Photos from this week's stop at Craig Chima's

[Kitcat]

I stopped at Craig's shop this week to pick up the 4 nice Pannsport wheels I bought from him here on the Forum recently. As usual, he had some Great cars, including two jewel-like original Lotus 7's which he has restored and which he and a customer race. He and CarMan are headed to Mid-Ohio next weekend for some racing. He says the Lotuses weigh abt 965 lbs and make abt 170 hp on the dyno with their little 1500cc pre-crossflow engines. His yellow Caterham was there waiting installation of its BDP motor (2000cc, alloy block). And, just to show he is broad minded he was also working on a coupla racing MG's.

[Croc]

You know, I am just a sucker for garages filled with gorgeous cars. Friday afternoon, pop a beer and have chat on cars.

[craig chima]

Mike, thanks for your post and for stopping by. A couple of additional points of clarification based on the photos. The silver/red Lotus and silver/blue Lotus, are both original 1962 chassis, albeit with considerable restoration and reinforcement to the chassis for racing purposes. Both are vintage race cars, but they are actually prepared to different rule sets. The red car runs to a much more liberal rule set, allowing modified front suspension, separate anti roll bar, etc, whereas the blue car is required to run basically stock suspension (anti roll bar as part of the upper a-arm) throughout. Both are dry sumped pre-crossflow 1498's (1538cc with .040 overbore) making around 170-173 bhp on 112 leaded race fuel. Obviously, a great amount of time, expense, and literally thousands of dyno runs have allowed us to achieve these power figures. The black MG Midget is a customer car that is now on it's way to Texas via car transport service, and the red MG Midget is actually a rather significant car in that it won the SCCA Runoffs in 1978 and is still in nearly identical configuration today as when it won, making it a true "vintage" race car. Lastly, as Mike suggested, the yellow Caterham is my own street car that I purchased a couple of months ago but as of today have decided to reluctantly put up for sale and will be placing an ad in the "cars for sale" section shortly. A longtime friend of mine has just put his SCCA prepared Lotus 7 up for sale and I have the "bug" to go back and do SCCA racing in a "7" after a 10 year hiatus from Club racing and need to move that car quickly if I have any hope of coming up with the $$ to purchase the race car. A person can have only so many toys.