Europa Euphoria: The semi-technical and semi-humorous account of th

Fun

not very technical, but a good read.

A little expensive. Made me laugh.

This is just a fun read for sports car (actually any) gearheads. Obviously not intended to be an overly serious book but a fun telling of rebuilding of a classic British sports car. A Lotus Europa, one of my very favorites, a really neat car that personifies LOTUS (Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious)' but a wonder to behold.I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it as a fun read!

Every so often, I look at my fully functioning 1967 Europa Series 1A and imagine taking it apart, bolt by bolt, so that I could someday say I had held every piece of it in my hand. But, when I read a journal like Bob Herzog's "Europa Euphoria", someone who had already restored many Elans and Cortinas as well as a Seven before taking on a Twin Cam, and I content myself with the pleasure of driving my car while it is still going and I am still alive, because I realize that I do not have the temperament for restoration. Herzog does not relate a fanatic's restoration, nor does he re-engineer the car, rather, he explains that he re-uses the bolts, but replaces nyloc nuts and, sometimes, even the washers, and, for everything else, he takes it out, blasts it, paints it, stores it, and eventually replaces it, hoping to end up with as few remaining bits as possible. He makes it sound simple, but he seldom is hopelessly stuck. Indeed, he mentions "stuckness" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", coming away with the sound advice to stop work on a frustrating problem and move on to something else, before permanent damage is done. From experience, I know this to be sound advice which I only wish I would remember.The book reads like a mystery, with clues and foreshadowing and corridors leading to dead-ends. When the transmission does not easily mate to the engine, but has to be bolted down to take up the last eighth-inch gap, I held my breath, thinking "No! Don't!", as if the heroine of a horror flick is about to see what the noise is in the basement... Sure enough, the transmission later has to come back out a few times to fix that and a reluctant shifter. Even as he recounts how the shifting problem confounded him, Herzog chips away at it methodically, trying one thing, then another, consulting friends, and even, if you can imagine, reading the manual!My only criticism relates to all the beer Herzog consumes. I am reminded of the wisdom of Elwood P. Dowd, the friend of Harvey, the invisible, six-foot-tall rabbit, who wondered at a psychiatrist's confidence of sitting in a maple grove while a quiet woman plied him with cold beer and whispered "you poor, poor thing", to which Dowd observed, "I'm sure you're making a mistake about all that beer and no whiskey". Other than that, an enjoyable book.