Cam belt 'slipped'

[dougt]

Hi,

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend. He's got a '99 S1 elise standard model which he's owned for about 3 months now. It's a very nice car with only about 10k on the clock and no apparent signs of having been thrashed, crashed or abused by the previous owner.

The other day when it was really cold (car covered in snow I think) he went to start it but it coughed and then died. His garage (not a dealer) say the cam belt has slipped 4 teeth for reasons they can't explain, and it's bent all the exhaust valves.

I just wondered if anyone had heard of this happening before. Have there been problems with the cam belt tensioning mechanism ? The main concern (apart from the fairly sizable bill of course) is that if the root cause isn't found then the chances are it will happen again.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Doug.

[dougt]

hmmm... that's a possibility, we were having repeated overnight snow at the time (Buxton in Derbyshire). My own car (alfa gtv) dove me mad by freezing up solid every night, but at least it always started once I did get into it.

Thanks for the replies I will pass on the info.