The "I can't believe they raced it!" Thread.
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Early American sub-compacts like the Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto were some of the most competitive models in the formative days of NHRA Pro Stock drag racing. And because both of those cars were offered in 2-door station wagon form, it should come as no surprise that at least a few enterprising teams decided they'd draw more attention by basing their racers on those variants instead of the usual hatchback body styles.
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Anyone remember Brilliance, the Chinese manufacturer that entered the 2005 World Touring Car Championship but never turned up?
(A Brilliance show car appeared at the launch of the 2005 WTCC in Monte Carlo but that was it)
Well, a Brilliance touring car did race sporadically in China in 2006 and 2007.
Batchelor's Shot at Brilliance - Grand Prix Rejects
When Geely’s boutique manufacturer Lynk & Co. joined the fledgling WTCR series in 2018, they boasted of being the first Chinese manufacturer to take it to the global motorsport stage. However, thirteen years prior, another Chinese manufacturer could have made history play out differently...
gprejects.com
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The Peugeot 205 is best known for its success in the World Rally Championship during the Group B era.
However, a converted 205 Rally car appeared at the two Brands Hatch rounds of the 1986 British Saloon/Touring Car Championship.
In the hands of the late Mikael Sundstrom (by that time, a double Finnish Rally Champion), the car finished 14th on the road and 3rd in the 1.3 to 1.6 Litre class on its 1st appearance. Its 2nd appearance was more successful though as Sundstrom not only won his class but finished 3rd outright! This after starting from the pitlane due to a problem with his clutch cable to boot.
That result, combined with his best ever WRC result in that year's Rally GB (a 4th place), seemed to stand Sundstrom in good stead as he went on to win the next 3 Finnish Rally titles.
A Peugeot would not appear again in the BTCC until 1989 when Mike Jordan raced a 309 in the 1.6 to 2 Litre Class.
However, a converted 205 Rally car appeared at the two Brands Hatch rounds of the 1986 British Saloon/Touring Car Championship.
In the hands of the late Mikael Sundstrom (by that time, a double Finnish Rally Champion), the car finished 14th on the road and 3rd in the 1.3 to 1.6 Litre class on its 1st appearance. Its 2nd appearance was more successful though as Sundstrom not only won his class but finished 3rd outright! This after starting from the pitlane due to a problem with his clutch cable to boot.
That result, combined with his best ever WRC result in that year's Rally GB (a 4th place), seemed to stand Sundstrom in good stead as he went on to win the next 3 Finnish Rally titles.
A Peugeot would not appear again in the BTCC until 1989 when Mike Jordan raced a 309 in the 1.6 to 2 Litre Class.
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A Proton Satria also briefly raced in the British Touring Car Championship.
Towards the end of the 2001 Season, TH Motorsport entered Steven Wood in the Production Class at Silverstone and Brands Hatch. He finished 3 out of 4 races with his best result being 15th on the road and 7th in Class in the Feature Race at Silverstone (The one where Yvan Muller and Jason Plato had their infamous collision which earned Plato a penalty demoting him from 1st to 3rd).
TH Motorsport and Wood continued in the Production Class in 2002 but switched to a Mitsubishi Carisma. Still, they gave Proton its BTCC debut.
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The Mazda 929 was one of the more unusual entries of the Group A era of Touring Car Racing.
Built, developed and entered by Dutch driver Hans van der Beek with support from the Dutch arm of Mazda, the main purpose of the car was to enter the Spa 24 Hours, which it did from 1986 to 1988. Its only finish was 23rd out of 25 finishers (10th in Class) in 1988.
It competed mainly in the Dutch touring car series but it did notably finish 9th (2nd in Class) in the 1986 RAC Tourist Trophy in the hands of Van der Beek and Raymond Coronel.
Restoration Mazda 929 Group A
PROJECTS Restoration Mazda 929 Group A Vink Motorsport is restoring this unique Group A car with rotary engine. The Mazda was built in 1985 by Dutch race driver Hans van der Beek to compete in the famous Spa 24 hr. With support of Mazda the Netherlands, this private team developed
www.vinkmotorsport.com
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A CMR Racing-run Nissan Almera from the 1990s has been one of the more unusual entries at British Racing & Sports Car Club and 750 Motor Club meetings in recent times.
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Here is the vehicle in question with Jacky Ickx and Claude Brasseur as the winning crew.
Mercedes-Benz G-Class - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Mercedes 280 GE, originally designed for the military, a modified version ended up winning the 1983 Paris-Dakar Rally.
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There's a one-make series for those (or similar) down here in Aus. They get good numbers, particularly in NSW. https://www.apra.club/
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The late Tom Wheatcroft introduced Formula Classic as a pan-European series in 1995. A fleet of identical front engined 1950s-style racers with skinny wheels (numbers vary from 15 to as many as 26), competed for a large cash prize (£100K, according to some sources).
