Esprit Quaife sequential early 2000's

[shortie2]

Has anyone on the forum got one of these in their car ? I have one of these and im looking for any information, schematics ,drawings , manuals etc , Quaife dont have any information nor are they interested , apparently 40 were made for lotus.

[generationx]

Give Quaife a ring!

https://www.quaife.co.uk/contact-quaife/

They’ve a very helpful sails/support group who I’m sure will try and help you (I used to work there many moons ago and still have friends there - it’s still a family-owned company).

[shortie2]

Phoned Quaife today , and they have NO records for that gearbox , absolutely nothing , only help was to confirm part numbers i gave were for that box and that they made a one off production run of 40 gearboxes delivered in early 2000's, Im going to try Lotus next and see if thats fruitful

[Caddyshack]

Bara Singh at Bara Motorsport is very good on building quaife and other gearboxes, he may know them.

I remember reading about them around 2000 Ish when I was looking to buy an Esprit as I understand the V8 turbos were held back due to the weak gearboxes.

[shortie2]

Tried Bara but while he has heard of it he has no info , ive spotted a sequential on Esprit engineerings facebook page so ive messaged them

[generationx]

Do you have some part numbers? Typically there will be a 3-digit “Q…” number moulded somewhere on the casing (that’s the casting number) and individual part numbers will be “ExxX-xx” where the “x” will be a number and the “X” a letter.

[shortie2]

Main casing casting is Q177, other covers etc are Q180, 181,182
one of the gear part numbers is E-25G2-57 02/01
I beleive the complete gearbox model number is QBE 25

[Caddyshack]

What do you need the info for, is it to just know about them or is it to refurbish it?

[shortie2]

I have 3 of these transaxles , 2 brand new and 1 in need of a rebuild plus some spare parts , Ideally im looking for a service manual but i doubt they did one so any tech information like torque settings and bearing pre loads would be handy .
Quaife has no interest so im looking at finding spares or other owners of the same transaxle perhaps looking for spares to organise re-manufacture service parts

[Caddyshack]

Seems very odd that quaife don’t want to help you. You would think they would take pride in their boxes still working.

I assume Bara could guess a lot of torque specs based on other versions he builds?

[Tyrell Corp]

Was this perhaps an off the shelf unit but with some internal tweaks - as Lotus did with the citroen and renault transaxles?

Tooling up to make just 40 units would seem cost prohibitive - unless there are some shared parts inside?

[shortie2]

AFAIK 40 gearboxes is a decent order for a motorsport company like Quaife, probably with a prospect of a further order if it was succesful
I dont think these gearboxes were intended for road use ,they are big heavy and probably quite clunky at road speeds.
When i spoke to Quaife and gave them part numbers they instantly identified it as " the lotus box" .
There will be common parts used in other boxes like the ATB diff and perhaps other parts .

[generationx]

If it’s a QBE25G then that’s quite old, as discussed. Quaife very rarely produce the kind of documentation you’re talking about as they rely on the skills and experience of their assembly technicians to follow a General Assembly drawing and hands-on guidance of the designers.

There should be a GA somewhere in the Design Office but, if this was a Lotus exclusive, they may not be willing to share it, it’s certainly not on their website. However it is on page 48 of an older catalogue and the casing, I think, was used for several projects, it has a cam plate arrangement for gear change which was a fairly common system from that period.

https://rallycar.es/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/qua...

Coincidentally I may have cause to visit them in the next couple of weeks, I can ask about this if you’re not in too much of a hurry.

[shortie2]

generationx said:

If it’s a QBE25G then that’s quite old, as discussed. Quaife very rarely produce the kind of documentation you’re talking about as they rely on the skills and experience of their assembly technicians to follow a General Assembly drawing and hands-on guidance of the designers.

There should be a GA somewhere in the Design Office but, if this was a Lotus exclusive, they may not be willing to share it, it’s certainly not on their website. However it is on page 48 of an older catalogue and the casing, I think, was used for several projects, it has a cam plate arrangement for gear change which was a fairly common system from that period.

https://rallycar.es/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/qua...

Coincidentally I may have cause to visit them in the next couple of weeks, I can ask about this if you’re not in too much of a hurry.

I have phoned them a couple of times now and whilst helpful they seem to have cleared out any 'old' information and all the 'older' staff who may have been involded have either retired or moved on but if you can glean any more information i would be very grateful.

[ragingfool]

this?

[shortie2]

Yes that is the gearbox , i have already seen this catalogue picture but thanks for posting it