5.4 L engined JBL

[Ant]

Hey Bevan

You are a good man, and Richards reply its a beaut! I have had several emails with Richard on chassis design, he gave me some advice quite a while ago, and its very hard to compere chassis unless you look at them for a start and then test them for torsional rigidity in the workshop and on the track for obvious reasons.

Your car handled well albeit a basic ladder frame of quite light 3x3, but it has been well sorted with huge horsepower and has the engine/transmission as a stressed member also other tubes from the rollbar mount etc supplement and add to stiffness.

The car you refer to was the first space frame Cobra built in NZ, and is very quick, I would have to view it to see if I consider the chassis to be like the JBL (all from pictures) Almac cars who built it did a great job, but looking at their basic unit and Graham Berry with all due respect to him is more of a hotrodder than a race chassis builder, but having said that Graham more than likely has produced a great chassis the old "Kiwi" way.

All that is just my opinion I like the Almac body it is very good compared to anything else I have seen here, most if not all of the other bodys in NZ are crap with the sides of the cars taper in going up from the valances on several - they are terrible. Also on CC body shapes were mentioned, but I think it would be hard to mount a different body than what each manufacturer designed it for!

I would say the JBL would be hard to beat as far as a chassis goes, especially with additional unsprung weight advantages and people in the advanced race game. Mind you Seftons old car is sorted and it would be hard to beat, it did an easy 1.32 lap of the Ruapuna circuit with more potential to knock another 3 seconds to equal good Transam times, the legendary late Possum Bourne gave him a hard time in his factory very large 500-600bhp Subaru rally car- spectacular stuff. Also as mentioned in an older post I am following the Boss JBL with interest, but dont know whether a BB is the right way to go for circuit use!


Thats my $10 worth of rambling