LISTER XJ40
You think when you get to this point that it’s finished. It’s not. It’s all very well having painted everything, and fitted everything, but that’s not the same as having painted and fitted everything. Assembly of this car was declared complete at a little before midnight, the day before it was in action testing at Silverstone. When they say that work expands to fill all the time available for its completion, they are wrong. This took more.
Seat and belts in, after a final fitting of the tiny boy pilot.
Bear gets drilling. To be fair, this took ages. And many, many tiny bolts.
The screen guys leap into action. Well, leap is over-selling it. They're quick. Ish.
Unloaded at the secret rolling road facility, and the first time we've seen her in daylight. Not bad.
Odd wheels, as the rear has road tyres. Don't roller the sticky rubber.
Strapped down hard, and getting abused. The numbers were better.
When you get down to this sort of detail, you've about cracked it.
A David arrives, and we take the old girl off to the rolling road to get her running properly. The clutch clearly required further bleeding, but she moved, and that’s a start. The rollers produced some eye-opening numbers, the wiring problems deleted from the car allowed things to be taken to a new level, and she left with more power than ever before. How much? Ample. Coupled with 10% weight loss, the power to weight ratio has improved substantially.
Home, and still it’s not finished. It went to the rolling road as a beach buggy. There is much to do. The various pull cables for extinguisher and power have been fitted, secured, and tidied, the seat and belts go in for the final time after a final visit from the boy wonder to get his seating position correct.
The rear is a little different, that fits so tightly that you almost don’t need any bolts. The side reflector lenses are deleted, deemed too heavy and pointless. The rear foglights have gone, replaced by blue-painted mesh to allow some of that hot diff air out. A series of “speed holes” are also drilled.
We finally finished making the battery carrier, which came out very well in the end. Anchoring the battery to a frame that also holds the box and allows the lid to be separately strapped to the box was a challenge that caused us some head scratching, but in the end it proved remarkably simple, it just needed the correct quantity of wine to see it, and a welder to construct it. That is positively the last bit of welding I have to do on this car.
Headlight trims properly fitted, using the magic nylon wonder that are tie wraps. It sounds crude, but for some applications they are perfect. There’s no weight to the trims, they aren’t easy to fit the proper way with those little screws, and if you want one off in a hurry, a pair of side cutters will snip them out in seconds. That’s exactly the sort of thing you can use a tie wrap for. Don’t hold the seats in with them.
Tracking checked. Camber check, because the car is sitting taller with the weight off, proportionately she is now stiffer sprung. The front dampers are a joke, one doesn’t work at all, so they are swapped for his spares, a pair of standard XJR Bilsteins. They’re OK, but not really up to the job. Better will come later.
Stickers thrown on. Someone, mentioning no names, but someone who had only one job to do on this project, might have left ordering them to the last minute and isn’t going to get his livery in time. We use what we have in stock, and we don’t have all the JEC stickers, we don’t race there any more so you don’t accumulate surplus roundels etc. We can’t fit what we don’t have so the car is stickered up as a Classic Touring Car Racing Club machine. The BARC livery does suit it.
A thousand little last-second jobs stretch the job deep into the last night, but that to-do list shrinks fast. Bonnet and boot pins fitted, their mounting plates drilled and cut further, the panels are dragged out of the shed and are the last things fitted. It’s done. The grille stands high for reasons we cannot work out, but too late to worry about that, the car is on the way out of the door.
Part 16 - Pimp my Ride.
The fuel tank filler is finally anchored in place. The filler cover has a tiny fabric loop fitted to enable it to be opened, because these posh cars that have electric filler releases are a pain in the hole when you delete all the electrics.
Inlet ducting and filter finished at last, a giant dustbin of a filter to feed the monster. The airbox idea was abandoned, not necessary at this point. The old meshed hole in the intake elbow was closed with a small plate, I never liked that daft idea anyway, and now we’ve been able to tackle it properly it’s deleted.
They do take time to cut and fit, but less than it takes to strip and fit the necessary door catches and handles from old doors to new. Especially since the old doors and new have different apertures for the handles, and some fool filled the doors with all this foam that now has to be carefully cut away. In fairness, said fool knew this was coming.
4 working doors took time. The wings can now go on, and the front bumper fitted. As stupid as it sounds, there are very few hard mounting points for the bumper, it’s fitted such that a minor nudge will let the fibreglass move rather than break, the actual “bump” resistance comes from the bumper, not the decorative cover.
We made a lexan rear window. The method was crude, but effective, and involved only an angle grinder, with some deftness of application. Six large holes are cut in it, to prevent interior pressure popping it out at speed. Then sixty million little holes are drilled to fit it to the car with tiny socket head bolts and nyloc nuts. The window is laid in place with the rubber, then anchored with two pilot holes and bolts, then carefully drilled and squashed into place, one bolt at a time, the heads hidden behind the rubber, and then the whole thing hidden with the stainless trim. It took the Bear and I a lot of time.
The other decorative trim was slung at it, the screen guys came along to bond in the windscreen, and we suddenly have an XJ40 on our hands.
Officer David is actually partially made out of rollcage tubing. 100mph and on his laptop. Kids!
We started the project thinking we’d be welding up the floor pans, sandblasting her, seam-welding the shell and sending it off for a professional paintjob, then strap it back together, a wiring job, 6-8 weeks tops. 5 months later it turned out to be something different.
Off she rolls to Silverstone for her shakedown. Did the rebuild work? Well, the owner hoped to get a top-5 car out of this once the bugs had been erased, all we asked is for a solid platform to now tune over the coming seasons. She won the class, and set fastest lap, first time out, to come home 4th overall. I’d say it worked.
Finally bearing a full set of doors. Just a million hours of work to go.
When Bears attack! We might leave the lexan's cover sheet on. It'll make it less distracting.
Once hung, and brutalised, the doors have furniture to be fitted. Lexan windows were simple in the end, the doors lack their rubbers, so these slide into place, and then jammed into position with high-density foam rubber, the bottom edge of the window then riveted through the chrome trim to the fibreglass skin. This gives the window its curve and holds it robustly in place. Punching the window afterwards to test it might seem a strange test, but it needs to withstand worse than that on track.
Done.
Getting the walk-around polish inspection from a delighted Andrew Jeffery. Just before her first win.