Engine Punk

Just after this, it hammered down It's already been a couple of weeks since the Hillclimb at Werrington Park but that's the summer months and long evenings for you - it's been a packed programme this year and no mistake. I took a little time out from my experiments in the garage/studio/laboratory to check out the sport on Sunday and also ask competitors how to get started. When I arrived it was dry and almost sunny but by the end of the meeting the temperature plummeted and we had some heavy rain. A couple of cars on slicks had just started runs and proceeded very cautiously up the hill to derisive remarks from some youngsters near me but their dad explained it was better to pootle up the hill than go off and damage something expensive. A couple of spactators were in just jeans and tee shirts and by the middle of the afternoon they appeared to me to be suffering from hypothermia. Still by the time I got home, it was dry and sunny with sign of rain south of Upton Cro...

I was over Adrian Booth's the other day shooting the breeze over cylinder heads and he pulled this out of a pile of other interesting stuff. He had another - all shiny and ready to be fitted onto the short block - but that belonged to somebody else so in defference to Adrian's customer I didn't photograph that but snapped this work in progress instead. The finished article looked rather fine, though you'll just have to take my word for it. It's a down draft cylinder head for a Modified Anglia Engine also known as the MAE head. I'd never heard of this before but as Adrian explained some of its history a distant bell began to ring. And you just have to peer down the inlet ports in the top photo to see what straight path the inlet gases now have. Usually they'd have to negotiate a right-angle bend. Cosworth were the firm most closely associated with the MAE cylinder head but there were many other firms of these versions including Holbay. Ford and C...