OPEL MANTA 400
Russell Brookes and rally team reunited
It’s a cold, windswept day at the Curborough Sprint Course near Lichfield. Centre-stage is the remarkably original GM Dealer Sport rally Opel Manta 400, still in its striking Andrews Heat for Hire yellow and white livery. Surrounded by driver Russell Brookes, co-driver Mike Broad, mechanic Willie Willmott and team manager John Nixey, it’s clear that the car still elicits huge passion and dedication. All four had their own special part to play in the Manta’s success on its last ever outing, the 1987 Welsh International, sharing the pressures and keeping up the pace in making it triumphant.
With the exception of bending a suspension link and having to avoid a herd of inquisitive deer that strayed into the path of the speeding rally car, it all came good. Yet behind the smiles there were tears because this was the last time a Group B car would take part in the prestigious event. ‘I don’t know why we even bothered to enter the Welsh Rally in ’87 because in the event programme the organisers said we were bound to win,’ quips Broad with a grin.
‘The car still looks amazing,’ says Nixey admiringly. ‘It was my job as team manager to co-ordinate the return on investment for dealers. I had to sell them the notion of rallying to create good media publicity, stimulating strong showroom traffic and producing volume sales.’
The dealer agreement involved £5 being allocated to the GM Dealer Sport funds for every non-fleet car sold. ‘My proposal was for a race and rally programme, and naturally the dealers wanted success in both categories,’ adds Nixey. ‘The budget was a bit tight as we balanced the conflicting demands.’
Broad chips in: ‘At the time, the sales overall of non-fleet cars amounted to some 200,000 units, resulting in £1 million being channelled into the motor sport purse.’ Outside sponsorship added many more much-needed pennies to the pot.
Significantly, with the change in the company’s marketing strategy through the amalgamation of Opel and Vauxhall, there were understandable repercussions. Brookes says: ‘A lot of the dealers resented money being spent to promote Opel when they were Vauxhall dealers.’
Throughout the first few months of 1987 the team at GM Dealer Sport workshops in Milton Keynes were totally focused on preparing for the next rally, the Fram Filters Welsh International starting on 1 May. In charge of the workshops was chief engineer David Whitehead. Including Willmott there were four full-time mechanics, aided by Pip Bolton, a private electrician responsible for installing the additional wiring for auxiliary lights and instruments, and Roger Jenkins who took care of the team’s tyre requirements.
The Manta 400 had arrived in the workshops as a box of components from the Competitions Department in Rüsselsheim. It was Willmott’s task to make sense of the mountain of bits and assemble them into a rally-winning car. Meanwhile, the pressure was mounting to have it ready in time.
The body comprised doors, bonnet, bootlid, front wings and rear wheelarches fashioned from Kevlar, saving some 80kg. Power was from a Cosworth-designed 2.4-litre twin-cam four producing 275bhp at 7200rpm and built by Swindon Racing Engines. Capacity from the roadgoing 2.0-litre was increased using a long-stroke diesel crankshaft. Depending on final drive, it returned a five-second 0-60mph time.
‘The Manta 400 was a very good car,’ says Willmott, taking a closer look under the bonnet. ‘We might swap out the axle ratio depending on whether it was a tarmac or gravel event, but otherwise the suspension, engine and gearbox specs were untouched.’
Dressing the car’s interior was equally demanding and involved installing the specially shaped rally seats, a fabricated dashboard and the door pocket container to take Broad’s navigation paraphernalia. As he climbs into his familiar co driver’s ‘office’, he observes: ‘Since 1987 this seat has been relocated. Now, it’s too high and set to the wrong angle, an easy job for Willie to fix.’
‘The special dashboard arrived with the shell from the fabricators,’ continues Willmott. ‘The revcounter and supplementary
instruments were positioned in front of Russell and the speedometer ahead of Mike. I then added a row of toggle switches, each one labelled with Dymo Tape.’
Broad adds: ‘I was the team co-ordinator. Although I’m not mechanically minded I liaised closely with Willie and David Whitehead to ensure that work progressed on schedule. The clock was ticking.’
It was equally important that the dealers felt confident that the budget was being managed wisely. ‘We could see the car coming together,’ reflects Nixey. ‘Then we took it round to the dealers so they could see how their money had been spent.’
The total price? According to Willmott: ‘The cost to build this car totalled some £100,000, which included the basic car as it arrived from Rüsselsheim.’
By now Brookes is belted-up in the driver’s seat, and beaming: ‘For obvious reasons my nickname was “Little Legs”. For me to reach the pedals, Willie positioned the seat so I was almost poised over the steering wheel. This made the gap between the roll cage, A-post and seat very narrow, making entry and exit quite a struggle.’
