Unique project from the US - Elite race car with a Chevy V8

[BrianK]

Hello All,

Years ago, I posted to this forum asking for advice on our project Elite.  Here's a recap of what's happened with it since.

Before I start, let me say that the V8 conversion (and the front-end uglification) was done in the 70s - decades before we purchased the car.  I know the car has shifted away from its roots and that Colin would not approve, but it was too far gone to restore, and a Lotus on a race track is far better than a Lotus rotting away in a garage, even if it's been Americanized.  

I should also state that we race in a series called "The 24 Hours of LeMons" - a low budget, endurance race series, where races are between 14 and 24 hours -- usually split across two days.  Participants in the series take pride in the fact that they don't take themselves very seriously. While the on-track racing is genuine, the off-track antics are very light-hearted and easy going.  Mazda (RX7 and Miata) and BMW (3 and 5 series) dominate the series in terms of marque, but you will see an occasional Citroen DS, Wartburg, Hudson, Wolseley, Bricklin, and, of course, Lotus Elite (all of which are extremely rare sights in the US) along with some truly horrible domestic cars - Rambler, Fairmont, Caprice, Pinto, Cimarron, etc. etc.

Brief history:
In 2003, Lotus announced it was bringing the Elise to the US, starting in MY2005.  I immediately put down a deposit.  I was not alone, and eventually found a group of friends who were in the same boat. Long story less long, about 6 years of dinners, drinks, karting and track days later, 6 of that group decided to start a 24 Hours of LeMons race team after finding a barely running e30 BMW (that's a 3 series from the 80's for those that don't speak BMW) on an internet site for $250US. We ran that car for a couple years and were consistently placing in the top 10 (out of 100+ cars/teams) when one of our team members decided to sell his refrigerator.

The person who came to purchase the fridge noticed my team member's Elise in the garage and muttered something about having a Lotus with a Corvette engine in his garage that hadn't run in years. My teammate's ears perked up and asked if it was for sale.  After weeks' worth of back-and-forth we owned a scab of a 1974 Elite with a 1977 Chevy 350 (presumably from a Corvette, based on block numbers and valve covers) attached to a Muncie 4 speed.  The rear diff was in the boot, the drive shaft was in the passenger's seat, the interior was in shambles, but otherwise, it was all there. Having lived its whole life in the Southern California desert, outside of a light dusting of surface rust, there wasn't a spec of rust to be seen.

Iteration 1: Minimal prep for race.  
This meant find a way to properly cage the car (not easy, as there is no metal for the A or B pillar stays), properly mount a seat, move the battery, remove the interior, find fitting wheels/tires, and properly cool a giant not-very-well-cooled american muscle car engine with the stock Lotus radiator.

Not trusting ourselves with the cage, we took the car to a rally car specialist who made us a beautiful cage. Months of prep later and we managed to take the green at our first race.  That race was on a very cold December day... and the car immediately and spectacularly failed.  We left a cloud of smoke that would have made James Bond envious, and our top speed was around 60mph.  Hours of wrenching later and the cloud was gone, but the top speed remained (this ended up being because of an ever-lengthening throttle cable).

Iteration 2: Brakes.  
By the next race, the engine was running fairly well (though our carburetor did not like to go around corners) so we had the speed, but we didn't have brakes.  We swapped out the front brakes for something from Wilwood, but the rears remained drums.  Even though we weren't great at stopping, we were *really* good at accelerating - much to the chagrin of the drive shafts, which eventually decided to part ways with the drums - even after moving up to grade 8 bolts.  The low gear ratio of the diff (top speed ~90mph, gearing limited) and low strength of the drive shafts meant that we needed another big fix.

Iteration 3: Jaguar XJS IRS.
We had spoken about it for a while, but the time had come to swap out the rear end for a number of reasons... to get away from the inboard drums (moving to inboard discs), to change gear ratio (the jag runs a 2.8:1), to add an LSD, and to increase the strength of the system.  We built some mounting brackets and modified the Lotus trailing arms in the shed, had the driveshaft lengthened, and mounted everything back up.  Much to our surprise, it fit fairly well, though the spring rates were completely wrong. After some fiddling, we got the car level and were able to run the car in anger.  Our new top speed is just under 130mph, the LSD allows us some power-on oversteer, and rear disc brakes meant we had effective rear brakes for the first time.  We added a brake bias for extra credit.

