WHEN THE GROUND SHOOK ON UK CIRCUITS
How Thundersports shone briefly, but noisily
As the British Formula 1 scene faded at the turn of the 1980s, the fertile mind of circuit operator and championship creator John Webb started to work overtime. If single-seater racing was no longer working, and he was on record as never feeling the British Saloon Car Championship could be a headline category, there was only one way to turn: sportscar racing.
In 1983, Webb launched Thundersports, a category that ticked many a box: it was well-promoted, had big prize money, brought all sorts of cars to the grid, became a headline category instantly and allowed costs to be shared by having longer races with pitstops. And he managed to get it on to the support bill for grands prix…and gain BBC coverage as well! Small wonder it was a hit, albeit for a relatively short period of time.
Webb had dabbled with longerdistance mini-enduro sportscar racing two years earlier by running a series of 200-mile races for Sports 2000 cars. They were popular with drivers because of the extra time, although they were a bit long for the fans.
So for Thundersports they became 100 to 150-mile races. The class structure was simple: up to 2000cc, over 2000cc and a third class for Sports 2000s of which there were plenty. Pitstops came between onethird and two-third distance and refuelling was permitted. And that simplicity of class structure brought out all manner of cars, from the much-modified Donington GT silhouettes to Dudley Wood’s Porsche 935K3 and Martin Birrane’s Ford C100 with a variety of cars for company. Most were in need of a home as many outdated sports-racers were either used as the base for the aforementioned Donington GT silhouette or were left in a garage.
Historic sportscar racing was in its infancy and Thundersports was a perfect interim home for many of the cars, especially in year one.
The nascent series, not a championship to begin with, burst into life at Brands Hatch with German dentist Siggi Brun taking honours in his ex-Jo Siffert Porsche 908/3. That he shared the car with Derek Bell, then a Rothmans Porsche factory driver, gave the series instant credibility. Opposition came from one of the category’s biggest supporters, John Foulston, who had bought the Lola T530 in which Patrick Tambay had won the 1980 Can-Am title. Partnered in ’83 by Historic Sports Car Club boss Brian Cocks, the 620bhp monster was hardly suited to the short Foster’s circuit of Oulton Park, at which the Gold Cup was won by Richard Budge and Vin Malkie (Chevron B19), but scored wins at Snetterton and Brands Hatch.
Entries in that opening season were strong, the extra track time and split costs being the main attractions, but then the category got an unexpected shot in the arm. At the end of 1983, Brands Hatch was awarded the European Grand Prix and needed support races. Thundersports was thrown on its biggest stage and delivered a monster grid, the race recorded and shown later by the BBC, with Ray Mallock and John Cooper winning in Cooper’s Lola T280.
Figures at the time reckoned an audience of three million tuned in to watch…
Suddenly the category looked different. Instead of old cars needing a home, there were purpose-built machines on the grid for 1984. Foulston bolted a 5.7-litre Chevrolet powerplant into the Lola and extracted 700bhp from it, but the main opposition would come from works British Saloon Car Championship Rover racer Peter Lovett who teamed up with Ian Taylor and fitted a rotary Mazda engine into a Lola T594. They won the opener at Oulton Park, but crucially won the televised British Grand Prix support race as well. For the drivers, it was a series well worth taking part in, as there was good prize money offered up by MCD. A regular racer throughout the Thundersports period was Ian Flux, who remembers: “It was the best prize money I ever made in national racing! It was Foulston’s money through Atlantic Computers so he could run his own car in it. We could earn £4000 per race and that was split between the two drivers, so me and whoever I won with, would be quids
in. It was a great idea from John Webb. He wondered what to do with all the shitty old Group 6 cars knocking about and came up with the answer!”
Grids in 1984 were full, variety was plentiful and a year later the international sportscar scene was reflected in the UK as a number of Group C2 cars were joining Thundersports. Tim Lee-Davey shared his Tiga GC84 with Australian Neil Crang to win the season-opening Gold Cup at Oulton Park as Lovett and Taylor switched to a BMW-engined Tiga and dropped to the two-litre class to try to slay giants.
At the end of 1985, the series again had a grand prix crowd, as Brands played host to the European Grand Prix. Mike Wilds remembers it well: “I was lucky enough to win that one in 1985 – the same weekend when Nigel Mansell won his first F1 race – and doing that in front of 100,000 people and being on BBC Grandstand was an amazing thing. I was driving Jim Wallis’Lola. OK, there was a bit of luck involved, but what a stunning thing. It was not only us, there were the guys in Sports 2000 cars in the field too. We all felt like heroes. It was just wonderful for national motorsport.”
