PART 4- FIRST UPGRADES

Now time to look at all the baggy parts. New shocks are easy, that part is simple in the extreme, but fitting some of the missing bushes is no fun at all. I hate doing lower wishbone bushes, hate it, they are always seized. If this car has been properly prepared, these can’t have been in more than maybe 5 years, and they’ll be poly, with stainless sleeves, so they can’t have corroded into one nasty mess, can they? Well, yes, because they weren’t done.

Weight removal from any car is best done as you go. The hours spent under a car working on it are when you spot the bits you realise it could do without. You just see things differently. This applies to a number of things in life, but I digress. A small pile of parts I deem un-necessary accumulate. An obsessive knowledge of the regulations helps here. So long as they don’t change the 2011 regs, which no-one had published yet.

Springs are 7 seasons old. Their height measurement speaks as to their degree of sag. New ones would seem appropriate. We seem to have accumulated 4 different sets, so we can have a play.

Rear brakes are curious. The lack of pads in there is the driver’s fault, but I’ve never seen these callipers before, they turn out to be old XJ40, with the small discs. Presumably what someone had lying around the workshop. They have to go, you can't seem to get race pads for them, and there's no wonder he'd gone through the rear pads so quickly if he was running road pads back there. Late XJ40 items replace them.

Calipers themselves could do with a decent service all round, one of the fronts is leaking all over the place just standing still, and fluid replacing. None of this SRF stuff, Millers 300+ for us via power4peanuts. Closer inspection of the front brakes reveals all 8 pistons to be scrap, it’s a full recon job. Front brake lines are Jaguar original, no braided hose here.

We are about where we thought we’d be now, bits to fix, not a car to build.

Front subframe is removed and completely stripped.

The camber and castor make no sense at all, the way that it has been achieved is very peculiar indeed. I didn’t know it was physically possible to fit 8 castor shims between top arms and ball joint.

Rack off, bottom pins out, and amazingly they do come out, we’re left with just the subframe and engine mounts. Even here there’s a problem, the engine mount towers on the subframe are loose. One has only one bolt left, and pivots happily. The other isn’t tight. By my calculations that left the engine anchored in place mostly by gravity.

New bolts and new engine mounts, the old ones are in trouble having had to restrain the gearbox as well.

Bottom arms poly bushed, subframe refitted. New front and rear subframe mounts, the fronts in poly, the rear as original. New original beats tired original every day of the week.

A check of the top arms, and bottom, we have previously found cars with them fitted to the wrong sides.

Front end reassembled. Brake callipers split, cleaned, reassembled, re-sealed, re-pistoned, painted and refitted.

Old front brakelines were original XJS. Discarded and replaced with braided items.

Brakelines themselves are all steel, but already run through the car, so we elect to leave well enough alone there. If it’s not broken…

Front anti roll bar gains new bushes. And just in time too. Droplinks gain poly bushes. It might be on standard roll bars, but they should now at least work as intended.

Front springs refitted. We have a choice of several, of varying height and rate. None are ideal, but we pick the closest to what we want, we just need to get the car on track to establish a baseline, we have no data yet.

Rack refitted, retaining the Bear's custom alloy bushes, and the front end is now done. It is a big step, a lot of the work we expected to do is in this assembly.

Back to the interior. Steering lock is attacked and disabled. Anyone racing with one in is a berk.

Extinguisher nozzles are resited and fixed with non-flammable jubilee clips!

Rear subframe then dropped off the car. The metalastic mounts are all replaced. I change my own every year. If it sounds like overkill, try removing one of yours, grip it in the vice, and waggle it. Then do the same with a new one. Now multiply that difference by about 2 tonnes.

Radius arms are upgraded, new front bushes with the air gaps arranged correctly this time. Spherical bearings and high-misalignment adaptors for the rear.

Once again, anti roll bar gains new bushes and droplinks gain poly. They were particularly baggy on the rear. But then so was my…nope, not going to say that.

Subframe inspected for cracks, loose or broken bolts. It is in half decent shape. Unusual in itself! Reassembled.

Refitted, and exhaust reassembled. One day I’ll remember to wear goggls for this part of the job.

What I would class as the most basic parts to this job are done, we now have a basic, sound class D car. Safety equipment fitted, and the fundamental, basic bits to  the very least of the cars on the grid are now fitted, ie fully poly bushed, the metalastics in good order, and brakes that work.

PART 5 soon - MORE UPGRADES!