Resto gets Shiel of approval
Terry Shiel’s Eurocars RX7 lives on today, having recently been magni cently restored by Jeff Kimmings and the team at J&S Motorsport for owner, Darren Wells.
“He wanted an RX7,” Jeff explains, “so we started looking around for one for him. It was going to be either this one or the Ghost Busters car (the Graham Moore/ Peter McKay car from Bathurst ’84) but it came down to the Terry Shiel car as it was 90 percent complete.”
There was still a lot to be done to return the Shiel RX7 to ’83 Group C specs, though. One immediate job was to strip the interior so it could be repainted in original white colours (it had since been painted black). This process revealed some issues with the car’s oor.
In the interim period the car had been converted to a Sports Sedan, which meant the oor had been cut to mount the engine inside the cabin. The replacement oor that had been subsequently welded in was from a Series II RX7, and as a consequence the joins weren’t right and the welded sections didn’t line up properly.
As Jeff and his team continued to nd more things that needed attention, it ended up being a full bare-shell restoration. What at rst looked as though it would be a straightforward exercise to get the RX7 race-ready once more turned into an enormously difficult and labour-intensive job.
“We got it sandblasted, and by chance it turned out the sandblaster used to work on the car back in the day! He walked in and saw it – and assumed it was a replica…”
An initially reluctant Terry Shiel came on board during the build, advising Jeff of some of the original speci cations.
“It was invaluable having Terry helping us with knowledge of what the car had, the layout of the dash, for example. There are no photos of things like that, but we were able to sit down with Terry and draw pictures. He was able to tell us how it was, and what tted where, etc.
“We’d get the odd random phone call from Terry when he remembered something else about the car that we needed to know, so it was really good. And at one point a couple of longtime friends of Terry’s, Mick Maiden and Clyde Lee, turned up out of the blue with an album of photos of the car from back in the 1980s, and that gave us some more information.
“As time went on, Terry became more and more enthusiastic, and we asked him if he would like to drive it at the Muscle Car Masters last year.”
Fittingly, it would be Shiel who drove the restored car in its rst on-track run.
“Darren had commissioned Geoff Wood to produce three scale models of the car in ’83 Eurocars trim, one of which we presented to Terry at the Masters last year as a thank you for the help he gave us in the restoration. Terry and his family were there, and he was quite emotional when we presented it to him as he stood alongside the real thing. To see how pleased and how emotional Terry was to see the car nished, and to see all the attention it got, for me it made all the hard work we put into the car worthwhile.”
Terry Shiel’s last race was as long ago as 2002 (at Oran Park in an RX7 Sports Sedan; as an aside, Shiel still holds the 2001-3000cc Sports Sedan lap record at Sydney Motorsport Park, which he set in an RX7 as long ago as 1991). When he climbed aboard the restored Eurocars Mazda RX7 at last year’s Muscle Car Masters, it was the rst time he had even been to a racetrack, much less driven a racecar on one, in 15 years.
“It was a fantastic experience,” Terry smiles. “The car looks exactly as it was, I got in it, did a lap and thought, ‘Gee, this is good!’ I was buzzing for the next few days!
“It was great. I’ve had a lot of promises of different things from people over the years and have been disappointed, so I wasn’t expecting much. But as they got going with the rebuild and I went and saw Jeff a few times, I could see that they were doing a thorough, proper job with it. I thought, ‘This might happen after all!’
“One of the things with that car was that back in ’83 my rst daughter had just been born. She’s now a keen karter and would love to go racing, and last year at the Muscle Car Masters she drove the Mazda down to the dummy grid for me! That was a nice thing.”