Broken at The Bend

It’s fair to say that my Elfin Clubman is my pride and joy. I bough the bare frame in 1998 and spent three years building it up to a finished car doing as much of the work myself as I could.

For nearly 20 years I’ve done everything from car shows to Tarmac Rally and dragged it around the country from Grafton to Mt Gambier for hillclimbs.

It’s been through some tough times, crashed badly at Collingrove, destroyed an engine at Classic Adelaide and twice broken the diff. It also endured an ‘off’ at Classic Adelaide 2006 where we left the road and encountered a barb wired fence, 13 years later the scars are still visible (on the car).

But it’s also an incredibly enjoyable car, while not overly powerful the light weight and diminutive dimensions deliver a weekend sports car that will keep most exotics honest on a twisty hills road. It’s also helped me to a class record at Collingrove and plenty of trophies for the pool room.

So I was pretty excited to be able to join in with the 60th Anniversary of Elfin at the 2019 Mallala Historics meeting and then for a celebration dinner and track day at The Bend. The highlight was an all in Elfins only session at Mallala (a regularity session that I won!) with everything from the very first Streamliner on track with a Formula 5000. Awesome.

Unfortunately though during the track sessions at The Bend the little Elfin suddenly went off song and made a death rattle that brought the day to a premature end. I was hoping for a simple fix like a bent pushrod or broken rocker arm but a quick lift of the rocker cover showed no issues so clearly the problem was deeper and therefore more significant. I’m guessing a valve has kissed a piston or worse still, dropped a valve and made some real damage. The plug shows mechanical damage so it’s not going to be pleasant.

So the teardown starts and as soon as the manifolds are off there are metal fragments visible just sitting in the inlet port - this is bad news indeed.

Off with the head and the full extent of the damage is now clear, the head of #2 inlet valve has come clean off and punched right through the piston and then beaten hell out of the chamber for good measure.

So why? I don’t really know, the engine has always had oil pressure, doesn’t really do lots of miles and it’s really only a handful of years since this engine was fully rebuilt with new valves. But a weekend of racing at Mallala and then track sessions at The Bend is pretty hard on the car, especially at The Bend where the engine sees full throttle and high revs for long periods on the big open sections of track.

We can rebuild! Obviously there is a full rebuild required but it’s not yet clear if the block and head can be saved or are beyond repair. But one way or another the Elfin will be back….