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North American Westfield Registry

The wheel is a big improvement and well worth the money. Although the leather quality isn’t up to the same standard as the Momo in the Porsche, it is more than adequate and the Alpha is about $50 less than a comparable Momo.

Modified & Recovered Dashboard -   The stock dash had to go.  The factory holes for mounting the speedometer and tachometer were rather far apart, and the exposed bolt heads made the dash look a little too homebrewed for my taste.  Since I wasn't looking for a massive project, I decided to take the easy way out and simply modify the existing dash rather than build a new one from scratch.  After stripping off the old covering and underlying foam to reveal the aluminum frame, I created a template that positioned the speedo, tach, and warning lights where I wanted them, and then transferred the measurements to a small piece of 0.025" thick aluminum that I bought at my local home improvement store.  I used spade drill bits to bore holes for the warning lights and steering column, and a Dremel fitted with a side-cutting bit to cut out the larger holes for the gauges.  I then cut out the section of the old frame that was exposed by these new holes and riveted the two pieces together. 

To eliminate the exposed bolt heads, I fitted the bolts to the bare aluminum frame, and attached low profile nuts with loctite on the underside to firmly secure them to the dash.  I then covered the top of the dash with new padding and leather, slipped the bolts into the scuttle holes and secured everything with nuts torqued a little more than finger tight (although the bolts were loctited to the dash, I didn't want to apply too much torque for fear of spinning them in place).  For more specifics and photos, please click here.

Cat Motorsport Quick Steering Rack -  There were two parts of this car that never seemed right to me: the steering and the gear shift.  In both cases, the rather leisurely speed of these items was out of character with the car’s otherwise hyper-quick nature.  

After a little research I decided to install the Cat Motorsport Quick Steering Rack.  With steering stops fitted, their unit has 2.25 turns lock-to-lock versus my car’s 2.8 turns.  The steering stops are little devices that limit how far the rack will turn the wheels.  This is done to prevent cars fitted with cycle fenders from fouling those items on the body work at full lock, of course the consequence of having such stops fitted is that they increase the car’s turning radius to something more inline with a GMC Suburban.  Since my car has the swept wings, I don’t need the stops and so I asked Cat to leave them off.  The absence of stops increases the turns lock-to-lock from 2.25 to 2.5.

The new steering is just about perfect.  Although steering effort is noticeably heavier, it is not excessive and it is offset by much quicker steering response and a turning radius that is more in line with a car that will fit inside a Suburban, rather than a Suburban itself.  Other than having to reset the toe, the swap was very easy and the folks at Cat were great to work with from this side of the pond.

Quaife Short Shift Kit - As I mentioned above, the stock gear shift just didn’t work for this car.  The Westfield is all about speed: hyper fast turn-in, short gearing that helps you launch hard from a stop, great brakes, high corning limits, etc.  Yet the gear shift had long, slow throws that were more at home in an SUV – and I hate SUVs.  I read that Quaife makes a quick shift for the Ford Type-9 gearbox that has an angled back gear lever specially designed for Caterhams (the angle affords more knuckle room between the front of the shift knob and the dash).  I figured that this would be a straight bolt-in on my car and would speed the shifts up a bit.  I was half right.  It turns out that the collar fitted to the bottom of the new shifter is too big to fit in the cutout on the Westfield’s gear lever platform.  I had my local machinist take about 1/8” of meat around the collar and then it bolted right in place.  Big difference!  The throws are definitely heavier, but they are so much shorter and quicker that they make this investment well worth the money.

Installation was pretty straight forward.  I mounted the unit in the passenger footwell and used the car's existing Crane XR700 eleconic ignition to feed the firing signal from the distributor to the MSD.  The new ignition produced a marginally improved idle and a big increase in performance at the top of the rev range.  Prior to the upgrade, there was no point in taking the engine past 6000 rpm.  Now however, the car pulls hard all the way to the 6500 rpm red line.

