HEROES: Alan Mann
Team owner, Alan Mann was never one to shout about his achievements - he didn't need to when those red-and-gold Fords took to the track and scooped up all trophies.
Race team owner and builder extraordinaire who helped Fords rule the track in the 1960s.
From 1963 to 1969, Alan Mann ran one of the most successful racing teams in the UK, which set new standards except for the very few top F1 teams who had a lot more money to spend. Whether it was with Lotus Cortinas, Falcons, Mustangs or Escorts his company, Alan Mann Racing, always produced the most immaculate, competitive, and usually reliable, machinery.
he was not going to be a millionaire in this venture either, so moved on to revitalise a Ford dealership near Brighton, and set up Alan Andrews Racing in 1962. His first efforts were with Anglias and Zodiacs which were prepared under Howard Marsden’s supervision, which he drove himself, always admitting to his limitations.
Ford onboard
Then in 1963, and never short of well-founded optimism about his potential, he approached Ford’s then competitions manager, Syd Henson, asked for help with running a new Lotus Cortina race car, discovered that these were still in very short supply, and finally went ahead with a Cortina GT for Jimmy Blumer to drive in the British Saloon Car Championship. At the end of the season, this was one of the cars which Ford then flew over to Marlboro in Maryland, USA, for a long-distance saloon car race, and it was this outing which endeared him to Ford’s Walter Hayes, who gave him the job of racing worksfinanced Lotus Cortinas in Europe during 1964. The newly-formed Alan Mann Racing, which eventually adopted that splendid colour scheme of running lustrous red cars with golden roof panels, immediately began winning endurance races where other Lotus Cortina entrants were encountering mechanical breakdowns.
Although Alan was an ever-present at the races, his cars not only being immaculately presented, but efficiently run, he could almost seem to be invisible at some of the events — for one rarely saw him waving his arms around, and he never seemed to raise his voice — yet his team was always amazingly effective. Operating from Byfleet, in modest premises, which had the sort of superskilled mechanics who seemed able to turn outwardly ordinary Fords into winners, this maybe explains why the Monte Falcons of 1964 and the Mustangs which dominated the Tour de France of that year were so successful.
And as if he was not already busy enough with his race-winning Lotus Cortinas, his business also went on to manage the prestigious and highprofile team of Ford-engined AC Cobras which won the World Sports Car Championship in 1965, and he was also tasked with building some of the lightest and best GT40 development cars in racing.
Red and gold
He campaigned Lotus Cortinas extremely successfully from 1964 to 1968, and these were the machines which made his operation so enduringly famous in the sport. Starting with cars liveried in the standard white-with-green side flashes, he employed mainly John Whitmore, Henry Taylor and Peter Procter to cut a swathe through the opposition in the European Championship — this included six outright victories, and in 1965 he went even better by providing Whitmore with one brand-new Lotus Cortina — KPU 392C — in which he scored another six outright wins, and won the entire European Touring Car Championship.
Later he admitted that he re-liveried his cars so that he could pick them out from the rest of the Lotus Cortina fleet as they hurtled past the pits in the early stages of a race !
Observers often wondered how he could keep so many programmes going simultaneously and successfully, for he always seemed so calm about what was going on. In that single year of 1965, as an example, he had the Lotus Cortina winning all over Europe, a very competitive Mustang out in the same series, and Daytona Cobras competing in eight World Sports Car events (a series which the team won, beating the might of Ferrari), all the time working on the development of lightweight Ford GT40s, and on the transformation of ex-Monte Falcons into British saloon car racers.
Twin Cam time
After this, he was invited to run works-financed Escort Twin Cams, both in Britain, and in the European Championships, in 1968 and 1969. These rapidly became the world’s best Escort Twin Cam racers, especially after much of the engineering and new-design work had been carried out for him by Len Bailey, who had an office at his workshops in Byfleet. It helped, of course, that Alan had a direct line to Walter Hayes, so when he suggested that the Escort might work well with the rare-as-hen’s-teeth Cosworth FVA engine installed, a supply rapidly became available.
It was on Alan’s behalf that Len Bailey was mainly responsible for the design of the sleek and lovely F3L racing sports car of 1968 , which was the world’s first two-seater to use the Cosworth DFV F1 engine. This car looked gorgeous, but was not a success, which was hardly Alan’s
“MANN PAINTED HIS CORTINAS RED AND GOLD SO THAT HE COULD PICK THEM OUT FROM THE REST OF THE LOTUS PACK”
fault for, at the time, he made the point that AMR was originally only allocated two of the precious DFV engines for the two F3L cars, and that they never did get a spare engine throughout an unsuccessful 1968 season.
This, of course, only tells part of the story about Alan Mann, and his Alan Mann Racing team’s intense activities, for in a mere seven years they would be involved — always by accepting commissions rather than by going out to look for work — in a myriad of projects, some of which were very definitely kept under wraps at the time.
In 1964, for example, his team tackled the Monte Carlo rally and other events in Ford Falcons, so nearly winning the Monte where a previous effort by another team had carried out a shambolic effort in 1963 (in 1964 Bo Lungfeldt’s car was fastest, but lost out to Paddy Hopkirk’s Mini Cooper S on handicap), he dabbled with 7-litre Ford Galaxies where Holman & Moody had already done much of the engineering, and later in the year he picked up the totally unproven Mustang (which had only just been announced), entered three cars for the gruelling, 10-day, Tour de France, and saw them take first and second overall.
In the years which followed he became involved in the British film industry, though he never shouted about it. It was Walter Hayes who acted as his introductory agent, by first of all having him meet Cubby Broccoli, then Ian Fleming (of James Bond fame), this soon leading to AMR being asked to produce four examples of Ford-based Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cars. At almost the same time Alan was also invited to do work connected with the film cars for the film Grand Prix, though he later complained that he had never been paid for this job.
Among other Ford-based projects was to build futuristic road cars for the UFO TV series, where the cars were Cortina-based under the skin, but sounded like gas-turbine powered machines, and which featured lift-up gull-wing doors which the producers had demanded, though Mann always complained that there was not enough in the budget to make them counter-balanced.
His behind-the-scenes work for Ford Engineering to rectify the short-comings of the Zodiac independent rear suspension was more successful, but was killed off by a lack of investment capital — at least, he later said, the Granada which followed was a much better car.
Moving up
Unhappily, in the late 1960s Mann did not seem to get on with Ford’s new boss, Stuart Turner, so at the end of 1969 his contracts with the company were not renewed.
This was the point at which he decided that AMR should be closed down (Frank Gardner took over the premises and some of the workforce), and Mann moved on to the next part of his life, which was to run a helicopter leasing business. Later he also purchased Fairoaks airfield, near London, and expanded his aerospace interests, though by the 2000s he had been reunited with some of the cars that made him famous — and even bought back one or two of them, restored them, and set them to race once again.
Although Alan died, far too young, in 2012, his sons then carried on the family involvement in his most famous projects, and those magnificent red-and-gold machines can still be seen at major classic events such as the Goodwood Revival meeting.
One final comment, too, is that someone once said of the British Saloon Car Championship: ‘If you want excitement in the pit lane, you need Ralph Broad — but if you need results, go to Alan Mann’, which sums him up completely.
“ALAN MANN RACING ALWAYS PRODUCED THE MOST IMMACULATE, COMPETITIVE AND RELIABLE MACHINERY”