Shorrock Traveller

In the spring of 1999 I decided to build something a bit special to celebrate the Minis 40th anniversary.

As my wife and I were expecting our son Adam later that your I decided to restore a Morris Traveller. I bought "a good one" with a new MOT from a friend and immediately started picking about at it. Within a very short period of time it became clear this "Good one" was indeed an almost total basket case that would need some major surgery to get it back on the road and in a condition to be proud of. After a few nights chopping, it looked like this.

This period could be described as the dark days of winter.

Still I persevered and within about 6 weeks the shell was fully restored and went off to be painted. As usual the painting took a hell of a lot longer than I was promised and when it came back it was awful! So back to the paint shop for a second try. While it was away I was busying myself restoring all the stuff ready to go back into the shell when, or should I say if it ever returned from the paint shop.

As you can see from the picture on the left, I was also building an extension to the house and doing the garden as well. Some folks are just gluttons for punishment.

Anyway by the time the car came back from the painters in an acceptable state it was only a matter of 4 weeks before Mini40. Not really leaving much time to get the car finished, so burning the midnight oil and putting in all my spare time it was finished, dyno'd and run in just in time. I was pretty impressed with the finished product.

The finished car was a real pleasure to drive, it was a bit more spacious than a normal mini, but retained all the normal mini characteristics	As well as the Shorrock blower it was fitted with uprated suspension, negative camber bottom arms and Cooper S disks & wheels
It was what was under the bonnet that really turned people's heads though. A standard 1964 850 A series fitted with a Shorrock supercharger. This was never set up to be an out and out screamer, the idea of fitting the blower was to make the Traveller competitive in modern traffic, & it was.	The performance of the Blown Traveller was roughly equivalent to that of a late 90's Rover Cooper. It would pull in 3rd from about 5 miles per hour and would easily cruise at 85 - 90 all day. In fact it would go considerably faster if allowed to.

I have subsequently been involved with the fitting of a few other Shorrock kits to Mini's something that is by no means as straight forward as it is made out to be, however once it is set up right the type of power you get for your outlay is amazing. If you are thinking about fitting one of these blowers to your Mini please remember one thing. These kits were designed to give a 25 - 30% increase in power on a STANDARD engine. They will do this reliably with little or no fuss. You are wasting your time trying to get huge amounts of power. Something that can be done more reliably and with less expense in other ways.