My Lola T492 Race Car

[911hillclimber]

Mistake!
Wrong car, wrong forum!

[911hillclimber]

Changed my mind.
Might interest a few:

https://youtu.be/KFuZGAW7Eow

[richkaz]

Great looking hill climber. Thanks for sharing.
BTW what sort of power does the engine make and power / weight ratio ?

Richard

[911hillclimber]

247 bhp/220 lbft and the car is 530Kg me in it on the start line with both eyes closed..

[KS]

Very cool. When all this is over, look forward to taking a closer look sometime.

[cubist]

I know you've put up pics before but would be nice to see some more on this thread? Go on, you know you want to...

[911hillclimber]

Not sure it really qualifies for DDK apart from the interesting engine that Jonathan knows more about than me! He has driven this engine in another chassis way back, I can remember it well.
The car has a huge thread running on another forum (yes, I do visit other places bar DDK), 621,000 hits, 2000 odd posts over an 11 year period.

But, because we all need something to look at and think about (I've just done 5 hours straight in the garden/jungle) howsoever off-track I'll do a sprint through the car from start to finish and 'DDK' the content, another trip down memory lane.

I'll do it here as you suggest, we have a lot of non-old-Porsche content on here (happily).

I did the short video at the request of a hill climb forum, been ages since I did a YouTube download, oddly easy.

Keith: are you going to hillclimb that 914 then?

[911hillclimber]

Ok, here bit by bit is the time the Lola T492 has spent with me following 12 odd years hillclimbing the 911 and about 4 with my Subaru Impreza.

I needed a fresh challenge at that time, 2008, and wanted a real race car rather than a modified road car which , erroneously, I thought would be straight forward.
I didn't fancy a single seater, too bloody dangerous and too small to get in (although I'm not fat or too heavy) but don't like cramped spaces. Try sitting in a formula ford and you will understand.

Way way back at school I had a million pictures of Le Mans cars on my Tech Drg folder and especially the open sports racers, nowadays I can call them the Porsche 908 etc. I left school in '68.
Radicals sounded good, fast and small but a bike engine with no or weird reverse gear was out (I was told by Mrs Hillclimber as she does the pit duty).
Lots of others cropped up in mind but all expensive. I had a budget of about £20K for the whole car, the Impreza sold for £10K. My mate still has it.

The usual trip to the Race Retro show in the spring of 2008 I hoped was to be the inspiration, and it certainly was.

There was the Sports 2000 race series/club stand, and on it a red Lola T 492, 1978, all original and all very fit and healthy, and elevated on a 12" plinth it looked just fabulous. It stopped me/us dead in our tracks, this was it, I had found my 'type' of car. A chat with a very unfriendly chairman of the Club was not a good start as he looked firmly down on hill climbing as a sport, but another gent intervened and he was great, very real, a Lola specialist and turned out to be a major help to me.

It was his son's car, not for sale and he knew of none that were for sale in any condition!

I joined the Sports 2000 forum and begged for a suitable car, in need of total restoration but straight and true. Silence. Not one to give up on anything, I begged harder, and then out of the blue a month later I was contacted by the Accountant of several rock bands who had one, not standard, not complete, but a roller with a new body from the Lola moulds.

To get to the point I bought it less the Cossie turbo engine and the Hewland FT200 box (a BIG mistake) that was loosely in the car. Borrowed a trailer, some tie-downs and down to Epsom to get it a week later, it was my dream come true.
The car would hill climb in Sports Libre (anything goes) class, my fav class, a class for the unusual, the wacky racers. There are 2 sections, under 2 litres, over 2 litres, and I don't like small hillclimb engines. V8 seemed a good call.

Here are some pictures the day after I got it home, I'll carry on a bit later. (there is a lot to come..)

[KS]

I personally think this is one of the greatest cars to be a part of DDK, and you should be very proud of what you have, and what you've achieved with it. Keep going...

[jjeffries]

I just spent a good four-five minutes studying that front suspension/caliper/upright photo. John

[PeterK]

Cool

[andytat]

I love your Lola Graham, keep it coming please.

Cheers.

Andy

[911hillclimber]

Thank you all.

