7000 cc V8 Chevy from one of the GREAT UK engine engineers of our time. Dick Langford’s - Langford Performance Engineering & the Nichols N1a V8, the gentlest sweetest blazing powerhouse motor ...
THERE IS NO OTHER WAY
This is the material of best sellers. Books will always be recording Britain’s amazing record as THE WORLD CENTRE for the highest performing internal combustion engines.
In the world of highest motor racing performances, the UK has very much been at the epicenter as a winning world centre for motor sports. Certainly since the dark days of the terrible WW2, where the UK had to spawn a flood of airfields to serve the Nation’s defenses, come the end of the war, war-honed specialist engineers & aerodynamicists played on those airfield perimeter roads. Motor Racing being the sport that it is (there is only one winner, twenty or so losers. So why are you doing it?), the UK’s competiveness lay in a pretty intense place as the sport once more blossomed into something more commercial.
One particularly sharp group surrounded the genius of Colin Chapman who together with Keith Duckworth & Mike Costin in the 1960s, persuaded the visionaries at Ford UK that to catch this commercial wave of sport-associated sales successes for their waning marque - they needed to invest in a Formula One Grand Prix winning motor. This they did and did it in Northamptonshire where naturally a few good engineers were drawn into to support Cosworth’s main Formula One DFV thrust for the likes of World Champions Jim Clark & Graham Hill.
Dick Langford was one such engineer who developed the meticulous facilities where race engines could be stripped, improved, updated, dyno tested to the extreme, & reproduced to order, but spread his interests where the sport did take him; outside his main & parallel Ford DFV derivation path. For his and his highly skilled craftsmen, attention to detail is ‘off-the-clock’ meticulous and bound only by solid engineering experiences of the highest order. As it happened, the US engine markets we similarly blossoming on the back of their love of drag racing where brutal big-engined explosive horsepower was paramount. Most of their huge road car manufacturers at one time or another dabbled with the engine tuning game largely because if they didn’t, their owners would!
We’ve already outlined the birth and progress of the fabulous American Can-Am racing scene elsewhere, a province which arguably became became dominated by General Motors Chevrolet. The sheer size of market, with racing refining reliability and ultimate power, meant that big horsepower V8 soon developed well and so as the original McLaren M1a path led to this day, to the fabulous Chevrolet LR3 ‘small block’ series. This motor & it’s many derivations provided the basics upon which skilled engineers could develop bore liners, pistons and conrods, the motor internals, match them with fuel injection and cylinder head reworkings that produces a simple unstressed motor providing monumental power but in an unbelievably smooth & docile manner, the equal to many and better than most, of the latest multi-cylinder supercar engines.
Langford Performance oversee the exquisite detail build and the end result is dyno tested, calibrated to perfection. If for many of us the royalty of this Nichols project lies with the chassis and aerodynamics of the N1a, then we do not overlook the amazing contribution that this amazing motor does also bring. To own one of these motors so rare & unique as priceless jewelry indeed.
For the full story, together with the fabulous list of success and services available, please refer to Langford Performance Engines.