Group B Sex

The other day I went along to the Race Retro show at Stoneleigh. It's basically Autosport for the classic/historic racing crowd, and what follows is pretty picture-heavy.

It was a lovely day, made less lovely by the guy at the gate wanting 26 sodding quid to let me in, but immediately improved by the display of McLarens just inside the entrance. Look at that, from the days when the sponsors were incidental to the race car and the power adder and limiter rules weren't drawn from a hat before the season.

Now this really took me back - when I was a kid I was well into rallying, and my favourite driver was Tony Pond. I remember seeing him tonking about in a TR7 V8 like this in the late Seventies. My dad took me on a trip to Belgium to watch the Ypres Rally in 1981, a rally that Tony Pond won in one of these the year before. No such luck in 1981 - it was won by a sodding Ferrari, I think!

There was loads of old rally tackle floating about, some of it slightly less likely than others. This Rover Vitesse can't have been too handy on a forest stage, but it looked terrific.

Now these were mental - the 6R4, that surely owed bugger all to the Austin Metro they were based on. Mid-engined, insane, and worth a small fortune now.

Ah, talking of small fortunes, was there ever a more gorgeous rally special than the Lancia Stratos? I remember watching them on the RAC Rally in the Seventies where, somehow, they still got beaten by bloody Ford Escorts!

The Sunbeam Lotus... possibly the most non-descript hatchback in the world until Lotus started dicking about with it. What was the last little rear-drive hatch in production? The Sunbeam only managed to hang on until 1981, while the Chevette and the Starlet lasted to '84. Was there anything after that?

Of course there was one car that changed the whole damn game and rendered shonky little Escorts and Sunbeams obsolete almost overnight, and it was this fine piece of German engineering. Amazingly well-built, blisteringly fast and on the very cutting edge of the latest technology, it dominated the world. And parked in front of it is an Audi.

Another car that was surrounded by a reef of slightly sweaty men with tented trousers was this, marked up as having been driven by Jimmy McRae. Behind it is a Subaru, marked up as having been driven by  Colin McRae, a car from back when Subaru were best known for building those little rust-while-you-wait four-wheel drive pickups, rather than cars for people who think that even though everyone knows a flat-four sounds atrocious, they should fit an exhaust that amplifies it.

No matter how shiny and valuable the classic race machinery is, you can't beat a good old unfinished project to draw the crowds in. This old Wolseley 1500 was the classic rally project for some university.

I think it spoke a volume about me that, out of all these classic rally cars and race cars, the thing that really made me go 'wow' was a MkI Transit beavertail. I must have some gyppo blood in me somewhere.

Even so, this beauty was hiding a 2.9 fuel injected Cologne V6 and five-speed manual. He only lives just up the road from me, too. Never mind using it to haul a race car around; I'd be inclined to race the transporter!

This old sixpence-cab Austin was a treat, too.

Meanwhile, the 'Sheep In Wolf's Clothing' Mustang Pinto project continues apace. Well, 'bloody slow' is a pace, isn't it? It's all bolted in - using actual bolts, now, not just the tent pegs that have held the transmission crossmember in for a few weeks - and the PAS is plumbed in, the cooling is plumbed in, and the fuel lines are plumbed in. Just ... well, everything else to do now.

It's the NSCC Driver's Meeting this weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it, though I have so many bits of car and other stuff to bring along that I should probably have considered chartering a cargo aircraft. Or just buying that V6 Transit.

Eugene

Valentine's Day Massacre

Just a quick reminder for all the men out there (who, let's face it, are generally oblivious) - it's Valentine's Day on Friday.

That's when you're supposed to make a romantic gesture towards the woman in your life. That's the woman who lives in your house. Your house is the building next to the garage where the kettle and the clean clothes live. And apparently, farting in bed but then NOT holding her head under the duvet doesn't count as a romantic gesture.

For Valentine's Day, I've given the missus a Pinto. Now bearing in mind that, in some South American countries, a "pinto" is slang for a tiny penis (oddly enough, Ford's Seventies compact was renamed for sale south of the border), there's much mirth to be had there. even more laughable is the fact that the space in the '92 Mustang convertible that used to house a fuel injected 5.0 V8 now houses a carburetted 2.3-litre four-pot.

Even this wasn't easy, despite the fact that the subframe is the same for both motors so the Pinto engine mounts drop straight onto the slots in the subframe. In theory. First, I waited until it was dark and cold, because every major job should involve blundering round in the dark. Ford handily made the Fox Mustang with a bonnet that opens to 90-degrees, so you don't have to remove it to extract the engine. It's almost as if Ford knew that 20 years on they'd all have their engines whipped out and the rest scrapped. You can see the length of all-thread propping the bonnet open.

When I removed the Pinto from its previous accommodation, it was a rusty four-eyed 1980 model. I'd taken the bumper and nose-cone, so when it came time to remove the engine I just hacked off the slam panel and whipped the engine out in seconds. What I now found was that the aero Fox has a mighty front overhang, and the Pinto sits a long way back in the engine bay. When you're trying to push a loaded engine crane - a supposedly "long reach" engine crane - over gravel, the little release valve on the front of the ram has hit the bumper and scraped all the paint off long before the engine is anywhere near where it needs to be. To drop the engine onto its mounts, you need a jib at least 42" long. This one was 39". Blood-buggering arse-biscuits.

It got done, though, and the engine mounts just dropped into their slots in the subframe. Eventually... after an hour and a half of levering, swearing, jacking up, letting down, cursing, and manoeuvring that involved a scissor jack between the chassis leg and engine block at one point, while I informed the engine that it was, in fact, a bum-rutting bastard son of a mother-f**king bitch's bastard's whore, it dropped in.

I'd salvaged the entire engine-bay wiring loom all the way to the ignition switch from the donor car, but it seemed that though the '92 had had its engine loom and ECU removed, all the other systems were still wired in - the engine loom was stand-alone and separate from the main body loom. This was great, as it meant I just needed the handful of circuits used on a carbed Pinto. So I set about paring away all the no-longer-required circuits from the loom... a job easier said than done when you're trying to follow circuits in a Haynes manual that, frankly, lies so unashamedly that it should have been part of the Plebgate inquiry. In the end, approaching the end of my tether, I cut one last redundant wire and the remains fell into two parts - the charging and external voltage regulator bit and the ignition control box bit. I wired the alternator bit in (AFTER realising that I was going to have to relocate the battery to the other side of the engine bay), then mounted the ignition box and coil. This left me with half a dozen wires to connect to a factory connector on the bulkhead - oil pressure, water temperature, tacho, two ignition-fed lives and one that's live when you key the starter. Should be a piece of cake. Let's see.

In the meantime, I've taken delivery of this. It's another engine-less breaker, even though it looks rather handsome in its Eleanor silver. I only really wanted the PAS pump and the wheels. Even so, having dragged it home, removed the power steering pump, removed the pulley from my old pump (using the correct special tool, kindly loaned by one of the Fox Doctors), fitted the new pump to the Pinto bracket and driven the pulley onto the new pump, I'm still no further forward as the pipe union on the car is different again to the new pump! The one on the silver car crumbled like a little bitch at the mere sight of a spanner, but fortunately, Steve the Fox Doctor may have come to the rescue with a PAS pressure hose to suit.

Don't forget - Valentine's Day!

Eugene