I needed to sort out what I had actually bought!
It is a Lola T 492, a Sports Racer design from Lola for the new formula introduced, several made cars for this series and still do. It was a design for the Clubman and had economy parts such as Cortina disc brakes and calipers, steering rack was an Escort Mk1 LHD turned upside down and the engine was a stock blue-printed Ford Pinto engine but fitted with an expensive Hewland Mk8 4 speed transaxle with inboard discs (Cortina again).
Suspension was all custom design, both fabricated and cast. Seating was for 1+a bit, I've seen 2 seats in one of these, but races single person. You lay in the car more than sit in it, and the seat is Lola design/made.
The 2 piece body was made of fibre glass and clipped with pip pins to the tub.

The alloy sheet tub has steel front suspension frame, a lot of sheet alum alloy and all riveted with purple aircraft rivets, almost no pop rivets to a sizable steel frame behind the driver with fuel tank inside it and welded to that the tube rear frame you can see in the pics above.

It had a good simple roll cage and cross bracing mostly bolted to this tub. Total weight about 420 Kg wet and 130 bhp ish so no rocket ship but when up to speed very nimble.

They made 110 of them in 77/78 with 3 major design changes, first 10 were with the radiator in the nose, then 47 were designed with the side radiators (weight into the middle of the car) and then to finish the rear frame tubes were enlarged to 1.25" x 3/4" from 1" square. This paragraph proved to be crucially important later on.

As you can see, the tub and car is very clean, but had several mods to the tub to make it wider (wider side pods) and lots of small pop rivet holes in line where other alloy sheet parts had been added and removed. The roll cage was brand new and powder coated, the steering rack was a full Titan race unit and the tub had a large foam-filled middle brace.

It had no chassis plate, but the seller gave me a new blank one that came from Lola. This HAD to be resolved, and is a very different story that I will detail at the end of this adventure.

The car in 2008 had huge Formula 3000 brakes, the Brembo's are endurance spec wide with 5/8" thick pads. Hubs are centre lock Ralt and the wheels magnesium Dymag 13" x 10" wide, huge for a hill climb car. Turning circle laughable.
Rear suspension turned out to be March F2 uprights, radius arms to suit the Hewland FT 200, the bigger brother to the Mk8 and nothing Lola about it. Rear wheels 13" x 14"....
Dampers all round are KONI aluminium with circuit spec coil springs, all very period proven practice, suspension travel about 3"!

The engines were dry sumped, so had a large tank for the oil and the fuel tank turned out to hold a huge 5 gallons and foam filled.

So, what to do?
I fancied a Rover V8, light, an easy 4 litres and compact, easy to dry sump (to get the engine low in the chassis) and relatively cheap. It would not fit in the rear frame but nothing other than a Pinto based engine would, so surgery was on the cards. Problem was the transaxle. The FT200 was v expensive, in-fact all Hewlands are! Found a big gearbox at Roy Lane's Techcraft for 5 K, hill climb spec.

This meant no reverse as the first gear needs to be double width to take the violent hill climb start so revers goes to make room inside. Custom adaptor plate 'bell-housing' and custom clutch. Just too much cost.
The same day I heard of a Porsche flat 6, 3.2 available from a man in south Wales that had a box changed over to mid engine. My ears pricked-up! A 'Lola-Porsche' sounded good!

I bought it all from Wales, never met the guy (a Doctor?) BUT it came with a flat cooling fan, tube headers and webers, alternator and an LSD. It was also known territory for me due to my 911 of course. What could be simpler? What a mistake this was in hindsight.
The engine was once in a Nomad sports racer, owned by one time Porsche Club Chairman Terry Davison who commissioned Krispin Manners to convert the car to this engine instead of a Ford V6.
Terry campaigned the car on the circuits, Stoic Racing, and it was this form that Jonathan Williamson raced at Prescott once.

The flat fan has it's own delightful story I think involving a pencil, a knapkin and 3 blokes with a few pints in a pub.

That has been a lot of words! I'll rest here and show a few pictures of the engine coming together with the chassis.

First mods to the rear frame:



Tub up-side down:



One of a 1,000,000 trial fits:



Getting closer:

[KS]

[cubist]

Beautiful. I'm a huge fan of this car/truck/sled. Keep it coming please...