Big Bangers The first of the
The Elfin 400 was Australia’s first ‘big banger’ V8 Can-Am style sports car. Only four were made, and the Globe Products one today has been meticulously restored by current owner Mark Goldsmith. About the only thing that’s missing in this magnificent resto is that elusive Globe quad-cam Ford Windsor V8 engine.
It was at the Mallala circuit back in 1966 that Mark Goldsmith rst saw the Globe Products El n 400 Cobra. It was only the car’s second race appearance, but the sight and sound of the shiny new metallic aqua-blue Ford V8-powered sports car that day left a lasting impression on Goldsmith, then just 14 years old.
In his later teens he got into motorsport competition himself, in rallying (in a Datsun 1600 – but before he got his own car he ‘stole’ his mum’s Datsun and entered rallies in that!), and then in a Lotus Europa and Twin-Cam Escort hill climbing and in tarmac rallies, events like Targa Tasmania and Classic Adelaide.
Later in life he switched to historic racing, with a mid-‘70s El n 622 Formula 2 openwheeler – a car he would take overseas to New Zealand and a two-summer race season campaign in the UK and Europe.
It was at one of the Classic Adelaide events that Goldsmith got inspired to have a go at historic sports car racing.
“Someone had bought a Lola T70 out here for one of the Classic Adelaide events,” he says. “We saw it and went, ‘how good is that!’”
So he and old school mate Richard Nitschke decided to make enquires in the UK with a view to buying a classic 1965/66 Le Mans-style Lola T70 sports car – which they’d bring it back to Australia to share the driving in historic races.
That plan wavered, however, when they discovered the huge prices European owners of these classic 1960s sports cars were asking...
A Lola T70 was beyond their means. Instead, they opted for something more realistic, something a bit closer to home. After consulting with Bill Hemming, a former
El n company owner and the man behind the El n Heritage Centre, they started looking at old El n sports cars. Nitschke ended up buying an El n 300 sports racer while Goldsmith continued his search for the Australian equivalent of a big, fast mid-‘60s sports racing machine such as the Lola T70 – an El n 400.
He found one of the four 400 models El n had made down in Tasmania – and it just happened to be the very same El n 400 Cobra V8 which Goldsmith had seen racing at Mallala back in 1966.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a sports/racing car that was now nearly 50 years old, the El n in 2014 was no longer in the pristine condition as Goldsmith remembered it from his youth.
“It hadn’t raced for a very long while and it was in as-raced condition when I got it,” Goldsmith says. “I was expecting it to be a complete restoration, and it was.”
The previous owner, Launceston’s Bert Howard, had acquired the car in around 1980. He’d bought it off Max Thompson, who’d shunted it heavily at the Baskerville circuit when he went off track and hit a ag marshal compound. After Howard bought the car he sent the damaged chassis back to the El n factory in South Australia for repairs. El n founder/owner Garrie Cooper offered to also upgrade to car for Bert at this time.
Goldsmith’s full restoration was aimed at returning the car to its original 1966 trim. This wasn’t a simple process. With the passage of time, and as the various owners and the Elfin factory sought to upgrade the Elfin in a bid to keep it competitive, quite a few things had been changed on the car. The main alterations were the stiffening plate steel around the engine and the squared off side bodywork pontoons the car had when Goldsmith bought it.
Goldsmith contracted former Elfin fabricator Greg Mobbs to re-fashion the original-style rounded pontoons. It wasn’t a straightforward job. The side pontoons house the Elfin’s two fuel tanks – a 40-litre tank on the left and 28.5 litres on the driver’s side. The original tanks had been altered to fit inside the squared off pontoons. It wasn’t possible for them to be restored to original shape, so the tanks had to be remade from scratch to fit inside the ‘new’ original-style pontoons which Greg Mobbs had fabricated.
Most of the fibreglass bodywork on the car is new. As a measure of the high standard of workmanship at Elfin when these cars were made in the mid ‘60s, the fibreglass moulds for the bodies on the production Elfin 400s were taken directly off the prototype Elfin 400 bodywork – which was hand beaten in aluminium sheeting by master fabricator John Webb.
Working alongside Webb back in the mid-‘60s at the Elfin works was Ron Lambert. Some 50 years on, Lambert would inadvertently play a key role in this car’s restoration, as Goldsmith explains:
“Ron Lambert would take a camera with him to work to take pictures of his work. So we had all these detailed pictures of the chassis which Ron had taken as it was being built. He still had his exercise books with his sketches and machining notes for my car! This has been of major assistance to us, because it meant that we were able to remove all the modifications that had been made over the years and restore it properly to how it was. I engaged another ex-Elfin man, Graham Scott, to do this job and to install a FIA-compliant roll bar arrangement.
“But also, as were getting on with the project, I was working on it at K&A Motorsport and tapping into their vast experience, it became known within the motorsport community that the car was being restored, so many people started coming forward with information and photos – mechanics who’d worked on the car, people who remembered things or had taken photos. The amount of help, the support that I had from people in this way, was just fantastic.”
The restored car is powered by a conventional Ford 302 V8 rather than the unavailable Globe quad-cam version.
Ron Lambert would take a camera with him to work to take pictures of his work. So we had all these detailed pictures of the chassis which Ron had taken as it was being built. He still had his exercise books with his sketches and machining notes for my car!
It’s set up basically in the form of the original Cobra 289 engine that powered the car when it
rst raced, with 48IDA Webers and Cobra intake manifold. It’s the original early-series casting Cobra inlet manifold – Goldsmith says that when he rst got the car he hadn’t realised just how rare this piece of Shelby engineering history is.
In its current trim the 302 Windsor puts out about 420 horsepower (312kW), says Goldsmith, which is close to what it had when the car rst hit the track in 1966. The potential is there to extract signi cantly more than that, but Goldsmith is in no hurry to do so as the car is handful enough to drive as it is. One redeeming feature of the modest tune is that it has is a fairly at torque curve. With its comparatively short wheelbase, lack of aerodynamic aids (wings in sports cars and openwheelers were still a couple of years away in 1966) and an all-up weight of not much more than 700kg, this is a fast, powerful and demanding car to drive.
The cylinder heads are replacement periodspec heads which Goldsmith was able to source from aftermarket head and block manufacturer, World Products.
“They do Ford/Chev heads of whatever year or spec you want. They catalogue the period by part number – that gives you what head is correct, and it’s off the shelf. Pistons, rods and valve gear are all aftermarket.”
The engine and LG500 Hewland transmission were rebuilt by Dale Koennecke of the famed Adelaide-based K&A Engineering (makers of the Veskanda-Chev sportscar as well as many top Sports Sedans). Koennecke is also a former El n man.
The transmission presented some headaches. A 302 Windsor V8 mated to an LG500 Hewland transaxle was a rare drivetrain combination in 1960s and ‘70s sports and openwheeler racing, so a suitable bellhousing wasn’t something that