Originally posted by Sharman
Peter
What were the small capacity alternatives in the early/ mid 50s in the UK. Everybody was struggling to find something suitable, which is why MG XP were used but when taken out to 1500 were fragile. I remember a very rapid little sports car built by somebody in Stockport (name escapes me) who used the engine out of his Q type MG (which was fairly recently auctioned I think) and called the car Cheetah. Ford didn't have anything, hence Elva heads, Standard Triumph nothing, Rootes well there was the Singer twin cam effort. Coventry-Climax were only just coming on stream. Every body was using pre-war based engines, Connaught, HWM you name it.
John
True enough - even the Bristol engine was a pre-war design.
Being early 50s both our Cooper sports cars had a limited choice of engines:
>1952 Cooper MG had a TC engine bored out to 1500 and became unreliable (as you said) - nowadays it is around 1350 which is a good compromise.
>1953 Cooper Zephyr had a 6 cylinder Zephyr engine which hopefully offers better power to weight than a Bristol engine, surprisingly few cars tried this engine.
Cooper built a Vauxhall engined sports car but that could also have been a pre-war engine?
And a 500 was fitted with Ford Consul engine & closed bodywork as a road car.
But by the second half of the 50s there were some alternatives appearing: as you say the Climaxes (my Elva has one); tuned/modified Ford sidevalves (not terribly exciting!) etc were starting to appear.
There were also big engine options by then - Jaguar, Aston, Bristol etc. but they were no doubt beyond the Lester budget (or chassis). Plus people like Alta were starting to produce racing engines.
If the owner is correct in saying it has a 1953 Riley engine it must be the postwar version of the 12/4, which was certainly available and possibly cheap but an unlikely racing engine (Riley tended to race the 9s & then the 6 cylinders, so not a lot of competition parts available).
John Treen built some highly developed Riley specials in the 50s, they tended to be 9 based, one of these engines might have appealed to Lester?
Something like the MG Q-type engine would have been a decent option, highly developed pre-war and the cars weren't terribly valuable post-war, that probably (and some lunacy) also explains the fitting of an ERA engine in a Morris OXford! Of course those types of engines could have been pretty unreliable, and were built for methanol etc!!