Allan Rennie's unique replica of the Lotus 35 Martin V8 F1 wins on it's debut after a 5 year car build.
A mate - Allan Rennie - capped an exhausting 5 year build project - with a fortuitous but nevertheless welcome! - win in the invitation class of the HSCC Classic Racing Cars championship - supported by Chartland Properties Ltd - at Snetterton yesterday. Allan headed Jon Waggitt in his Brabham BT18 and Alaisdair Pike in his Brabham BT21 after poleman Michael Scott and 2nd qualifier Ian Gray retired.
The racecar is a unique replica of the V8 Martin engined Lotus 35 that was run by Charles Lucas and driven by Roy Pike and Piers Courage in 1967 - the original was destroyed in period.
Essentially the car is a Lotus 35 F2 chassis with a 3 litre Martin V8 engine squeezed into it. Allan bought some heads and blocks off the engine designer - Ted Martin - and began the project in 2004. The challenges of building the almost unique engine using 40 year old castings was something of an engineering challenge - and squeezing it into the back of the little Lotus was problematic to say the least!
The HSCC found out about the car and generously provided Allan with an invitation to race the car at the Snetterton.
The car had a few teething troubles - which was to be expected! - and doing a 20 minute race was entering into unknown territory in respect of fuel consumption etc.
Allan himself was a little rusty - not having raced for 9 years - and qualified in 3rd. After the promise of a promise of beer if he did not crash it - he managed to keep it on the island and after poleman Michael Scott and Ian Gray retired - Allan stroked it home to win - much to the astonsishment and delight of his pit crew!
Allan had hoped his return to racing would result in brolly dollies - however instead he got Carl, David and myself. I am sure that the fact we had forgotten to buy a pitboard - which meant we were restricted to "polite" gestures from the pitlane made all the difference.....
Results from the race below:
Allan decided not to go out in race 2 due to some technical problems - and this was won by Alaisdair Pike's beautiful Brabham BT21.
Brilliant day - real friendly enthusiastic bunch of competitors - Allan hopes to get the car out for another run - so we better start trawling ebay for a pit board then...
We are building a small site for Allan about his car - so more information on how to spend loads of time/money building a historic racecar coming soon!