Hi Danny, following is Peter’s answer to your question about our project:
“Clive and I have been mates since we were at Uni studying engineering while working for Triumph and Chrysler respectively. I decided that my career would best be served in mining and have lived on four continents, five countries and quite a few houses until I finally found time to make some interesting cars. I emphasise “make” rather than “rebuild”. First project car was to take 50kg of bent, broken and rusted crash remnants of a 1959 S1 Lotus 7 chassis from Rhodesia and create a chrome moly new build. That project came with a rare Coventry Climax FWB engine where a blow up 30 years earlier had ventilated the block. So new billet crank, rods, pistons and cams were made and a large part of the crankcase repair parts were fabricated. That car was sold to Mike Brotherwood who is the British S1 Lotus 7 guru.
Next project was to build a 100% new build all aluminium lightweight E type Roadster. Classic Jaguar in Sussex made a new all aluminium body, bonnet, chassis Monocoque and Crosthwaite and Gardiner supplied a brand new 3.8 all aluminium FIA spec engine to 1964 specs. It was assembled and painted by Concourse Sportscars in New South Wales. A lovely car, which I had dreamed of building for 30 years and became everything I wanted. It was a toolroom perfect car with sufficient original parts and identity to be an almost exact sister to the Briggs Cunningham lightweight le Mans E types. At 1050kg and 340 BHP, it was very quick, surprised a number of modern Loti, Ferraris and Porsches while having huge character. Track days were great and fast. One problem. It was too pretty and perfect to use! A stone chip would be more than annoying. So the next project took us in a different direction. Still an E type, an S1 coupe was chosen…and then cut to pieces to allow a very much stronger structure to be created, mostly invisible under the skin. Box section RHS side anti intrusion bars were created inside the sills (quadrupled the section modulus for an 8kg weight penalty), a roll hoop was added and triangulated forward to the now far stronger sills and rearward to the additional chassis rails at the rear, which safely protect the bag tank fuel safety cell. Having previously had a bad day with a fire after a chopper crash, I’ve become fussy about fuel safety cells! Next we carried out an FEA analysis of the front frame assembly and discovered that about 12kg of repositioned chrome moly aircraft tubing increases the torsional stiffness several fold. Bigger AP Racing brakes, a 6 speed Tremec gearbox and structural mods have been more than offset by the aluminium Jaguar AJ engine, Ali boot, bonnet, doors and ZF limited slip differential. The chassis will be put in a jig to ascertain final torsional stiffness values and is expected to come out 80kg lighter and 400% stiffer in torsion. 425 to 440 BHP is expected from the short stroke (84mm) large bore (99mm) modified Jaguar AJ engine. Flow bench testing has yielded 315 CFM but with the new 5 angle valve seats we’re hoping for a bit more. Why have we built this car? Very good question and please don’t tell my wife, but it’s as simple as this. We get far more satisfaction building this unusual car than going to a Porsche or Ferrari showroom. Both lovely cars of course. But in our engineering minds, not as satisfying as designing, engineering and building our own special car”.
