BEETLEMANIA IS ALIVE AND KICKING ON THE STAGES
Bob Beales has taken something old and is keeping it very new. By Paul Lawrence
WHY ONE MAN PERSISTS WITH A 62-YEAR-OLD RALLYING FAVOURITE
For more than 50 years, Bob Beales has owned and rallied a VW Beetle and is proud of the fact that it is probably the oldest car currently active in historic special stage rallying.
Most recently Beales, co-driver
Mike Leflay and the Beetle tackled the Roger Albert Clark Rally and came away with a class win (although it was the only G1 starter) on the longest stage rally on the UK calendar.
Hereford-based Beales explains: “The Beetle is 62 years old and is a 1958 car which has now been a competition car for 60 years. It was originally used by local rallying legend Bill Bengry, who was a family friend, and he used it as a spare car during his successful rallying programme in 1960 and 1961.
“It was a back-up to his main car when he won the Motoring News Championship. Then he put a Porsche engine in it and took a few outright wins on national events. Then they were using other vehicles and it got tucked away.”
As a teenager, Beales used his own Beetle road car for competition in the mid-1960s before his dad decided he needed a separate car for motorsport. Bengry suggested the Beetle, which by then was sitting in storage. That was in 1966 and Bob has had ‘UWP 401’ ever since, with it only standing idle for a few years in the 1970s while his focus was on his young family.
In 1982, Beales went to watch the Lombard Golden 50 Rally, a key event in the formative years of historic rallying. His interest was reignited and the Beetle was retrieved from storage and re-prepared for rallying.
Beales says his interest in motorsport goes back to family holidays at Borth on the west Wales coast. “My father was state-registered blind so he lived his motorsport through me,” he says. “I used to drive the family car on the beach as a kid, setting up autotest courses and getting my parents to time me.”
Aside from the sabbatical in the
1970s, he has been competing pretty much ever since he passed his driving test at the age of 17 and had his first rally in a Standard 10. That event ended in retirement when the brakeless Standard demolished a five-bar gate.
For a decade and more Bob and the Beetle were regular contenders as historic rallying used a mix of road and stage events. He won the Welsh Historic Championship in the early 1990s but, in the face of ever-rising entry fees, now concentrates much of his active rallying on demonstration events. He is into his early 70s, so rallying is done on a pension and that limits how much he can do.
However, the national section of
Wales Rally GB has been the exception to that rule in recent years and he first tackled the event in 2015 when a stub axle broke. “Doing WRGB was a big deal,” he says of taking part in Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship.
The well-known Beetle is prepared to Oettinger GT specification in order to qualify for FIA historic papers. It delivers around 80bhp and a top speed of 100mph from a 1300cc engine and a fourspeed gearbox. Drum brakes all round mean that a degree of caution is needed, particularly on fast downhill sections.
“I’ve spent blood, sweat and tears on the car and it is a family heirloom,” says Beales. “I think my grandson will have it one day. I rally it when I can afford it. It’s got to be used, it’s not a show car.”
Last autumn he decided to forsake Wales Rally GB and contest the Roger Albert Clark Rally for the first time, with a five-day route covering 300 stage miles. It was one of the biggest challenges that car and crew have ever taken on and it was a case of mission accomplished despite a range of challenges.
“Running first on the best of the roads was important to us – we were cleaning the road for the leading cars,” he says. However, road conditions were generally better than he had experienced running behind the
WRC field on Wales Rally GB.
Inevitably, getting a 1958 car around such a tough event was a real test of determination, endurance and perseverance. Early problems included a detached oil pipe and a new dynamo pulley that fell apart. On Monday morning, on the final leg, they slid off into a ditch after the flying finish of Falstone 1 but managed to get going again. However, the moment that nearly ended it all came in the second run through Kershope on Saturday.
Towards the end of the long stage, they caught the MG Midget of Bob Seager. In trying to pass the Midget, they hit a hidden culvert in the grass and the front of the Beetle bounced high in the air after a substantial impact. But Beales pressed on and the sturdy Beetle ended the stage with realigned steering, some cosmetic damage, a deranged number plate and a fair amount of Kielder landscape stuffed in and around the front of the car. Less solid cars, and perhaps frontengined ones, might not have got away so well. “We did it, but without the support of family and friends it would not have been possible,” says Beales.
The Beetle is likely to have a quieter time this season. “I have got a 1964 VW 1500S and had originally hoped to use that on the Roger Albert Clark,” says Beales. “The engine was built up but it still needed a bit of welding and we hadn’t got the MOT done. If things go well we hope to use it down at Clacton on the closed-road event at the end of April.
“I last used it on an RAC Historic Rally in the early 1990s so it is coming out of retirement. I’ll try and take on the Cortina GTS, but the engine’s still not as powerful as I would have liked and probably has about 125bhp.”