The Sports 2000 drivers had reliable machinery and rather than being cannon fodder, were able to outlast the more outlandish cars and gain good results. That meant prize money.
The mighty Can-Am Lola was the car to beat and continued to be so in
1986 as Foulston and John Brindley were in fine form, Foulston’s win at the 1986 British Grand Prix coming on the back of his hefty investment in MCD and the news that from 1987 onwards the grand prix would be at Silverstone only. At a stroke, Thundersports lost its biggest race: right from the start, the series had always enjoyed a GP support race, be it at the British or European races, but no more. It was the first big blow to the series.
Foulston came under a different attack in 1986 as American-based Brit Andrew Ratcliffe teamed up with former FF1600 racer Nigel Burke to but a brace of Lola T530s to take on Foulston, Wilds sharing with Ratcliffe when the team debuted midway through 1986 with Flux joining Wilds for 1987. The battle between the Can-Am cars was to the detriment of the grids as the smaller-engined cars fell away and the Foulston was killed testing at Silverstone at the end of
1987. The championship had lost one of its biggest supporters.
“The death knell for it was the death knell of John Foulston,” reckons Flux. “The day he died, so did Thundersports. Everybody wanted to beat Foulston and Foulston was putting up the money. Once [his] Silverstone [crash] happened, that was the end of it all.”
Another Thundersports stalwart Wilds has a different take: “It is difficult to say what the end of it was, really. When it first started, Webb at Brands Hatch was incredible. He was always coming up with ideas and promoting things. But I think the blame has to lay with the governing body a little bit [then the RAC MSA]. That’s because it was the governing body of UK motorsport that, in my view, probably wasn’t governing very well. It was allowing so many new formulas and categories. There was only one cake, if you like, of competitors, but they were trying to slice it way too thin by allowing too many other clashing series. There were too many other opportunities.”
As Groups C and C2 rose in popularity and drivers were tempted to race in
World Championship sportscar events, so Thundersports started to wane in popularity and a rival appeared on the scene as the BRDC launched its Group C2 Championship. While never huge on numbers, it was aligned to FIA regulations and took cars away from the Thundersports grid.
Faced with dwindling grids, the Brands Hatch Racing Club tweaked the rules for 1988 with the over and above two-litre classes being joined by one for singleseater sportscars effectively to attract Formula 3000 machinery in sportscar bodywork. There were few takers and sadly, too, the once dependable bread-andbutter Sports 2000 class was shrinking, just as grids were doing for the sprint race championship. It was crunch time.
As the BRDC continued with its C2 championship, it was clear that there was no longer a demand for the two championships and at the end of 1989, Thundersports was no more. At its peak it gave spectacular races and offered hordes of amateurs a chance to race at a grand prix and against international sportscar drivers as well.
As Wilds remembers: “Those cars were so iconic. You could race an American single-seat Can-Am car, you could drive – as I did – a car like a Lola T280 with a
DFV in the back. You could drive a Sports 2000. You could even drive a Mallock U2.
“The variety was brilliant and, as a driver, it was a chance you never ever had coming up through the ranks. I never had the chance to drive a Can-Am car in the day. I love meaty racing cars, things with more power than grip. And Thundersports gave you that chance.”
Now, the thought of a Porsche 908 and a Chevron B19 racing at the Oulton Park Foster’s circuit might seem ridiculous but that was part of the appeal of Thundersports: you could take any car and engine combination of almost any age thanks to the simplicity of the class structure and go racing.
Entry lists of that era are fascinating as you see national racing heroes, ex-F1 racers and sportscar heroes all tackling what was a glorified club series, but for that short spell it worked tremendously. Had Brands not lost its grand prix, had Foulston not been killed at Silverstone….. could it have gone on indefinitely? Perhaps not as the older cars gravitated to historic sportscar racing and increased in value once again, but they would have been replaced by other alternatives.
Nowadays, of course, Sports 2000 racing is booming once more and the Historic Sports Car Championship has picked up the Thundersports name for its Pre-1980 series. What goes around, comes around… ■
“The death of John Foulston was the end of it”
Ian Flux
“It was a chance to drive some iconic race cars”
Mike Wilds