I thought that to celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary, my 70th birthday, 41 years of owning my 50 year old English sports car, surviving another 19 years after suffering a very serious stoke and after one-half day of having my car almost finished after 41 years of work, that my wife and I should drive it halfway across the country to the 2024 Healey Conclave at Road America race track and Blue Harbor Resort on Lake Michigan in Sheboygan WI. And, hopefully, back home again.
    

< How do you pack a Jensen-Cooper [Healey] for a 23 day road trip?Carefully.Two soft duffle bags under the folded down top and two in the passenger footwell v  with a trunk full of tools and spare parts.



    Well, why not? None of us, myself, my wife Bokhee, or my car were getting any younger, I had always wanted to drive a convertible sports car through the Rocky Mountains, and I had always wanted to visit Road America, one of the best, if not the best, race tracks in North America. Bokhee agreed to come along as navigator and trip manager so I booked our reservations at the Healey Conclave and some events at the VSCDA [Vintage Sports Car Drivers Association] meeting at Road America the weekend prior to the Conclave. What could go wrong? Besides, it was now or never. But I told Bokhee that there were going to be absolutely no promises that we would even make it or what the trip was going to be like. I did promise her that she could bail out at any time and I would drop her off at the nearest airport for a flight home. But that I was going to keep going no matter what.



< Leaving home on our great adventure, Bokhee is in the passenger seat. Nice looking car.  

        We decided on a southerly route out and a northerly route back and a total trip time of 23 days with spending 9 days at [what I was calling] Healeyfest. Since I was going to have to do all the driving we elected to restrict our daily drive to about 5 hours and 300 miles per day. I wanted to avoid driving at night if possible, and from the number of big, dead animals we saw by the side of the road this was a good idea. Anyone of those deer or cattle or big undetermined animals would have destroyed my car and probably killed us both by coming through the windshield. My car has a very low nose; any animal would have just rolled over the hood and into the passenger compartment.

        This meant a 7 day/6 night trip out [2200 miles] and the same time frame coming home, but only 2000 miles. We spent 9 days at the Blue Harbor Resort in Sheboygan and drove around to various events for another 600 miles. By the way, this part of Wisconsin is absolutely beautiful.

        The trip out, which ran through 7 states, was by way of [starting at] Redmond WA, La Grande OR, Pocatello ID, Rawlins WY, North Platte NE, Omaha, NE, Waterloo, IA and then Sheboygan WI. The trip home ran from Sheboygan to Austin, MN, Mitchell SD, Spearfish SD, Billings MT, Missoula MT and Ritzville WA, then back home. Over all, a leisurely drive. It was a vacation, not a marathon.

        After working on my car for 41 years and after my car spending the last four years in the shop getting a new engine from Lotusbits in England and installed by Byron at VRM [quite a bit bigger job than I had anticipated], a new transmission, new paint, new seats, new interior, new top, new gauges etc, I picked up my car late Wednesday night and we left first thing Thursday morning Sept 5th, with about half the items on my to-do list checked off. I told Bokhee that I had no idea if we were going to make it to WI or not, but that I was at least going to give it a go. I think she thought that we wouldn't even make it two days out before the car would break down and she would be able to go back home again. I doubt that she ever believed that we would really spend 23 days on the road. I have to admit the trip out was eventful.

    We [meaning me] immediately got a speeding ticket for 30 mph over the limit south of Yakima WA the first day because I hadn't really driven the car in four years and I had replaced the speedometer twice and the tachometer once since I had gotten it back from the shop the first time. As I was driving along watching the gauges I kept thinking to myself “I can't be doing 90 mph, the tachometer and speedometer must be way off. This feels like 60 or 70 mph”. Unfortunately the WA State Patrol officer with his radar gun around the corner disagreed with me and said I was going 90 mph in a 60 mph zone, so I got a $465 dollar speeding ticket to start the trip the first day out. That sure put me on my toes the rest of the way.

    It was 95 degrees just as soon as we crossed over the mountains into Eastern Washington, with the top down and the sun beating us to death. Bokhee thought she was going to die while I drove the entire way with one eye glued to the oil temp and water temp gauges and the oil pressure gauge. I [and Bokhee] was absolutely convinced that I was going to melt the engine or that something was going to break or fall off. The nose of the car was all custom bodywork designed and built by me over 40 years ago and I had never really had a chance to test the aerodynamics or the air flow to the cooling or the fuel injection. There was a record heat wave all the way to Nebraska, which meant, with the high elevation, that the air was hot, dry, and thin. But the three row oil cooler and the four row aluminum radiator kept the engine temps down to 180-200 degrees all the way. Byron did a great job. I told him that he is a genius. He told me that I must not know any really smart people.



<  Life on the road. You never know who you will meet. When it is 95 degrees, park in the shade.