Starter -  The Pacific Northwest Historic Races are always a blast.  They don’t have the same turnout as the Monterey Historic Races, but the crowds are much smaller and the whole attitude is more laid back – probably a much closer approximation to the atmosphere that existed when these cars were originally raced.  On Saturday I met up with the president of the local Lotus Club and asked about joining.  I wasn’t sure how they would treat a Westfield, but he said that they were happy to take my money.  He added that if I brought the car on Sunday I could park in the corral and join them for the parade laps.  Cool! 

The next morning I went out to the garage to start up the Westfield for the drive to SIR but when I turned the key, only the starter spun, not the engine.  Uh oh…  The starter looked very easy to access, so I grabbed some wrenches and removed it for a closer look.  It turned out that the pinion spring had broken into a bunch of little pieces and spread itself throughout the bellhousing.  Since the inertia starter is known for premature disengagement (boy there a lot of good jokes there…) I felt this was a good opportunity to exorcise another bit of Lucas engineering from the x-flow and replace the inertia starter with a proper, modern unit.  So I gave the good folks at Dave Bean Engineering a call and ordered their bolt-in gear reduction starter.  The bolt-in part of their description was accurate, but the positive cable post only had about 1/8” of clearance from the sump.  I took the pragmatic view and decided that the starter would only rotate and ground the starter against the sump if there was an even bigger problem, so I coated the expose post with liquid electrician’s tape just to be safe and put it in place. 

The new starter worked great…for one month, and then it died.  Dave Bean cross-shipped a new one without any hassles (I do love these guys) and the new one has been in place without a problem ever since.

Electric Cooling Fan- When the weather warms up, and Seattle traffic rears its ugly head, the Westfield begins to run a little warm, so I decided to replace the stock cooling fan with a more powerful unit.  Unfortunately the chassis gets in the way of installing a larger than stock puller fan, so I had to switch to a pusher fan fitted to the front of the radiator.  I did a little research and found a unit that pushes 1650 cfm, which is a lot for a 12” fan. 

TRW 6-Point Harnesses -  The car came fitted with Willans 4-point harnesses.   Now many people feel that 4-point harnesses are a big improvement over the typical street car’s stock 3-point system, but I disagree.  The first time I used a set of 4-points was during my inaugural ride in the Westfield back in ’97.  As I tightened up the shoulder belts, I noticed that the resulting upward force applied to them caused the  lap belts to rise up off my lap and position themselves over my stomach, and consequently in the vicinity of my vital organs.  Although properly tightening the lap belts first would have prevented them from riding up so much in this situation, it did get me wondering what would happen in an accident.  Would the forces involved when the body is thrown against the shoulder harnesses be enough to pull the lap belts into that same dangerous position?  Now in a traditional 3-point system, an upward force on the shoulder belt actually pulls the lap portion of the belt tighter down and tightens it against your pelvis.  Fortunately I had another option in the more race oriented 5 & 6-point harnesses.  These safety devices use one (5-point) or two (6-point) crotch straps to keep the lap belts properly positioned over your hips in an accident and so your vital organs are protected. 

After this ride, I did a little research and I came across a paper written by an Australian doctor that outlined this phenomenon in a more scientific, and much, much clearer fashion.  He had worked on a number of racers who had been in accidents and so had seen the effects of the 4-point versus the 5 or 6-point harnesses first hand.  He concluded that the 4-point harnesses were dangerous and should not be used.  I’m sure others will disagree (and they have on the WSSC boardroom), but for my money give me the added security of a sub belt or two.

AVO Shocks & Stiffer Springs - Spax shocks came fitted to the car, but with only 5,500 miles on them, they already felt worn out.  I had heard a lot of good things about AVO shocks -- and a lot of bad things about the stock Spax units --  so I gave Andy at Cat Motorsport a call and ordered a set of AVOs with new springs (F: 270lb, R:180lb.).  Installation was very simply, and the improvement was pronounced.  The car's handling was much better, more controlled, I could put power down in a corner a little earlier, and the ride was improved.  As an added benefit, the large external knob on each shock body make them a breeze to adjust.  On the downside, the polyurethane bushings are pretty noisy and have not responded well to anti-seize, but even with the squeaking these are a highly recommended upgrade.