Vintage Thing No.37 - MAE head (Modified Anglia Engine)

I was over Adrian Booth's the other day shooting the breeze over cylinder heads and he pulled this out of a pile of other interesting stuff. He had another - all shiny and ready to be fitted onto the short block - but that belonged to somebody else so in defference to Adrian's customer I didn't photograph that but snapped this work in progress instead. The finished article looked rather fine, though you'll just have to take my word for it.

It's a down draft cylinder head for a Modified Anglia Engine also known as the MAE head. I'd never heard of this before but as Adrian explained some of its history a distant bell began to ring. And you just have to peer down the inlet ports in the top photo to see what straight path the inlet gases now have. Usually they'd have to negotiate a right-angle bend.

Cosworth were the firm most closely associated with the MAE cylinder head but there were many other firms of these versions including Holbay. Ford and Cosworth first co-operated in 1959 when Cosworth developed a lightweight iron crankcase engine for the new Ford Anglia. Cosworth founders, Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin, then tuned the new engine, code-named MAE (Modified Anglia Engine) and it soon became the power unit of choice for drivers in
Formula Junior and later Formula 3.

According to Cyril Saunders on his blog,, this combination on a 997cc Anglia engine would put out 90 bhp at 7800rpm in 1961. In something like a March 703 Formula 3 single seater these engines could produce 100bhp on a single downdraught Weber 46IDA and rev to well in excess of 10,000rpm, which for a pushrod engine is very good indeed. The high revs were facilitated by the Anglia's short stroke - the 997cc engine had a stroke of only 48.41mm so the pistons didn't have to travel far when the crankshaft span round. The cylinder bore by contrast was 80.97mm so you can understand how oversquare the standard engine was. Stock output was 39bhp!

Many engines would be installed canted over so that the carbs really were vertical. By and by, more sophisticated engines with fancier cylinder heads came along and ousted the Ford MAE from Formula 3. These included the single overhead cam Cosworth SCA, which still utilised the Anglia block but had a completely new cylinder head of Cosworth's own design. This was much more expensive but could produce 140bhp, still from 997cc.

However, at about this time, the Formula 2 stock car racing boys "discovered" the MAE head. They were looking for an alternative to the old Ford 1172cc side valve engines and a few ohv Anglia motors had already appeared on the short circuit scene by the mid-sixties. However, when the first MAE appeared, Adrian said it made everyone else feel like they were going backwards. MAEs first appeared on oval tracks in the south east and the midlands but it wasn't long before the west country boys and northern lads realised what was going on.

Here you can see the inlet manifold that went with the MAE conversion. Apparently, demand for the Cosworth MAE was so strong most of them were sold as kits and if you know what you're doing like Adrian you could make your own like this one. Demand for such devices is increasing once more as historic single seater racing gains in popularity. I'm not a great enthusiast for single seater racing cars but there's something very delicate and simple about the fuselage-on-wheels look of the 1960's cars.

If you're curious about historic Formula 2 Stock Cars you could do a lot worse than Kevin Wickham's site, which should bring back a lot of memories for some of us.