A DOSE FROM THE DOCTOR

Jonathan Palmer’s Formula Ford backer, West Surrey Engineering chief Mike Cox, bought the ex-johansson Ralt RT3 from Ron Dennis to go to British F3 with the young doctor in 1981.

Bennetts had returned home to New Zealand, where he ran his old mate Dave Oxton in a Ralt RT4 to the 1981 Formula Pacific title in the Southern Hemisphere summer. And then he got persuaded back to the UK… “I said I’d think about it, and we basically set up the team while I was 12,000 miles away,” he reminisces. “I came back mid-february and we got up and running. They had built a little workshop at the side of WSE, and that’s where we were based with our little A-series Ford transporter that would only just hit 50mph. We had Dave Stevens, who was JP’S Formula Ford mechanic, as a number two, and I got a friend of mine, Harvey Spencer [ex-brabham, now Carlin], to come and work with me as mechanic/ engineer. We had a bit of help from JP’S brother Jamie. He was our weekend gofer.”

Bennetts had to persuade Cox that Palmer needed a spare Toyota engine from Italian tuner Novamotor: “He said, ‘It’s won the first four races, it must be good!’ But I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a racing engine and they do wear out’. We did four races without a spare engine – we were sitting there with our fingers crossed all the time. Eventually Mike and JP got five grand out of BP Sunbury, and we put that sticker on the front of the cockpit covering and got a spare engine. There were so many races in those days, and we could alternate the engines while the other one was rebuilt.”