And that’s what kept me busy throughout most of Christmas 1982 until, one viciously cold January morning in 1983, we took it for a shakedown test at Donington, with Tiff Needell (who later went on to present Top Gear and Fifth Gear) driving.
By now, time was of the essence. The car had been rechristened the 83G for the 1983 season and Robin had sold it to an American, Ken Murray, who as well as owning one of those awful Ferrari Testarossas that Magnum PI used to drive, fancied himself as a bit of a racing driver. Ken had hired three drivers: Randy Lanier, Terry Wolters and Marty Hinze, and entered the team in the 24 Hours of Daytona race, due to take place in early February, less than a month away.
We got to Donington, just me, Tiff and a couple of mechanics, and started running the car, but it was so cold that we couldn’t get an accurate idea of its performance, compounded by the fact that the fan belt on the Chevy engine then broke.
One of the mechanics borrowed Tiff’s car, an Austin Allegro, went and bought a fan belt, came back, and left his car keys in the back of the truck. We carried on, and at least got some valuable miles done. At the end of the day as we were packing up, and saying our goodbyes, I got in my car, a Morris Marina, tried to turn the key but it wouldn’t turn. I gave it a bit more force. Snapped it. Turned out I’d picked up Tiff’s Allegro key.
Double whammy. Neither of us could get home. Luckily, one of the mechanics had a dodgy mate who lived in Derby. He arrived, hotwired both cars, and two hours later we were on our way back down the M1.
But that was it for testing. The car was shipped off to Daytona, and as part of the deal that Robin had struck with Ken, I went too, beginning what was to be a very interesting period in the US.
And so to Daytona, a gruelling 24-hour race, held at the International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. The curtain-opener for the US motor racing season. A legendary meet.
Which on the one hand was great. But on the other, the car wasn’t ready for such a test of endurance. A single shakedown test at Donington does not a finished car make. Not only that, but arriving in the US and linking up with the team, Motorsports Marketing, I soon learnt several slightly dismaying things, none of which gave me any confidence that we were even going to finish Daytona, let alone be competitive.
First, Randy Lanier was an excellent driver. Better, I’m afraid to say, than his co-drivers Terry Wolters, who wore thick Benny Hill glasses that gave him a somewhat comical effect, Marty Hinze, a resident of Daytona Beach whose permanently dilated pupils hinted at a misspent youth that might well have carried on into adulthood, and Ken Murray, who could barely change gear – a wealthy novice who had been allowed to enter himself in the most prestigious sports car race of all after Le Mans.
Second, Motorsports Marketing badly needed a team manager.
Thus my first task was to have a sit-down with Ken after his first practice drive in the car and persuade him that he’d have a far better, more enjoyable and less stressful time leaving the driving to others. Also, that I should be his team manager.
He agreed on both counts and thus, at the grand old age of 24, I was running the car as well as making tactical decisions for the team.
The American mechanics weren’t great but I had Ray Eades and another mechanic from March along with me, and we got to work on the car, hoping to get some reliability into it, but with no great expectations for its performance.
Sure enough, we kept breaking down in practice, the work list getting longer far faster than we could tick items off. We stayed up all night getting it ready for qualifying, but still with various problems we qualified an underwhelming fifteenth. We worked through a second night, meaning that by the time the race began we had already been up for the best part of 48 hours – not ideal preparation for a 24-hour race, but we didn’t expect the car to run for too long.
It began. Now, in those days, you didn’t have a televised timing system. Instead the teams relied on wives and girlfriends to write down car numbers as they passed the pits and hence keep a lap check. The good ones were amazing. Unfortunately, the girls we had weren’t the good ones, and by an hour into the race we had no idea of our standing.
Not that I was too worried. My goal was simply to keep running for as long as possible at a pace that didn’t massively stress the engine, gearbox, brakes and so forth, to keep Randy Lanier in it as much as possible and Terry Wolters out of it during the night, because he couldn’t see.
I’d never done anything like it before. Of course I’d race engineered for Johnny, but I hadn’t run a car to the extent that I was making all the strategy decisions in a long race. Formula Two races were short sprint events. Add to that the fact that I was really tired.
About four hours in, I was helping Randy get out of the car and Terry get in. Because Randy was shorter, he had a seat insert that I yanked out of the car ready for Terry. I yanked it too hard, it left my grasp, took off like a Frisbee and landed on the roof of the pit building. I spent about 10 minutes after the pit-stop clambering up rather precariously to retrieve the spacer and get it ready for Marty, who was up next.
Later, around midnight, with the car running well, I staggered exhaustedly to the loo. Daytona, like Indianapolis, has a vertical tower showing all the car positions, and as I passed on my way to the toilet block, I glanced up to see that P1 was car 88.
It didn’t sink in at first. I was swaying in front of the urinal when suddenly it hit me: 88 – shit, that’s us. We’re leading.
Hot-footing it back to the pit lane I found I wasn’t mistaken. We had taken the lead at around the 12-hour mark. All the other cars were having problems, but we’d just kept pounding around, and it was only with about an hour to go that the heavens opened and our engine started misfiring, which cost us time. Without that we might have won, but as it was we finished second – second in the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona race. Quite a result.
I nearly lost my chance to celebrate the result. Absolutely knackered, but elated, we finally left the circuit in the hire car, which was a Chevy of some description. Ray, the mechanic, was driving and we headed back to the hotel with me asleep in the front and the other Englishman asleep in the back. But, like Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Ray fell asleep too. We were at the traffic lights. His foot must have come off the brake in drive, resulting in the car rolling forward into the middle of the intersection where it was T-boned by another car. As awakenings go it was scary, the car spinning, glass flying everywhere.
We lived. No broken bones. And it was certainly a memorable weekend. The result did not go unnoticed by Robin Herd, who immediately saw the sales potential, leading him to giving me a budget to develop it further.
Enter Al Holbert. An American driver who’d had a lot of success in minor categories, Al was connected with Porsche, and what he wanted was a Porsche engine in the March chassis instead of the Chevy.
In the meantime, Al wanted to compete at the second race of the IMSA season, the Grand Prix of Miami on 27 February and less than a month away. So as a stopgap while we started work on the Porsche installation, he ordered a second Chevy-engined car from Robin.
By now we had funds for wind tunnel research and were able to take a suitably updated version of Sardous’ original 25 per cent scale model to the Southampton tunnel in order to develop a high-downforce kit for the car (where I was pleased to see that my original ‘aero-by-eye’ approach did not feature any howling mistakes). With those changes made, Al Holbert took the modified