This isn't exactly my Rolling Road report, but here goes.

The car is a 1969 Mini (slightly modified), well Ok VERY modified

Basically the car was stripped to a bare shell and all of the rust cut out and replaced with new stuff, the rest of the original paint was removed and the whole car sprayed in Dove Grey (with an ivory roof) twin pack. The subframes were shot blasted and powder coated, fitted with hi-lo's and Spax adjustables, the drum brakes on the front were thrown away and a set of Cooper S items put in their place (new disks + caliper pistons). On the end of these were fitted a set of revolution 6 x 10 wheels, shod with Yokohama A008 tyres.

Next came the engine, a 1340 unit from Freeway Motorsport in the UK consisting of re-bored block, reground crank, 286 Cam, new shells, Cam Belt drive kit, Longman Head, 2.95 Diff and a std. gearbox (recently been overhauled after 25 years), Aldon Yellow Dizzy, inch and three quaters HIF6 Carb from a Metro, Maniflow LCB, RC40 twin box exhaust....... you get the idea..

Then came the interior, seats from a XR2 with the rears re-trimmed to suit and 4 point harnesses. New carpets, soundproofing and a works type dash completed it off nicely.

After the car had been on the road for about 2 months we took it to Santa Pod (a drag racing strip in the UK) for the 1995 Mini showdown and on it's first run it set the time to beat all day, the second run didn't even come close. In fact it was the outright class winner with the first run!

Since then the car has been on and off the road with some head gasket problems (now cured) and a little time to recondition the gearbox (it was the original after all) untill:-

September 1996, when it was taken to Circuit Motors, next to Castle Coombe motor circuit where is was placed onto the rollers and setup properly, this also gave us a chance to asses our own efforts at setting it up. First a general health check, plugs, points, dizzy cap, plug leads, tapptes, carb all checked to make sure they were all in good shape. Then a compression check 180psi, 160psi, 180psi, 180psi from Cylinders 1 to 4 respectivly, not too bad considering. Then onto the Bosch engine analyzer which confirmed that cylinder 2 was not running right, but it was not serious. Now came the fun bit, run up through the gears until you get into 3rd, and bring up the retardation force of the rollers untill full throttle just balances things out (engine in a steady stare), this was repeated at 1000 rpm intervals to about 4000 rpm just to check that all was Ok and the mixture was ok (Read from a CO meter). Another machanic then loostened the Distributer and with the car running at 3500rpm under full load (full throttle) the timing was adjusted until maximum pwoer was achieved, this in fact gave us another 5bhp! at 3500rpm. The engine was turned off, the dizzy locked and it's position marked with some white paint. The next run was to check the profile of the needle in the carb, and to make any changes needed to achieve the correct full load mixture throughout the rev range. As it turned uot the mixture was correct up to about 5500rpm where it weakened out enough to cause a slight missfire, but we decided to leave things as they were because the engine is normally only reved to 5000 rpm for very short times. I can say that is quite an intresting experiance being next to an engine running under full load, with the bonett off at 5500rpm - it's really noisy (and worrying).

In the end, if the figures for the bhp at the wheels were plotted and carried on to about 6500 rpm (if the mixture was improved) the car would be giving out 70 - 75 Bhp at the wheels, so allowing for about 25 percent transmission loss (prob. more in a mini) that gives about 100Bhp at the flywheel, which is quite respectable! It also proved to us that the was that we had set the engine up wasn't bad at all, and nothing was in danger of self destructing.

So, to anyone who has a modified Mini and feels that it isn't running right - GET IT DYNO TUNED, we did and it only cost us 70 UK Pounds for the privalage.

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