One of the problems was it was very expensive to take part. After poor entries to the first round, the grid was filled by giving cheap or free entries to some quite quick drivers.
They also had the wrong engines. Originally Vauxhall Carlton 6 cylinder units were quoted which would have allowed a suitable soundtrack even when silenced but they emerged with a 4 cylinder Ford engine that didn't sound right at all.
The engines were originally built by Holbay, who were already in financial troubles at the time they took on the contract, and eventually went bust after the death of founder John Read in a flying accident- by this time, Wheatcroft had written off the entire Formula Classic project (at a cost of £1.6m apparently), although some development work did apparently continue on the car for some time after the series was canned.
The modern tyres they used didn't promote the 4-wheel-drifts suggested by the PR blurb either.
After 2 meetings, the series collapsed. They only raced at Donington Park and each meeting had two races, although there had been plans for the series to race at the Osterreichring, Brno, Zandvoort, Zolder, Nogaro and Paul Ricard.
The only really notable competitors were ex-F1 drivers Martin Donnelly and Perry McCarthy and former British Superbike and Truck Racing Champion Steve Parrish.
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This is the Protos. Designed by Frank Costin and powered by a 1.6 litre Ford-Cosworth, it competed in the inaugural European Formula 2 Season in 1967 with Ron Harris Racing running the cars. It only scored 8 points all season in the hands of Brian Hart with the best result being 2nd at Hockenheim. The only other notable driver of the Protos was Pedro Rodriguez. He had 3 races in the car but he was a graded driver ineligible for points and wouldn't have scored anyway as his best result was 7th at Jarama.
The Protos was also notably entered in the 1967 German GP, with Hart and Kurt Ahrens Jr. as the drivers, they were ineligible for points due to being F2 entrants. They qualified 22nd (Ahrens) and 24th (Hart) of the 26 entrants, out qualifying only Guy Ligier's F1 Brabham and Brian Redman's F2 Lola. Ahrens lasted 4 laps of the Nordschleife before his radiator failed. Hart finished 12th and last on the road but there are conflicting reports as regards to whether he was classified or not because he was 3 laps down.
Now, what was unbelievable about why this car raced? It was made from very light but fragile plywood and had an almost-enclosed 'bubble' canopy over the cockpit and inboard suspension, which was unusual by F2 standards at the time. The wooden monocoque arguably saved Rodriguez's life when he crashed heavily at Enna. The canopy also allowed for unimpaired vision when Hart was following a car that then suffered an engine failure, spraying oil all over the Protos.
However, the car suffered from the ride height being too high and being overweight. It also didn't help that Costin only had 127 days and a £20K commission to actually design and build the car once he'd penned it so there was no time or money for proper testing or development. Needless to say, the car never raced competitively after 1967 with Ron Harris Racing switching to Tecno for the 1968 season.
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The Liquified Petroleum Gas-powered Super 2000 Honda Civic entered by Mardi Gras Motorsport and driven by John George in the 2004 British Touring Car Championship. It was the first alternatively fuelled car in BTCC history, after being converted to run on LPG through a collaborative effort between Mardi Gras Motorsport and the Dutch Prins Autogassystemen BV company.
Lack of pre-season testing and the car being 100kg overweight meant George was 6.5 seconds slower than the frontrunners at the Donington season launch. George proceeded to finish 4 of the first 9 races, peaking with 13th in Race 2 at Thruxton, being lapped every time. At Silverstone, he qualified 10 seconds slower than the frontrunners, the Civic was promptly parked. The team and George would return for the last 5 meetings with a BTC-Touring spec Peugeot 406 Coupe that was also converted to LPG. This led to marginally better results but still no points with 12th in Race 1 at Knockhill being the best.
LPG would have its moment in the sun in the 2010 BTCC when Team Aon converted their Ford Focus STs to "cook on gas" with Tom Onslow-Cole and Tom Chilton finishing 4th and 5th overall with 7 wins between them and Chilton winning the Independent Driver's title. TO-C had even gone into the final meeting at Brands Hatch with an outside chance of winning the outright title, only to retire from all three races but Team Aon still secured the first BTCC titles of any kind for alternative fuels.
(I've done the research)
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Wilson and his Belmont also briefly raced in the 1990 BTCC.In 1991 the Cavalier wasn't the only Vauxhall in the British Touring Car Championship.
1991 Vauxhall Belmont (Jeff Wilson)
Jeff Wilson
Register of SuperTouring specification cars raced around the world
www.supertouringregister.com
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Mark Ticehurst drove an LPG-powered Vauxhall Vectra in the 1999 Vectra SRI V6 Challenge. He wasn't eligible for points but he would otherwise have been champion.
