WINTON FESTIVAL OF SPEED
THE WINTON FESTIVAL OF SPEED HARKS BACK TO THE GOLDEN ERA OF SPORTS SEDAN RACING, WHEN SEX WAS SAFE AND MOTORSPORT WAS DANGEROUS
An event which harks back to the hairy-chested Sports Sedan era
RULES is rules, but sometimes they get out of control and suck a lot of the fun out of things. And lately in motorsport, it’s the rules protecting the cubic dollars tipped into modern car-racing that suck most deeply. Did you see, for instance, Scott Mclaughlin getting fined for taking a poster onto the podium recently? This is what we’re doing now? This new PC era is also why the pinnacle (so they tell us) of four-wheeled sport, Formula One, now amounts to slot-cars driven by robots. Even in our beloved Supercars, not a single car runs an engine, gearbox or diff (or anything else) that you or I can buy in a new road car. Reality check, anyone? Rules and restrictions are everywhere and just about every category has become corporatised, with sponsorship money calling the shots on both sides of the pit wall.
It wasn’t always like that. Oh no. Step back a few decades and you had Jack Brabham designing his own Formula One car and winning a world championship with it. And he could do it because motorsport was yet to become a money factory; there was still room for people with imagination and genius to make their mark. Can you imagine Lewis Hamilton skinning his knuckles on a car after hours? (Then again, can you imagine Sir Jack with neck tatts?)
Locally, perhaps the greatest expression of ‘the mad scientist goes racing’ came along in the 1970s in the form of Sports Sedans. These often backyard creations were built on the simple rule that there were no rules. Oh sure, there were safety regs you had to meet, but fundamentally, if the end result looked vaguely like a road car, you were a race-car engineer.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST EXPRESSION OF ‘THE MAD SCIENTIST GOES RACING’ CAME ALONG IN THE 1970S IN THE FORM OF SPORTS SEDANS
Okay, there were some rules, but they were never designed to reduce the amount of imagination you could use or the degree of crazy involved. So, a Sports Sedan builder could swap metal for fibreglass, glass for Perspex, shoehorn in whatever production engine, cylinder count and capacity they wanted, move the wheels to new locations, put the driver in the back seat, put the engine in the cabin (no smoking near the injector stacks, mate), make it as loud as possible, run monster slicks or huge brakes, and just generally take it to the limit. How’s this for a rule: A front-engined car had to keep the engine in the front half of the race car. Still plenty of wiggle room there. Sports Sedan is probably the only category where cheating was never a thing – you can’t break a bunch of rules if there aren’t many.
Letting backyard engineers off the leash also produced some incredible machinery, things of wonder such as a Volkswagen Type 3 fastback with a mid-mounted Chevy V8. Or a Mercedesbenz coupe that was more or less a Formula 5000 openwheeler with a plastic body on top. You couldn’t make it up. Except these blokes did.
The earliest Sport Sedans tended to retain a fair proportion of the original shell, although right from the off, there was plenty of engine swapping and moving stuff around within the car’s footprint. And from there it only got crazier until we ended up with spaceframe construction, forced induction and electronic management. But only if you wanted it. You could always plonk a Webered-up two-litre engine in your Escort, cage it out and call it a Sports Sedan.
The engineering ranged from magnificent to godawful, and the end results covered the full spectrum from Street Elite
MOTORSPORT WAS YET TO BECOME A MONEY FACTORY; THERE WAS STILL ROOM FOR PEOPLE WITH IMAGINATION AND GENIUS
standard to drone-strike-on-a-repco-store. But when you think about it, there’s a lot in common between the philosophy of making unrelated parts work properly and, say, the classic pro street movement in street machining, or the more modern pro touring vibe.
And don’t go thinking these weren’t fast cars. Yes, they had hairy backsides, and they weren’t always easy to drive, but they were crazy-quick and many of them would have given a frontrunning touring car of the day a big black eye. In fact, many touring cars, once they’d reached a certain age, were converted to Sports Sedans. They attracted some gun steerers, too, and everybody from Moffat to Richards, Bowe to Jane, Brad Jones to Gricey has had a crack at these monsters.
Over the years, Sports Sedans have evolved to use newer tech and tap into newer makes and models. But the magic of not having any regard for performance parity, nor giving a toss about attracting corporate quids, has meant that the category is, amazingly, still around, still producing new cars and still dragging the crowd to the fence on race day. And still off the chain.
These days, the old stagers have a class of their own. It’s called Group U, but it amounts to Sports Sedans that ran from those very early days up to the end of 1985. You can run any car with a logbook from that era, but, just to show that rules should be guidelines only, an accurate replica of a period Sports Sedan can also run as an ‘invited’ car. Mint!
The cars at the 2019 Winton Festival of Speed in early August typified the variety of makes and mods to be found in Sports Sedan; here’s a sample of what we found, from mild to wild.
YES, THESE CARS HAD HAIRY BACKSIDES AND THEY WEREN’T ALWAYS EASY TO DRIVE, BUT THEY WERE CRAZY-QUICK