A few years ago at the sprint event of the European Ford Event in Holland I noticed the rear wheels on another Cosworth moving forward quite a lot during the launch. I knew that Cosworth had the same yellow Powerflex bushes fitted in the rear beam as I have. So apparently there is still quite a lot of movement possible with those bushes. During a sprint it's not so bad, but in corners this can mean that the rear beam moves underneath the car, changing the toe setting of both rear wheels. I had already read a few times that the solid bushes that are available don't really compromise the ride, so I ordered a set of solid bushes last year.



At the time I had already put quite some effort into removing the old Powerflex bushes from the beam, but they wouldn't come out. But now it was really time to replace them, so this time I tried a bit harder and managed to remove the bushes without removing the whole rear beam from the car. Fortunately, fitting the solid bushes was very easy.





The reason I really wanted to remove the old bushes was because I also wanted a different exhaust on the car. And removing the bushes with the new exhaust on would be even more difficult. The reason for wanting a diferent exhaust is that the noise from the Mongoose is driving me crazy, especially on long runs on the motorway where it really had an annoying drone. I guess I must be getting a bit old.

Getting another exhaust was not so easy though. As with most Cosworth parts it had to come from the UK, but most sellers said it was too big to send. And when I finally found one that would send it the price was listed incorrectly and it turned out to be much more expensive. In the end I found a nice second hand Magnex exhaust with 4" tail pipe from Gary, and shipment was also not a problem in this case.



Fitting the exhaust was a nightmare though. I already knew it was not going to fit anyway due to the 6 degree rear beam. For that reason both centre boxes had to be moved about 4 cm to the front and the brackets fitted to the centre boxes had to lengthened to come back to the original place. But strangely that wasn't the only place where it didn't fit. It had to be adapted to quite a bit at the front too, to clear the chassis rail, arb and gearbox. On some locations it only has about 5 mm of room, but it's not touching anything, also not by movements of the engine. But unfortunately no pictures from the exhaust being fitted.





The noise from the exhaust is huge improvement. It is still not really quiet, but at idling it's a huge difference and also the annoying drone at motorway speeds is gone.