ON THE BENCH AT THE BELLEVUE GARAGE

it is fairly generally known that at the extremely up-to-date Bellevue racing shop there is a Heenan and Froude test-bench, installed in a sound-proof fire-proof room, equipped with sound-absorbing roof, water-cooling from the mains and twin Burgess silencers under the floor. The last engine I saw on it was an M.G. unit used for testing the German-made Derbuel blower, which, by the way, is a very compact instrument which would easily smuggle alongside the cylinder block of such an engine. There is no doubt at all that anyone who tunes modern racingengines without a test-bed is working very much in the dark. Such equipment vastly simplifies fuel problems and enables the very best to be obtained from any engine. Wilkinson finds M.G. engines, for instance, very sensitive to ignition timing and varies the distributor setting by hand with the engine full bore on the bench, locking it when maximum output is registered. He tells me that temperature makes

a considerable difference to output and that if cold water is suddenly allowed to flow through an engine the full-bore output will fall by as much as 5 b.h.p. I believe the charge made for putting a client’s engine on the bench and adjusting to maximum efficiency within the limits of existing components is E,5, and that that includes horse-power readings before and after attention. Quite apart from racing, those drivers who seek trials honours should find such attention invaluable. Long runs on the test-bed show up weaknesses in racing-units without involving the blow-up that would occur if the engine was run on the track, where it is functioning unobserved beneath a bonnet. Incidentally, the -Heenan and Fronde equipment at the Bellevue stable has functioned faultlessly and it is ingeniously self-correcting for accuracy.