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The Emery GTI brings sports car looks and
performance to the Imp
A roofline lowered three inches, together with a shallower windscreen and more steeply raked rear window, give the car a new, elegant, sporting look. There is still headroom for six-footers - special seats place driver and passengers closer to the floor, and give improved support for fasr motoring.
Above all, the Emery GTI is not expensive. The complete conversion of a standard Imp or Chamois costs £ 130.
A wide range of tuning equipment for even greater performance is available from Paul Emery Cras Ltd., which make the GTI a potential race-winner as well as an ultra-fast grand touring car. For competition use, special 850, 1000 or 1150 cc. engines may be specified.
In 1964 Paul Emery Cars prepared and tuned Imps to all shapes and sizes for road and competiton use, as well as marketing the GTI as a sort-of complete car.
The full range of Emery-tuned power units for the car covers five different capacities, and working on three different strokes:
There is also the standard capacity of 875 and a fourth capacity of 1,068 cc. To get the engines into these different sizes, the block casting is dealt with:
To produce a car to GTI specifications also involves lowering the roof-line by four inches, chopping metal out of pillars to achieve it. The seats are lowered to make more headroom. The headlining is hung on to, for economic reasons.
The front windscreen has three inches chopped off. (So an inch less than the total lowering job.) The rear window is retained, at an increased rake.
By late August 1965 testing had started on a prototype self locking differential. Should this be fitted, then an anti-roll bar could be fitted at the rear end, too. This prototype diff was made by Jack Knight, who did a series of close ratio gears for the Emery Imps.
There was a range of manifolds, carburettor set-ups, camshafts and so forth that was married up with any of the five capacities, decided by the customer's choice of engine tune. Tuning takes three forms, of which the first one is the choice in capacity.
The 850 cc engine could be made to produce about 74 bhp, the 998 about 85 bhp.
No exact figures were given for the 1,150cc engine, as it hadn't been given sufficient run.
Carburation: either SU's, Strombergs or Webers. The Stromberg CD pattern instrument was new at the time. Paul Emery regarded Webers as mainly a competition choice, because of the difficulty of installing them satisfactorily in the Imp engine bay. For a more docile road Imp he would use SU or Stromberg. He prefered Strombergs, saying they are slightly better and easier to tune - a smaller range of needles anyway.
Emery Cars was also testing a fuel injection system, looking for a better solution than the other three. By mid-August fuel injection was still a long way off.
Closer by was a transistor ignition system, based on a system produced by Klinger Controls Ltd. Willy Griffiths was doing the testing. He expected improved sparking over 6000 revs. Especially for the Emery engines that run at over 9000 revs, this would be a benefit.
| Manifolding: | Head: | |||
| Stage 1 | - | twin 1¼ inch S.U.s on an inlet manifold, retaining the standard Rootes exhaust system | polished ports, valves and combustion spaces | |
| Stage 2 | - | combined inlet/exhaust manifold with twin 1¼ inch carbs - S.U.s or Strombergs | as stage 1, plus oversize inlet valves and bored out ports | |
| Stage 3 | - | as stage 2, but with 1½ inch carbs | as stage 2 plus oversized exhaust valves and the ports are bored out to greater extent | |
| Stage 4 | - | Weber carburettors with a combined inlet/exhaust manifold. On the exhaust side Emery Cars have developed a system of longer pipes to keep the silencer further away from the exhaust valves, which can otherwise cause a pretty short silencer life. | a proper racing head with big valves and ports and an 11.5 to 1 compression ratio. |
These stages of tune can be combined with:
Extras
There is a full range of bolt-on bits and pieces for the Emery GTI, like:
Emery GTI. - Cars and Car Conversions 1965, March
Testing the Emery GTI
E is for Emery : improved (and how) Imps : the tuners. - Cars and Car Conversions 1965, October. - p.257-258
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