It all started in 1984..... (Roger Perry picture)
Roger had many interests, one of which was a passion for Lancia cars. At that time he had a Fulvia HS with the 1.6 engine. This was the car Fulvia took the world rally championship with and held it until they brought out the Stratos which was the ultimate hairy-chested rally car until ousted by the modern breed of lighter, more highly stressed four wheel drive cars. Roger had a Stratos and occasionally came up to see us in it. At the time I knew Roger there were only 19 Stratos’ in the country and Roger ran a club for the owners. It had a six cylinder Ferrari engine based on the Dino, Fiat had bought Lancia by this time and they owned Ferrari as well. The car was a beast, Roger occasionally used it as a road car for every day use and he had a lot of entertainment out of it. The only problem was that it wasn’t happy tooling about in thirty mile an hour limits, it came into its own when it got to over 100mph in third gear and then still had a lot up its sleeve!
Later in the year Roger rang me. He was organiser of the Stratos Owner’s Club in UK and they used to book Silverstone for a day once a year and go and play at being boy racers. As soon as he started to explain this I knew what he was after, “You’ve not got the engine back in the Stratos yet have you?” He said I’d hit the nail on the head. I knew the engine was out from my visit earlier in the year. Evidently the arthritis had flared up and Roger couldn’t manage. He asked whether I could go down and put it all back together for him. Of course I said yes, arranged to be away for a week and jumped in the Fulvia.
The Lancia Stratos.
When I got down to Gardiner’s Cottage Roger took me into the workshop and showed me the state of the wicket. The engine was, apart from the crankshaft being already installed in the crankcase, completely in bits! I looked at it and said “Oh dear!” or something like that. Roger gave me the workshop manual which was for the Ferrari Dino not the Lancia version, in addition it was in Italian!
Deep joy! I got my stuff into the house, had a cup of tea and a word with Annie and the kids, put my overalls on and went out to get started. Three days and about four hours of sleep later, I had the engine rebuilt and back in the car. There had been one or two glitches, the manual I had didn’t cover the distributor which was fitted to Roger’s engine and in the end I threw the manual away and timed it just as though it was a steam engine. I balanced the three twin choke carburettors as best I could and when we tried it it started first time! The nice thing was that just as it started, the phone rang and when Roger answered it it was his two mates in London who were doing exactly what I was doing, rebuilding the engine completely. I didn’t take a lot of notice what was going on until Roger gave me the phone and said “You’d better have a word with these two!” They were having the same problem that I had hit, the manual bore no resemblance to the engine when it came to fitting the distributor and timing it. I told them I had thrown the manual away and timed it exactly how I would time the steam admission valve on a steam engine, set the engine just before top dead centre on no. 1 cylinder and fit the distributor so it was just sending a spark at that time. It wasn’t quite as simple as this because the distributor had two sets of points, one set operated up to about 3000 rpm and the other set kicked in afterwards to give more advance. They took my advice and must have got it right, they were at Silverstone the following day.
Roger and Annie were due on the track the following morning so I worked all that night finishing it off and at about four in the morning took it out for a totally illegal, but immensely satisfying test run. I think I was doing about 100mph in third gear when I decided it would do! We loaded it on the trailer, the family went off to play at racing cars and I had a clean-up and a leisurely breakfast before driving home.