The continuing saga of my Lancia Beta Spider

[mangocrazy]

I'm reasonably confident that the thread title will act as a magnet for all the old rust-related jokes, so I'll be awarding points for originality.

Anyway my ownership of this vehicle began in 1987, when I bought it for the princely sum of £450. It was first registered in 1980 and only had around 24k miles on it, 7 years later. One of the major selling points was that it had been Ziebart rust-proofed from new. The guy selling it was a friend of a friend and had bought a Beta Montecarlo, the mid-engined variant that spawned the 037 Rally WC winner. He later admitted to me that the Montecarlo was a nightmare and he should never have sold the Spider.

I ran the Spider as a daily driver for the next 4 or 5 years and was very impressed with the way it went and handled. It had the 2 litre motor, producing a claimed 115bhp, which in a car weighing no more than a ton gave quite sprightly performance. When I started a contract involving a daily round trip of 90 miles I decided to retire the Spider from the daily grind and bought some sacrifice metal to do the heavy lifting. This was a Lancia Beta Coupe, which did the commute when the weather was too bad to use the bike. When this dissolved into a pile of ferrous oxide it was replaced by a van (a Fiat Ducato of ill repute) and subsequently a couple of Ford Transits.

Consequently, by the mid 2000s the Spider only had around 55k miles on it and had spent a large part of its life garaged. Around the same time I bought a moneypit in the south of France and quickly realised that a targa top sports car with a delicate bodywork disposition would be ideally suited to life in a warm, sunny climate. So in 2009 the Spider did its own version of The Long Way Down and relocated to the Languedoc. This is a photo of said vehicle in its new (at the time) home.

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For the next 4 or 5 years we used the car whenever we returned to the house and I started in my battle with French bureaucracy in attempting to get it re-registered in France. Eventually in early 2015 (!) I finally received my precious certificat d'immatriculation, and had the Beta registered as a vehicule de collection (classic car).

Wonderful! What could possibly go wrong?

(To be continued)

[ChrisW]

That's beautiful! I'm envious, I've had a few Lancias but none of the pretty ones.

[mangocrazy]

I also (briefly) owned a Beta HPE. Really versatile car, but that particular example had already lost its battle with the Tin Worm. It did take 4 of us to Glastonbury 1985 and back, so for that it deserves some praise.

[v8-powered]

Friend of mine had a Montecarlo, lovely thing in a champagne colour. It was mint, not sure if it was original or restored. He sold it to buy a Ferrari 348 which he's recently sold.

[mangocrazy]

One of the guys on the UK Beta forum has a fuel injected Volumetrico (supercharged) Montecarlo making 340 bhp. Bonkers simply does not do it justice.

[MingtheMerciless]

A mate had a Delta, it was a sporty version and a fantastic drive but my god was it a mechanical disaster, it leaked, it rattled, the overhead instrument console fell off on me when we were on the M23. He used to joke it did 0-60 in two body panels it rusted so quick.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

I had a 2 litre Beta coupe that rotted away, I thought the engine was more than 115bhp, it felt a lot pokier than a mate's Pinto engined Capri.

I didn't know there was a Beta Spyder, I thought there was just the HPE, Coupe, Saloon and Monte Carlo. The Monte Carlo is a sanitised Stratos and Fiat considered selling as a Fiat X1/20.

[Demannu]

Had a Volumex and a MC.
The volumex was a proper quick car, spoilt only by dropping the gearbox on the M6 at 95 ish.
The MC had a party piece of swapping ends if you braked mid corner as the brakes had the finesse of a light switch.
A proper place for your old girl to retire to!

[cheb]

[mangocrazy]

Yes most, if not all, of the old jokes about Betas rusting were based on fact. In their defence I'd say that most other cars of the era were equally as bad. I watched in disbelief as a mate's Alfasud rotted away in what seemed like no time at all. I never really 'got' the looks of the MC and saloon versions back in the day, but both make a lot more sense to me now.

The VX versions were supposed to make 135bhp, which wasn't a great deal more than the injection models claimed output of 122bhp, but the big difference was the grunt from low down that the blower provided. And the brake problems with the MC were so bad that production was halted for a year or so. I believe Lancia's solution to the problem was to fit a smaller servo unit ...

According to Lancia's records only about 10k Spiders/Spyders were made and none of the 3rd series (VX and injection models) were Spiders, but it seems that a disproportionate number have survived. Not quite sure why that should be.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Tha Spyder is probably better made, my one rotted up the inside of the door pillars and across the floor between them, the Spyder doesn't have door pillars to rot.

[mangocrazy]

The Spyder was actually a Pininfarina design and was largely built by Zagato so that may have something to do with it. It was based on the Coupe floor pan and Lancia handed the basic bodyshell over to Zagato to do their part of the build, then the part-built car was handed back to Lancia to finish off the trimming etc. Typical Italian efficiency...

