Took the Mantis to the rolling road at John Noble Motorsport last week, as my birthday treat (to self!). My chum Garry came along to stop me getting bored, and so he could get his ‘top down’ fix (his MR2 roadster is being repaired after he lost the back end a couple of weeks ago)! There were a couple of Caterhams in the carpark when we got there, but they took the car straight onto the rolling road, and after one sneakyphoto by me, shut the doors because of the noise! I’d hoped to take a good few shots & maybe a short video clip, but no doubt I would just have got under their feet, so I contented myself with listening to the increasing roar of my exhaust (even through the shuttering!), then slunk off for a full English breakfast! Yum! An hour later we wandered back & they were finishing up. I was pleased to hear there was nothing wrong with the engine, power or fuel supply, and I had a very respectable power graph! Also 325BHP (vs Marcos quoted 352BHP; not sure if mine was measured at the wheels or flywheel – if the former then that matches manufacturer figures nicely). The chap who did the testing also mentioned that they normally saw 310BHP out of the Ford Mustang Cobra engine, so it was a good figure, which was nice to hear! I thought, may as well ask if there is anything obvious to do to the engine to beef things up, & got told that the next significant increase would be major engine work (so major money!), so any thoughts about tweaking things were instantly dismissed…

The dyno only took an hour so we set off back home late morning; Chatsworth was on the way back so we stopped off to take some pictures, despite the car looking a tad ‘well traveled’!

Also finally got round to taking the dash cover to a trimmers to get the leather replaced. The original leather has pulled off the front lip (from the heat of the sun I suppose), exposing the fibreglass, so hopefully the new leather will be attached more firmly. I’ll also remember to feed it & stop it from drying out, as it’s costing me about fifty quid