26/08/2025
We thought we’d give a little snapshot of some of the interesting cars we’ve had on the rollers over the past few months, some more successful than others, in no particular order:
A fantastically finished TVR Cerbera with the flat plane crank AJP engine, although unfortunately this one was rather short lived! It came in for an ECU fit & map but after doing a quick ‘before’ power run on the factory management it started pouring white smoke out, a suspected head gasket failure👎.
Next is a little Alfa Romeo Giulia, it had visited us 18 months prior but made disappointing numbers due to having the VVT unit removed and the cams being left at standard timing. It came back to us once this was refitted and with a bit of wiring and a remap we’d picked up 30lbft across the entire rev range, probably the cheapest 40bhp he’ll ever get!
Then a Porsche 911 3.2 from with an ITB conversion courtesy of . This was one of those rare jobs where there were no problems and we could focus on getting a nice result without any dramas! An especially uncommon event for a Porsche😉.
Another well presented car was a MK2 Golf with the ever popular 1.8T swap. We ran into some potential issues with the actuator which limited the power it could make, but having spent all day chasing various other issues (note the darkness outside the workshop, this was in July!) we decided to leave it for another day. We still got around 240bhp which should be more than enough to enjoy over the summer.
And last but not least was a Ford Capri with the early 70’s style widebody kit, reminiscent of the old touring cars. Laying beneath is the 2.9 BOB engine, the 1.8T of the retro Ford world! Here we had another case of factory fitted parts being removed without the necessary modifications, in this case it was the variable inlet ‘VIS’ unit fitted to the BOB engines. These are crucial for top end power, without it you get a steep drop off in torque from around 4500 onwards and a horrible shaped curve, the owner wasn’t too bothered about peak power figures but we hope to gain another 15-20bhp upon it’s return with the valve refitted.