[demographic]

My mates father has a small Fulvia and a Fulvia Zagato but the Zagato (sport?) is a different shape from yours.
Thats aside from the two Lambdas and I think an Auralia.

Last I saw the Zagato was more of a bodyshell being worked on mind.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Fulvia is completely different to the Beta.
The Fulvia's engine is a very narrow angle V4.

[mangocrazy]

The saga part deux (a.k.a. when things go bad)

By now the car was registered in France and had a new Controle Technique (French MoT) valid for 5 years, but the guy who did the CT mentioned that while it wasn't yet a problem, he had seen the beginnings of corrosion on the underside of the car and thought I ought to be aware. This somewhat concentrated the mind and made me start making plans to bring the car back to the UK so I could get the corrosion fixed. Since the early 2000s I had been collecting parts for a full refresh of the engine (by now it had done nearly 60k miles), and figured it was about time to get started on that as well.

So in late October 2015 we flew down to the gaff, intending to drive the car up to Zeebrugge and catch the overnight ferry to Hull. A couple of days before we were due to drive back we were out shopping and on the return journey a hideous screeching sound started coming from the engine bay. We limped back to the house and as far as I could make out, the noise was coming from the driver's side of the engine. I was in no mood to start trying to fix it, so it had to be farmed out to a garage. It was at this point that I made my Big Mistake.

Instead of taking it to a garage that I knew and trusted, but was about 7 or 8kms away, I decided to hand it over to the garage in the village. I'd had work done by them before and they seemed perfectly OK, but unknown to me there had been a change of ownership in the interim. When talking to the new owner I began to feel a trifle uneasy, as he seemed more interested in pointing out minor omissions of the garage I normally used than actually diagnosing the fault. I left the car with him and went back the next day to ascertain progress. The fault (obvious with hindsight) was a failing water pump - the noise alone should have told me that, but I was panicking and not thinking straight. So that was ordered and would arrive the next day, when work could start.

When I turned up, late on the next day, it was obvious that something was wrong. The garagiste was using the word 'bloqué', which I wasn't familiar with. It took a few seconds to realise that it meant jammed, locked, stuck, seized. To cut a long story short, the twat had decided that he wouldn't just replace the water pump, he'd also change the cam belt as well, even though it had only been changed less than 500kms ago. In doing so he had omitted to tighten up the locking nut on the adjuster, left it ticking over and the belt had slackened off, with predictable consequences. It was now in a state where the engine could neither be rotated forward or backwards.

It was over a year later (Christmas 2016, in fact) before I could repatriate the engine to the UK, strip it down and find out conclusively what had happened and when I did I found 7 out of 8 valves were bent, with corresponding witness marks on the pistons:

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And here are a particularly wonky set of valves. I'm not entirely convinced that any of them are genuinely straight.

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And when stripping the bottom end I discovered that the butchery extended to him removing and tightening up the crank pulley nut with a cold chisel. He either didn't have a 38mm socket or couldn't be arsed to use it. There is a circle of hell reserved entirely for cunts like him...

[mangocrazy]

My mates father has a small Fulvia and a Fulvia Zagato but the Zagato (sport?) is a different shape from yours.
Thats aside from the two Lambdas and I think an Auralia.

Last I saw the Zagato was more of a bodyshell being worked on mind.

The Fulvia was the last model produced by Lancia before they were subsumed into the Fiat conglomerate. The Beta used the Aurelio Lampredi-designed twin cam inline 4 motor that also appeared in numerous Fiats of the era.

The V4 Fulvia engine was a little jewel of a thing.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

We put Fiat twin cams into rwd Escorts, lovely engines, never seen one with bent valves, but the ones we had were all running engines from rusty cars.

[demographic]

Fulvia is completely different to the Beta.
The Fulvia's engine is a very narrow angle V4.

So is the Lamda, something like 13 degrees IIRC for the early ones.
Looks more like a wonky inline 4 really.

[demographic]

My mates father has a small Fulvia and a Fulvia Zagato but the Zagato (sport?) is a different shape from yours.
Thats aside from the two Lambdas and I think an Auralia.

Last I saw the Zagato was more of a bodyshell being worked on mind.

The Fulvia was the last model produced by Lancia before they were subsumed into the Fiat conglomerate. The Beta used the Aurelio Lampredi-designed twin cam inline 4 motor that also appeared in numerous Fiats of the era.

The V4 Fulvia engine was a little jewel of a thing.

The little Fulvia is tiny, me and my mate in it and we' were pretty much rubbing shoulders.
I've never been in the Zagato but mates father damn nearly uses the dark Lamda as a daily driver which is going some for a 1920s car.
The open top Lamda doesn't get as much use but lets face it, its Cumbria and... rain.

[mangocrazy]

We put Fiat twin cams into rwd Escorts, lovely engines, never seen one with bent valves, but the ones we had were all running engines from rusty cars.

The only way they bend valves is through owner's or garage's incompetence. They're a great engine, strong, torquey and robust.