Category: Cosworth

This 1929 Ford Model A Hides Rally Car Mods and a 9,000-RPM Cosworth Engine – James Gilboy @TheDrive

This 1929 Ford Model A Hides Rally Car Mods and a 9,000-RPM Cosworth Engine – James Gilboy @TheDrive

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eing an international-level pro racing driver isn’t half bad, as far as jobs go. Not just because it entails being paid to race, but also because it can involve traveling abroad, which sets the stage for the kinds of magical moments we rarely experience as adults. One such experience can be falling in love—not necessarily with a person, but sometimes an object; an artifact that can take you back to some of the most precious seconds of your life. And after racing Rally Argentina in 1993, one rally driver did just that after stumbling across a 1929 Ford Model A he couldn’t leave behind.

According to a post on Facebook page Apex Automotor, the unnamed driver had the Model A shipped to Finland, suggesting the car’s owner to be the only Finn to enter the rally, four-time WRC champion Juha Kankkunen. Kankkunen’s car or not, they sent the Ford to a Ferrari and vintage car specialist shop Makela Auto Tuning, which stripped the Ford down to its frame before performing a comprehensive restoration and partial modernization.

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Ask a Hemmings Editor: What gave the Chevy Vega engine its bad reputation? – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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The Chevrolet Vega represented a number of firsts when it burst onto the scene for the 1971 model year. It pioneered a number of product development processes at GM, it made use of new production methods and technologies, and it even introduced a novel means of rail shipment. It’s also widely seen as Chevrolet’s first major blunder from beginning to end, yet the main culprit that everybody points to as the cause of its failures certainly wasn’t the Vega’s only issue and may not have been its primary problem.
Earlier this week, reader Leif Ortegren asked us what exactly caused the Vega to get such a bad rap when new.

I wonder why the Vega motor was so unreliable. If memory serves, it had an aluminum block with coated cylinder walls. This was pretty new technology when introduced, but other cars (Porsche for one) used it successfully for years.

And in response, we heard a couple of the most oft-quoted causes for Vega engine failures: lack of a coolant recovery tank in the earliest models, and insufficient coating of the cylinder walls. Neither are wrong, but at the same time, neither answer fully encapsulates what went wrong with the L-13/L-11 overhead-camshaft 140-cu.in. four-cylinder engine. (For the purposes of this article, we’re not going to discuss the rust or other issues that contributed to the Vega’s reputation, just the engine.)

To begin with, while we’ve written in the past that engineer Jim Musser, who oversaw the Vega development program, also oversaw the development of the engine, that’s not entirely correct. Rather, the engine grew out of work General Motors had done on sleeveless aluminum engines going back to the Fifties and GM engineer Eudell Jacobsen had been working on an overhead-camshaft four-cylinder version since at least 1966, two years before GM Chairman James Roche announced that Chevrolet would have an answer to the import tide by 1970.

A one-off race car in street car clothing: Mercury’s 1980 Cosworth Capri – Kurt Ernst @Hemmings

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After a one-year absence, the Capri returned to Mercury dealers in 1979, this time as a badge-engineered Fox-body Ford Mustang. To promote the model’s sporty nature and highlight the performance potential of a four-cylinder engine, Mercury borrowed a page from Ford’s playbook, building a race car-inspired, Cosworth-powered show car. Never considered for production, just one 1980 Mercury Cosworth Capri was built, and on January 12, this unique piece of Ford history will cross the auction block, part of the Waterford Collection at Mecum’s 2019 Kissimmee, Florida, sale.

Read the rest of Kurt’s article here