The Roaring Season

Kenz wrote:Comparing the two auto boxes, the installed version is enormous.
Must have been a huge weight penalty to drag around, as well as the slush box inefficiency.

The larger installed version has actual Auto Trans clutch packs & planetary gears IIRC, the other trans pictured uses dog engagement gears. The torque converter apparently was derived from a Ford falcon auto, probably to give a higher stall speed to match cam etc of engine. For scale purposes the final drive section is ~275mm long.

Jac Mac wrote:[color="#0000CD"]There were a few evolutions of the Auto Trans, two types in these pics. The one fitted in the car ( J- Car ) has Ron Fournier working on it.
I believe the people rebuilding the car Wal mentioned posted some pics some time ago on this site.[/color]

Comparing the two auto boxes, the installed version is enormous.
Must have been a huge weight penalty to drag around, as well as the slush box inefficiency.

[video=youtube;AquI49zoaAo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AquI49zoaAo[/video]

I guess this is Wall Wilmott. I clearly remember you working on the RF brake of Bruce's car at Pukekohe in practice. I thought how great it must be to sit in the car while 2 guys worked on it! there is a photo somewhere. Just saying.

Actually , for a car that raced as little as the G7A did , it got an incredible amount of press while it was being built and developed . It was on the cover of at least Road & Track and one other magazine . It got written up in Hot Rod just so they could discuss it's engine . It even appeared in Car Model Magazine as an article and a set of general layout drawings in case you wanted to attempt to model it .
During this period it was still known by it's original name , the "Calliope" . The car was intended to have some very exotic equipment as shown in the article a few posts back . The dihedral wing was only one of the oddities . It was the special engine that was called the Calliope and gave the car it's name . It was a pushrod design with three valves per cylinder operated by two camshafts , both mounted in the block above the crankshaft .
The design was doomed from the start by the weight of the honeycomb construction MK 4 chassis . Immensely strong and durable it was an excellent chassis for an endurance car but was way too heavy to make a good "sprint" racer . This tendency for the parts to be over-built and too heavy for a sprint racer , Can Am car extended to things like the suspension arms , uprights , etc . The more parts they hung on the car the worse off they were .
As Kar Kraft struggled to build and develop the chassis , Ford's engine department was having no luck getting the Calliope to produce the expected horsepower and live . I have never see an Official statement but Most believe the early test running of the car was done with an injected iron-blocked 427 much like Lothar Motschenbacher was running in his M6 and M12 . This was the engine that was in the car when it first went out to the Agapiou brothers . All the photos of the car running under it's own power with the original bodywork and trick wing including the commonly seen photo of it in a banked turn were accomplished without the Calliope engine .
when the car left Fore it had the rounded nose . The squared off nose was always credited as done by the Agapious . The photos of the car on the lawn are interesting as they may imply the car was given to them with two noses and they first used the rounded one . The car on the lawn does appear to have the conventional FE type 427 in it . I am not sure they ever ran that car with a Boss in it .

A buddy of mine sent me this link, one of the F3Ls, the wrecked Nurburgring car, is for sale here: http://www.prewarcar.com/postwarclassic/classifieds/ad63500.html

Thanks so much Wal, that would really be great if we could find out more.

I have sent a message off, and fingers crossed we may get some imput from England. Meanwhile I found a couple of photo's of Big Ed in action in Dave Friedman's excellent book 'McLaren Sports Racing cars'.
The bottom photo is captioned Bruce McLaren laps the X1 while Chris looks on.

I think it is to go back to 'Big Ed', but I will go through my mail and find the source and see if we can get him onboard to fill in the story, or at least his permission to use names.

I love that story Wal. Can-Am was typical of that sort of media showmanship.

So when you say "From the requests I have gotten there must have been not much left of the original", do you know what happened to the car in the years that followed? And the party that contacted you, are they returning it to "Big Ed" guise?

I have been contacted recently by a party who is supposedly well on the way to getting the car back to the track. From the requests I have gotten there must have been not much left of the original.
The work that we did - in conjunction with Ferguson R. & D. - was to evaluate the advantages, in case Jim was onto something. At the end of a fairly expensive exercise, it was decided that it was a dead end, and Jim himself gave up and went back to a more conventional transmission.
Jim did an amazing job of raising the hype. Before the body was raised on the 'Auto' cars a mechanic would worm his way under the car and padlock a bag over the transaxle. This was (like the 'Winged Keel' on the Australian yacht) enough to drive the media into a frenzy. There was absolutely nothing that could be learnt from seeing the outside of the box but it sure created some 'press'.

