing it. The exhaust note was a bit of a give away. It had a much harder edge to it and the ends of the pipes looked like blow-off valves. Behind the standard headlamp bar is the cover for the belt drive to the supercharger. You can just see the little blower under the carb. Those are tool boxes either side of the wheel to maximise traction and that front bumper is a roll of lead. The supercharger fits on top of the engine and is driven by a belt behind the standard cooling fan. It's a shortened Roots blower and sits under a down draught carb. Not a great shot but we were about to climb Crackington on the 2015 LET The clever ...

Stephen Bailey's MG Midge during tea and cake after his successful ascent of Sutcombe Hill A Midge was a kit car you built from plans available back in the eighties. More of a self-build affair, some parts were purchasable to ease the construction process. Most were based on Triumph Herald chassis, which made the process of construction fairly easy especially if you had a vintage style radiator shell to hand. Stephen Bailey built a Midge but then felt he could build another one specifically for trials. Instead of a Herald he managed to find a pre-war MG chassis and used most of that as the basis for his Class 8 trials special. hardly anything else MG went into. The running gear is mostly Ford with a 1620cc Kent engine. This has a single SU on quite a long inlet tract for torque, hence that round thing on the bonnet. I think he used Triumph uprights I asked him how he'd registered it and he said he'd built such a long time ago the DVLA trusted anyone who was bui...

For us the course closing car was never far away So Binky and I couldn’t manage to repeat our performance from last year but we still had a great event. It was a difficult trial and by the time we got to the sections the already wet conditions had been churned up quite badly. There were a couple of hills that we cleaned that were so difficult we were euphorically elated when we cleared them. And those feelings lasted for a long time afterwards. Having replaced all the joints in the steering linkage and also the central idler bearing by the time of this year’s Exeter , Rob recently had the toe-in re-adjusted and now rates the steering as good instead of vague. His regular car is an MX-5 so he has a good benchmark. Backalong, the MCC used to swap the order of starts around – the others being Cirencester and Plusha Services in Cornwall - but since 2013 Popham has always been the latest starting point. On the Exeter 2015, we thought this affected our performance. T...

Following on from our "outstanding failure" on the Exeter and Silver-that-would've-been-a-Gold-had-we-not-muffed-up-a-special-test in last year's Lands End (but we've put that behind us now), Binky and I have high hopes for the 2015 Land's End Trial. The only thing is, we're right at the back of the pack so may be renewing our acquaintance with the course closing car. The sections on the Exeter were said to have deteriorated significantly by the time we got to them but for this event I'm hoping that pervious entrants will have laid a sticky layer of rubber just where we need to find any grip. Binks hasn't had to much to the Allard since our last outing so I'm looking forward to this year's Easter motorsport extravaganza. We aren't really in it for the pot hunting, just for the crack. However, at Candidi Provacatores our policy is one of continuous improvement. Attitudes may change if we find we're getting up the hills a...

You may well stare in wonder Pete - you're looking at the interesting side Pete Low and I spotted this little beauty in the paddock at Wiscombe Park hillclimb in 2014. There was no-one to ask when I spotted it and I've been trying to find out more about since then but to no avail. Regular readers of Engine Punk may remember the Imp-powered Vixen single seater that sent me into raptures some time ago so it was inevitable that I should be drawn to the site of an upside down Imp gearbox again. It's just a Hillman Imp gearbox, there's nothing to see here, move along now The vehicle in question was clearly labelled a Raven but despite being pretty well up on Imp lore this didn't ring any bells with me. The inverted Imp gearbox enables the mid-engined layout and is often used with Imp engines as in the Vixen. But the Raven had a 1600 Ford crossflow lump in it - so it must be quite a well-built box, then, with an engine almost twice the size of yer ordinary Imp....