    We spent the first night at La Grande OR and then pushed on through downtown Boise [95 degrees in an open car in stop and go traffic] to Pocatello ID for the second night. I noticed that the engine seemed to be running very rough and was starting to lack some punch. By the third day at Rawlins WY it was obvious that something was seriously wrong, the engine seemed to be running rich, and it would not idle. The tail pipes were very black and it looked like I was running way too rich. I was guessing fouled plugs or some kind of fuel injection problem. We pulled into an auto parts store to buy some new spark plugs and I pulled out the plugs one by one, and sure enough, they were very foul with carbon deposits. I replaced the plugs and called Mike Taylor at Lotusbits. He reminded me that I had ordered the fuel injection without any kind of barometric air pressure sensor, and that he had never put one one before in because they are never needed in England. To be fair, he had asked me what the elevation was at my home and I said it was only 300 feet above sea level and I did not think to mention back in 2020 that I might someday drive across the country. At that point we had been running at 6000-7200 feet elevation for hundreds of miles Problem identified but not solved. I asked Mike to send me a sensor unit in care of Blue Harbor Resort and all I could do was hope that I could find someone in Sheboygan or at Road America who could install it and reprogram the ECU. On top of that we had not had time to completely set up the ECU for the car. Vintage Racing Motors had run my car on the rolling dyno twice but the engine still needed more fine tuning. Mike agreed and sent one to Blue Harbor Resort for me. In the meantime I was running the car at up to 7200 feet elevation with the fuel injection ECU set at sea level. Not to mention running at 4500 rpm and 90 mph for hours at a time.

    Remember, the speed limit out there is 80 mph and everyone was doing 80-90 mph too. You had to drive at least that fast just to stay out of the way. We sometimes hit 100 mph or more on long straights or passing triple tractor trailer rigs. I did learn that the car was very aerodynamically stable and I could even take my hands off the wheel at 100 mph [very very carefully, of course]. That was some good news, since I had shaped and the built the new front end myself.

  

< Bokhee inspecting the engine after the fuel injection problem in WY. The car got a firm lecture about behaving in the future. It seemed to work. Nobody talks back to Bokhee.


Fortunately I had brought a nice set of tools along > for just something like this. The white long-sleeved shirt was to protect me from the sun while driving.


 

   
< Completely fouled spark plugs; the engine would barely run. New plugs made a huge difference.

   






From Rawlins WY we aimed for North Platte NE and miles and miles of corn fields [which was okay] and miles and miles of cow manure smell, which wasn't, since we were in an open car.

    We would try to leave the last hotel stop at about 9:30 in the morning, drive a couple of hours and getting horrible gas mileage because of the corrupted fuel injection system, stop for gas, stretch a bit, have a drink and a snack and then back to driving. Couple more hours driving, stop again, and back on the road. After our second stop Google Maps directed us down some country road to get back on the freeway further east, instead of going back through town to get back on the interstate. As we were driving along these empty country roads through the corn fields out in the middle of nowhere [think Cary Grant in “North by Northwest”] the engine completely died. Dead as can be just as it was starting to get dark, with me having lost my regular glasses and only having my sunglasses to drive with and Bokhee completely unable to drive the car anyway.

    Great, just great.

    Bokhee got on her cell phone to look for a tow truck in case we needed one; I really didn't want to have to spend all night in the car with no heater. I was thinking that this was the end of our road trip. I had moved the battery to the trunk and added an electric trunk release, which now didn't work. I had hidden a pull wire for just such a problem and got the trunk open. Of course one of the battery cables was loose because the shop [not VRM] had not tightened it down after rushing to put the car back together. It had worked for 1500 miles and then quit in the most remote area of the trip. But another quick repair and we were back on the road. So far our luck was holding up.

< Everywhere we went people were interested in the car. These guys knew quite a bit about cars and wanted to know all about the Lotusbits engine.

    We then drove through Nebraska with one more night in Omaha, then on thru Iowa towards Waterloo to see Pat Lind. Pat had bought the SCCA Huffaker Jensen-Healey, raced it for years and now is having it restored by Huffaker in CA. Pat and his brothers operated Lind Brothers Motors and Lind Brothers Racing. They were very successful and still have their original building with a huge collection of spare pars and an enviable car collection. I bought two Lind Brothers Racing T-shirts and wore them everywhere the rest of the trip. That stop was a big part of my pre trip planning. About two hours away from his garage the exhaust became quite a bit louder. A quick peek under the car didn't reveal any serious problems so we pressed on. I guessed that the new exhaust system had broken, but not in any super critical area.

   

Taking a ^ quick look at the exhaust system two hours outside Waterloo Iowa. What fun is a road trip without a little adventure? Boring, right?

As soon as we got to Pat's place he jacked up the car, popped underneath and saw that one of the header pipes had broken. He wedged it back into place and recommended a shop who might be able to fix it. Boubin Automotive agreed to work late that night and start early the next day to sleeve the broken pipe so we could keep to our schedule.
 

   I know what Bokhee was thinking. ^  "I knew we would never make it." I have to admit that Bokhee was a great sport the entire trip. I am a very lucky guy.

    They did a great job and we left for Sheboygan after lunch with Pat. Since I had specified the exhaust system and failed to consider an intermediate hanger at the end of the transmission, which meant all the weight of the exhaust system was on the manifold and the rear hangers at the very back of the car, I blame myself and not the car or anyone else. Anyway, another problem solved, thanks to Pat and the great people in Waterloo.    

Pat Lind jacked up the car, dived v underneath and immediately diagnosed the problem .
.