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No it wasn't. 1991 was the first year of Class II, later dubbed "supertouring". Middlehurst, Walker and Leech's Sierras were all refitted and reengineered to comply with the new rules. They weren't very good and neither was Gravett's dedicated Sierra Sapphire, another I Can't Believe They Raced It.
1990 was the transitional year with a mix of actual Group A and Class II cars.
There was also Dave Brodie, he entered a 4 wheel drive Ford Sapphire in 1991, his only finish was 15th at Silverstone.
Can't think of any other 4 wheel drive cars to have raced in the BTCC that wasn't an Audi.
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The 2nd car in this shot is the first Honda ever to race in the British Touring Car Championship.
The car in question is a Honda Prelude (3rd generation). In the hands of Martin Wray, competing under the Hawes Group Racing banner, the car started 2nd from last on the 31-car grid (notably ahead of Mike Newman's Sierra) and finished 22nd and last of the classified finishers. It took 3rd place in the 1.6 to 2 Litre Class.
(Brands Hatch 1988 was the car's only appearance so footage and photos of it are hard to come by, the following image is the best I can find at the moment)
A 4th generation Prelude won the BRSCC Thundersaloons title in 1993 and 1994.
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Jeff Wilson's Vauxhall Belmont from the 1990 and 1991 British Touring Car Championships isn't the only obscure entry from the Vauxhall stable in that series.
In the 1986 Season, the late Tony Lanfranchi entered a Vauxhall Nova in the dying 1 to 1.3 Litre class (The class hadn't even had any entries since 1982 and was merged with the 1.3 to 1.6 Litre class for 1987). He only took part in 3 races (Silverstone, Brands Hatch GP and Snetterton) and was his class' sole entrant in 2 of those, the one exception being the British GP Support race where he had James Kaye, also in a Nova, to contend with. Kaye not only beat him but actually finished 7 places ahead of him. However, Lanfranchi had to start from 2nd to last on the 32 car grid, due to a 10 second penalty and having his time disallowed for an underweight car during practice.
He finished all three races, each time in bog last of the classified finishers, with his best result being 11th at Snetterton. This owed more to the low grid numbers the British Saloon/Touring Car Championship was suffering from at the time as only 16 cars were entered at Silverstone and Snetterton.
In the 1986 Season, the late Tony Lanfranchi entered a Vauxhall Nova in the dying 1 to 1.3 Litre class (The class hadn't even had any entries since 1982 and was merged with the 1.3 to 1.6 Litre class for 1987). He only took part in 3 races (Silverstone, Brands Hatch GP and Snetterton) and was his class' sole entrant in 2 of those, the one exception being the British GP Support race where he had James Kaye, also in a Nova, to contend with. Kaye not only beat him but actually finished 7 places ahead of him. However, Lanfranchi had to start from 2nd to last on the 32 car grid, due to a 10 second penalty and having his time disallowed for an underweight car during practice.
He finished all three races, each time in bog last of the classified finishers, with his best result being 11th at Snetterton. This owed more to the low grid numbers the British Saloon/Touring Car Championship was suffering from at the time as only 16 cars were entered at Silverstone and Snetterton.
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There was once a short-lived British car company called Peerless.
A Peerless GT contested the 1958 Le Mans 24 Hours. It came 16th out of 20 finishers in the hands of Peter Jopp and Percy Crabb.
A Peerless GT contested the 1958 Le Mans 24 Hours. It came 16th out of 20 finishers in the hands of Peter Jopp and Percy Crabb.
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The world's fastest skip!
Only got as far as a successful land speed record attempt at Santa Pod but still...
Only got as far as a successful land speed record attempt at Santa Pod but still...
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Biofuels in the British Touring Car Championship.
Now that the BTCC has switched to 100% sustainable fuel for the 2025 season.
Now that the BTCC has switched to 100% sustainable fuel for the 2025 season.
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Forgot about the bio-ethanol SEAT Leon from 2009. Can't believe that car ran on three different types of fuel during its time in the BTCC!
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For anyone who is familiar with the BBC motoring show Top Gear.
They once held a motorhome race!
They once held a motorhome race!
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Top Gear also had a race with airport vehicles once.
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Continuing from alternative fuels and also combining the I didn’t know this existed.
Triple 8(yes, that Triple 8) LPG prepared Vauxhall Vectra. I didn’t know this was a race series. Too cool. Would have been cool if they made another series including some Sapphire Cosworths. Could have been a GM vs Ford touring car series.
Triple 8(yes, that Triple 8) LPG prepared Vauxhall Vectra. I didn’t know this was a race series. Too cool. Would have been cool if they made another series including some Sapphire Cosworths. Could have been a GM vs Ford touring car series.
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