The Build Up...

At  long last the successor to my stolen rally prepared Austin Cooper S, 277 BRX, has emerged from a 12 month rebuild of another Cooper  S I bought in 2007. This car is a Morris Cooper S first registered in 1965 and converted into a 60’s rally replica,  but not prepared to the current regulations for special stage rallying, and is now stored off-site for obvious security reasons.

Despite my knowledge of old minis, what appeared to be a fine solid car ended up with a lot of structural repairs needing done beneath a cosmetically very good exterior. We had a lot of work to do to bring it up to MSA(Motor Sports Association) stage specification, mostly in terms of safety, and also to incorporate the many strengthening additions that we developed over the years in the old BRX.
(For those interested in the process, there will be a separate article in a future issue on the re- build ).

Not only was the car rebuilt, but as some of you may know my bad December in 2006, when the car was stolen, was compounded by a major accident when I was co-driving for a friend just before New Year when our Peugeot 205 left the road on a special stage at Alton army barracks, hitting a tree head on at 60 mph, resulting in my pelvis being broken in three places. Hence the new car has an excellent set of 6 point Willans seat belts with more than the normal padding in certain critical areas!

The Isle of Man Rally is one of the toughest rounds of the MSA Gambia Dunlop British Historic Stage Championship and is my favourite round due to the challenging and varied nature of the closed public road special stages, some of which use parts of the famous TT mountain circuit. The event is so demanding that there are points awarded for each of the three days, compared to one on most of the other rounds.

This year our class, B2, for pre-1967 cars of 1000 to 1300cc, was the second best supported with 8 cars, after the ubiquitous Escort in C3 which had 10 entries out of the total of 56 Historic entries. Due to the geographical position of the Island, the event attracts crews from Ireland as well as the mainland and is a counter in the Global Irish Historic championship.

Of the 8 crews 3 were from UK, championship class leader james Stait in his MG Midget, Matt Pearce and myself in Morris Cooper S’s , 3 from Ireland headed by “Merv the swerve “ Johnston in his rapid green/white ‘S’ powered by a unique Manx racing engine with twin 40 Webers (not splits) feeding a 5 port head, and 2 local crews led by the rapid and experienced Manx minman Glen Leece who like me has a newly built red/white car for the event this year.

The Recce

To minimise the time off work I travelled over the previous weekend to prepare the pace notes which are a vital part of these rallies. We are allowed 3 runs over the stages with the roads open to normal traffic and in a standard road car . As my co-driver was unavailable for that weekend, I persuaded long time expert Mini navigator and friend Graham Carter to assist me with the notes. The weather for the recce was stunningly hot and quite pressured to cover all the stages in just 2 days .

The Rally

As we arrived early evening on Wednesday it was raining heavily with mist over the mountain, not the best outlook for the rally. Over the next three days we would cover a total of 150 stage miles on 23 stages, varying in length from 1.3 miles to 13.6 miles Thursday was scrutineering in the afternoon and considering the car was straight out the box everything went smoothly, with ace mini competitor turned Eligibility scrutineer ,Paul Loveridge, happy with the rebuild and his only comment was “nice seats” -Cobra Suzuka and Imola for driver and co-driver respectively.

Thursday Day 1

We then had a three hour wait to the start of the 3 evening stages at 8pm, the first being 6 miles of Marine Drive, a spectacular road hugging the cliff on the way out of Douglas.
This was followed by two short 1.3 mile blasts through Castletown with plenty of local spectators urging the cars through the narrow and twisty road past the Castle, across the bridge and along the promenade.
My pace after a two year lay off was not special but we got through the stages without mishap and the brakes were now properly bedded in after fading big time on the approach to one of the artificial chicanes on Stage One. The same was not true for Irishman and Manx regular Alan Courtney who retired his borrowed Cooper S after the first stage with no clutch.

Friday Day2

The pace setters in our class on day 2 were James Stait in the Midget closely followed by Matt Pearce in his Cooper S who admitted to going up a gear since his outing last year.
At the end of day 2 we were 3rd in class, but only due to the demise of Merv Johnston whose engine blew up after stage 6, and a rare error by Glen Leece, putting his car in a ditch on the Curragh’s part of Stage 12 and my favourite stage 12 Morrisdale, ,the reverse of Kella run in 2006. Glen’s car was not badly damaged but the excursion dislodged some sludge in the petrol tank and blocked the fuel line. He was however able to get the car repaired and started the following day under super rally rules as per the WRC.

Our only problems during the day apart from the mist on Stage 5, Little London, where we climb to the highest part of the mountain circuit, were both the float chambers on the new H4 SU’s vibrating loose, causing a major fuel leak over the manifold and misfire at high revs on 3 of the stages .- we backed off ! Fortunately this was easily fixed once we sawed a spanner in half to tighten the awkward nut under the float chamber. (Note : wire lock these nuts on your car).

Saturday Day3

We still had 7 long stages to do on Saturday and I was now getting back more confident with the car and starting to push a bit more. The weather was better and the stages were dry and more predictable until we got to the third last stage, the longest on the rally SS21 Cringle. We were about 6 miles into the stage approaching an uphill medium right flat in third gear when we hit standing water unseen on the inside of the corner (not in our notes or cautioned), and we aquaplaned straight off into what had been a dry stone wall ! By the time we hit the wall it was a pile of large stones due to the other cars who had gone off before us.

The underside of the car was badly damaged with the wheels toed out at 10 degrees and the car refusing to go round corners ,hence we lost 2 ½ minutes in the process. We were lucky however as James Stait who was comfortably leading the class went off for 10 minutes and was a bystander to our aerial transit into the wall. At service Spencer and Nick straightened things as best as they could and we somehow made it over the last 20 miles of the final two stages,to record a second in class finish for the car’s first ever event. Full marks to my son Spencer who prepared the car over many months and apart from the carbs, it performed faultlessly. Our strengthening mods to the sub frame and the unique Tech Del replica sump guard enabled it to survive even a severe rubble wall attack, albeit with the car now 10mm shorter on the nearside! More work to do before the next outing. Thanks also to Alex Cleland at Mini Spares ,Tim Harber at Minimail, Trevor Hancock for the engine and gearbox rebuild ,Neil Slark for the cylinder head and rolling road , and especially the NHS staff at the JR in Oxford for my rebuild.

Thanks to Nick Cole for the photos and help with servicing.

Final Positions

1st Overall Historic Jimmy McRae/ Andy Richardson Stobart Porsche 911
(Jimmy was 3 times winner of the international event from 1982 to 87 and still going strong)

Class B2 1St Matt Pearce/ Dood Pearce Morris Cooper S

2nd Peter Horsburgh /Anthony Preston Morris Cooper S

3rd James Stait /Gill Cotton MG Midget

4th Philip Kerlin /Noel Anderson Austin Cooper S

Another superb Isle of Man Rally - Roll on next year