Finding the necessary pieces to rebuild the engine | Project Elva sports racer

Unlike some more common British cars out there, Coventry Climax stuff doesn’t come cheap or easy. No, we’re not talking Ferrari or Porsche prices, but we still shelled out about $8000 to get most of what we needed to build an engine and transmission for our Elva sports racer. And we had to involve several sources.

We found a correct FWA engine core at Michael’s Vintage Racing. Michael Clifford and his son, also named Michael, specialize in racing Elvas–yes, enough are out there to warrant a dedicated race shop–and proved invaluable resources for this project. While the block turned out to be in good condition, the head itself had been modified to make a larger-displacement engine and was not going to work for our application.

Our FWA block that we scored from Michael’s Vintage Racing is cleaned and rebuilding has begun.

We were lucky to run into Steve Sanett of Penta Motorsports. He loves these Coventry Climax engines and was willing to swap us even for an FWA head that hadn’t been modified. We also got the correct intake manifolds, distributor drive cam and performance water pump rebuild kit from him.

A forged FWA crank, improved Climax FWB connecting rods and ARP fasteners join new race bearings for our bottom end rebuild.

He also supplied us with beefier FWB rods fitted with ARP hardware, stronger Penta Motorsports-designed head studs, and a blueprinted, billet 34mm oil pump with correct offset pickup for the angled sports racer oil pan–this pump would provide more pressure than our 30mm pump.

Chris Tchorznicki from Sevens & Elans, Ltd., a friend from our Lotus Elan project, had the right oil pan for our chassis, one that would work with the engine’s 10-degree tilt. He also supplied a good, used, forged crank. These pieces represented another $1000 spent, but we were getting close. And we already had a new Lucas distributor that had been properly modified by Advanced Distributors.

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Comments
sir_mike
sir_mike Reader
5/5/22 6:05 p.m.

it's coming along.Adv. dist. is a great place for Lucas dist work.They did one for me.

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