Originally Posted by steveboyslim

You do post some rubbish on this forum about vauxhalls and about the XE/LET engines.
Built and mapped correctly they can be very powerfull and reliable.
If you have had a bad past with these engines you have been building them wrongly.
The cylinder head was designed at Cosworth and is just a slightly scaled down version of a YB head.
In an ealier post you mentioned that the gearboxes were not good which is rubbish, the F28 has been proven to take 580 + bhp.
I do agree that the 4x4 system is not so good.
Without the XE there would be far less MK2 Ford Escorts rallying, less Caterham's and many other car racing, which use the XE in some form.
In rallycross, the XE based engine, used in turbo form (extensively modified) has been able the beatsome of the best Ford YB and other brands of engine, in the sport.
The current crop of vauxhall engines you mentioned, fail mainly because incorrect mapping (go faster chips) sold by some of the so called vauxhall tuning companies.

Steve