Firstly: I must say, one nice thing about being the Keeper of the Flickering
Flame (it's a Lucas flame) is that I get to see mail on its second time around,
in case I happened to miss it on its first. Today, for instance, one machine
named packard (at att?) decided it was time to send me about three weeks worth
of bounced mail because a particular user (khp) apparantly doesn't exist any
more. I got to read about abbotts and aardvarks and archery...all over again,
to the tune of 4000+ lines. Great fun.
I looked up a few 70X engine specs in G.R.'s Spitfire book. He says that for
the 1964 factory Spitfires, they were getting 98 hp for the LeMans cars, and
102 hp for the rally cars. The rally cars had more power because they used a
higher compression aluminum head, but Harry Webster was afraid they wouldn't
last for 24 hours driven flat out at LeMans. As it was, the '64 LeMans cars
hit 134 mph on the Mulsanne, with 1147 cc engines. Those engines used a cast
8-port cylinder head, twin dual-throat Webers (40DCOE's ?), and tuned exhaust
headers. For the '65 LeMans, they used 45DCOE's and wilder cams to get 109 hp
from the same 1147 cc engines, and were able to hit 140 mph. For the last
factory-supported Spitfire rally effort, they switched engines to the soon-to-
be-released 1293 cc, which in rally tune gave 117 hp. This meant they had to
run in Prototype Category, but they ran the '65 Alpine Rally that way and took
1st and 2nd Prototype overall (not based on a formula). He also gives some
specs for the 2000's. The rally versions of the 2000 produced about 150 hp,
and they did some development for a GT6R (racing version of the GT-6) to be a
replacement for the Spitfires for '66. This version, with fuel injection, if
I remember right, was producing about 175 hp. The program was cancelled when
the rules were changed that would have made all those cars illegal.
Jim Muller
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