What ever happened to Big Ed?

Turned into a MkII convertible by Shelby and won Sebring 12 hours in 1966, supposedly broken up, but rumours emerge from time to time that the chassis still exists.

What ever happened to Big Ed?

Turned into a MkII convertible by Shelby and won Sebring 12 hours in 1966, supposedly broken up, but rumours emerge from time to time that the chassis still exists.

Thanks Wal, yes I'd heard that about the big car manufacturers, and Dan Gurney once said pretty well exactly the same thing when describing Chryslers efforts in the 1970 Trans-Am series. He said the various areas of the car were divided throughout the various divisions within Chrysler, so there was an engine division, a gearbox division, a rear-end division etc, and none of them communicated with each other, and every one of them was more interested in painting a glossy picture of their efforts than winning races. As he said, "you end up racing a camel with 16 humps".

What was the reason for developing the auto trans? Was it to speed up gear change times? I know Jim Hall used his to good effect, as it freed up his left foot so he could adjust the angle of downforce on his big rear flipper wing.

What ever happened to Big Ed?

I think that car was owned by Ian Cummings in Sydney then in NZ ?? but 1987 was in the parade at Silverstone GP up and running the Baker mk 4 with hillman minx brakes!!!! and corvette motor David Manton sent to the USA,I had a short ride in it ,lovely to look at but???

The tub of B.E. was aluminium to start with and the boys just got in and started hacking. Door hinges, whatever.
The trouble with Ford U.S. or U.K. doing anything 'In House' was the politics. Everyone on the corporate ladder was worried about their job, and failure of something that you had anything to do with gave your oponents amunition, so everything was over engineered.
If you had it done by an outside company then if it turned to custard you didn't get much splattered on your shoes.
I had forgotten the 'Auto transmission', the photo I posted before looks like (externally at least) a Hewland L.G. and we may well have done initial testing with that.
The 'Auto' was in reality no more than a torque convertor coupled to a 2 speed manual box. The same as we experimented with and Jim Hall used with some success.
The car would have to be put into 1st gear before the engine was started and then held on the brakes. It was then just let go the brakes and step on it, using a slight lift of the throttle to allow you to change gear.
We achieved quick times in practice, but the lag created by lifting off when racing another car would just kill corner speed.
The torque converor/fluid flywheel, and all the oil involved was quite a heavy spinning mass (mess on a couple of occasions).

Powder wrote:I think Gavin Bain had one of the cars in Christchurch for a while. I don't know if it ever ran while here. I think it was 'just' a trade-in on one of his cars, the 4.5lt Ferrari maybe?

Malcolm.

Yes, Gavin had one of these, that he got from the UK. I believe that they were too short and a nightmare to handle with the power. He had the car at the same place I had one of my cars in I think the 80's - getting some restoration done. I imagine he probably took it away from the place for the same reason I did - enough said - we both got taken. But I sat in it many times and it had a very nice feel. I am not sure that it saw the track here or not, but I was there in the Q as I had the real hots for it. Just took my fancy -small, British, a DFV, and rare and looked the part- had lots of switches also! Chris Read, Arrowtown.

Wow, these are wonderful photos Wal, thanks so much for posting them. I can only imagine the incredible collection of photos you must have!

What did they do to get weight out of Big Ed? Its my understanding much of the weight in a GT40 is within the main structure itself? I love how they came up with the nickname for it. Its great hearing these stories.

Steve, I found these among my collection. Taken during the construction stage of the car you refer to as the X1.
Bruce was offered the job of converting a GT40 into an open top sports car, and although he considered the project to be rather a waste of time and effort, took on the task 'for the money'.
We had to partition off the end of the workshop (as the project was 'secret') and Gary Knutson and Howden Ganley were given the task of trying to get some weight out of the structure and try to make it competitive.
The in house name for the car was 'Big Ed.' (as it was considered to be another 'Edsel' in Fords history) and the guys slaved away behind closed doors for what seemed like months. In the bottom 2 photo's Howden was playing the clown and 'driving' using a welding helmet as a visor.