We organised a Lotus Europa meet at the weekend over on Pistonheads, and broke the world record for Europas in one place. Nine of us turned up

Anyway - we had gone to Hofmanns for a meet and to look around the Europa Race car that Chris Randall is running in the Lotus on Track series and the GT Cup series, it is a serious bit of kit, with a lot of the modifications being made available to customers in the near future, the full spec runs the Europa at 450BHP without major engine internal upgrades.

We also went to their Classic garage for a look around, sorry for the quality of the pictures, my flash was playing up....













In for a Cam belt change - engine out job.......










1000BHP anyone?








There were a lot of other cars in there that were under covers and we couldnt look at, but my favourite has to be the Group C car (closely followed by the Shelby)

Someone asked what the 0-100 time was, he replied 'about 2.5 - 3 seconds, but its the next 100 thats the interesting bit....'

Thanks to the guys at Hoffmans for letting us look around, and really looking forward to an easy 275BHP from the Europa with the new ECU

I even got prompted by the missus to ask when it would be available

Bigger version on my Picassa page here

 

That Hoffmans Europa is interesting (actually I've always been interested in the Europa, I feel it's always been very underrated).

A real supercar beater if they can get 300bhp+ without sacrificing reliability (and an absolute monster if closer to 400bhp).

I might be tempted back to Lotus (again)

 

The 275BHP figure is one that Chris quoted as just needing to replace the ECU with the Solaris ECU (used in LMP1 racing)

He is currently aiming for a 460 map at the next tuning, and has only had to swap the pistons so far from the stock engine - and these he went for the lighter VX ones.

The main performance increase comes from the fecking huge Garrett turbo he has in there

He reckons a road version could easily top 400 and be 'useable' as the ECU can handle multiple maps, so you can just knock it back to 250 if the conditions merit it.

This is what he does between LoT and GT at the moment, as he is limited to 250BHP in the LoT races

Get yourself down there Mark - Chris will happily show you round the car, and is a thoroughly nice bloke to talk to, very enthusiastic about all that he is doing, as it is his project, and he is designing it all.

He also races the Group C car, and is using as many principles from that as he can for the Europa