The car ran well, but with our new-found speed meant we were putting much higher loads on the brakes - especially the front.  We would get massive shudder under braking... hold-on-for-dear-life shuddering... shake-the-car-to-bits shuddering.  We found that all the extra weight of the iron-block Chevy was not doing good things to the front suspension - especially trunions/uprights and the sway bar mounts (as the sway bars locate the single-lower-arm front suspension).  We had 3 catastrophic failures in the front suspension - we broke three uprights, which we eventually replaced with Spyder parts,  and we kept wearing out the sway bar bushings. Replacing the bushings would temporarily fix the problem, but the fix didn't even last an entire race. We needed something better.

Iteration 4: Custom-built front suspension.
We realized that a lot of our issues with the front suspension were related to the shudder, and we realized that the shudder was due, in part, to the sway bars being overloaded by front-back motion under braking.  We needed a more stable locator for the lower suspension arm, so we made a lower a-arm, and designed it in such a way that we had camber and castor adjustment (this was possible thanks to a spacecraft engineer being on the team).  With the new suspension meant that we needed a different sway bar.  We found the right one after sampling several from a dismantler & settled on something from a big, American truck (no idea which one).  This ended up working out very well - completely fixing the shudder and came with the added benefit of more front camber - a necessary addition.

Things were going swimmingly. We were ironing out other little bugs and really getting the car to move.  We did a race at Laguna Seca and noticed that we were getting heavy oversteer on right turns and heavy understeer on left turns.  This didn't make much sense, so after the race we did some measuring.  The chassis, of course, is a center backbone with an arm that goes on either side of the engine. The suspension is also on that arm.  We found that one arm was 1.5" (~40mm) higher than the other.

Iteration 5: Chassis reinforcement. 
Back in the 70s when the V8 conversion was done, to accommodate the shift linkages, the fabricator simply cut out a large portion of the backbone. There was a giant hole, about 8" long, removing all the metal that is vertical.  In other words, 1" flare at the bottom was there, but then nothing until the horizontal piece at the top.  Lo and behold, the chassis bent right there.

We bought some lag bolts to strap the thing down to the concrete and were planning on winching it back into shape, but all it took was a couple hops on the arm, and it easily bent back into place. (scary).  We knew we needed to box in the front suspension, but access was difficult, so we made the nose removable (see last 2 pics below).  [As an aside, being able to remove the nose is the single best thing we've done to the car from a maintenance standpoint.] We then added bars from the roll cage's knee bar to the top of each shock tower, and then added some metal around the weakened chassis area.

Doing this not only improved the car from a safety standpoint, but it also transformed the handling.  Finally, for the first time, we have a car that handles nearly as well as the BMW we started with all those years ago.

...and that brings us up to today.  Our last race was last weekend.  We had yet another suspension failure (we keep finding and fixing weak spots in the suspension) and are dealing with some transmission issues.  Otherwise, several years in, the Elite is starting to feel like a race car.

If you're interested in following along, we post updates for both the BMW and the Lotus on our team Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/bteamracing/

You can see some of the cosmetic changes here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/churchofbk/sets/72157653489257030, and if you're really interested, there are several racing albums on my flickr account as well.

 

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Edited May 27, 2016 by BrianK

[soldave]

Great stuff! Really love things a bit different like this. Will have another read through later but looking forward to reading more about the car and its adventures

[oilmagnet477]

Fab story and (at least up to iteration 4!) shows how good the CC original was to get to 130 in standard guise. I appreciate you would have better acceleration but it really goes to show how difficult (and no doubt expensive) it is to improve on things from a given point.

Good luck - looks a lot of fun

[CharlieCroker]

Awesome, in some weird way I kinda like the overall look! I've come across this car several times in my web browsing but never knew thing about the car, nice to see and hear the history behind it, well done, happy racing!

[makkyh]

Just love it., Bravo

[mikeeech]

I like the look of the car and it's a great write up. Thanks for posting! The front end is clearly functional and as Colin Chapman would say "good engineering looks good!" And to me it looks good. You have an awesome car there which is clearly being improved by race performance and failure.