While still inside, Brookes and Broad recall with feeling the Manta’s one major shortcoming: it was an appallingly hot car to drive. ‘When they homologated the Kevlar body panels, they forgot to include the full-flow ventilation grilles in the C-post,’ explains Broad. ‘We used this car twice on the Cyprus Rally and the temperature inside often rose to 55ºC. The only means of getting cold air into the cabin was through the tiny slots cut into the side windows. Nevertheless, the Manta is a big, comfortable car for driver and co-driver with adequate space for all our equipment.’
Brookes adds: ‘This was the last rally car
‘The Manta easily has a total of 275bhp on tap, while you could only use about 240bhp of an Escort’s power’
I drove without power steering. It was bloody hard work compared to a modern machine.’
Meanwhile, the pressure in the workshop was unrelenting. ‘In motor sport it never seemed to matter if you had six months or six days to the start of a major event,’ says Willmott. ‘We had to maintain the pace to ensure it arrived at the start on time. It wasn’t that deliveries from suppliers were held up, just that time seemed to run away. We’d often put in an all-nighter to have the car finished. We were always watching the clock.’
Recalling his early drives, Brookes admits to being impressed by the Manta 400’s traction: ‘The Escort was good but this car was much better, especially for a normally aspirated rear-wheel-drive machine. Much of this was down to the development driver, Rauno Aaltonen, who put in so much time in making the 400 perform properly.’
One aspect of car management Brookes and Broad practised continuously was wheelchanging. ‘We reduced the time taken to swap a wheel to 1min 20sec, and that was using a manual Bilstein jack,’ says Brookes. ‘If we had a puncture, we’d find a layby, have the wheel changed and be on our way again before the next car came through.’
‘The Welsh was one of the very few events when we talked quite a lot about tactics,’ Broad confides. ‘We’d competed in this event many times before and there were some stages, like the forest sections of Dyfi and Hafren, which Russell really liked. For these sections we put in a lot of effort improving our times by around 10-12 seconds. The Manta easily has a total of 275bhp on tap. In contrast you could only use around 240bhp of an Escort’s available power so we could drop a few seconds on stages we didn’t like.’
This was also the first year when the team was supported by Mobil Oil while the Championship was sponsored by global fuel company Shell Petroleum. Broad explains how this became an issue: ‘The clerk of the course was Vauxhall dealer Ron Evans. He wanted us to be car number 1, but Shell and Mobil were pushing hard for David Llewellin or Jimmy McRae to be first off the startline. In the event Ron got his way.’
As in previous years the Welsh International consisted of 36 stages with 30 hours of tough, competitive driving and just two short breaks of two hours each. Keeping to schedule time, the Manta was delivered to the startline at Cardiff Castle just in time.
The GM Dealer Sport service support vehicles comprised six Chevrolet vans imported from the United States. Essential radio communication between car and
support van was provided by rally coordinator Robin Turvey using a Home Office Communications Branch shipping channel. Since the rally route was located in the middle of the country, it did not interfere with the marine world.
‘I used the Circuit of Ireland to get myself to my peak,’ says Brookes, ‘but that was in a nimble, front-wheel-drive Opel Kadett so I spent the first few stages on the Welsh reacclimatising myself to the larger, rearwheel-drive Manta 400. I was adamant that 1987 was going to be my year on the Welsh.’
With spring sunshine and cheering crowds, it appeared as though Brookes’ and Broad’s luck was in the ascendant, but it was Pentti Airikkala who pressed into the lead once into Brechfa. It was shortlived, though, and Brookes pushed ahead in Stage 5 and stayed there until closing time.
Significantly, between Special Stage 2 and 3A a curious incident occurred. Brookes explains: ‘We were driving through an old mining village, Pont Henri, when an old lady stepped into the road and flagged us down, saying “Russell, you’ve never won the Welsh Rally because you haven’t carried a lucky lump of steam coal in the car.” At this point she thrust a piece through the open window. On the plaque is engraved “The last coal from Pont Henri Colliery 1861”. She became our number one fan in Wales.’
Willmott adds: ‘Mike did the routeplanning and the service van would arrive at the end of each stage ahead of the rally car to carry out servicing. The only exception was on Stage 6 when we had to change a suspension strut after the car hit a big bump.’
At the finish the Mantas came home first, second and third, with Brookes in the lead ahead of Airikkala and Andrew Wood. After 18 attempts, Brookes finished the 1040km event in 213min 25sec, showing complete mastery on the early forest sections and the tarmac stages later near Brecon.
In the fading light at Curborough, enjoying their last moments with the car, everyone agrees that keeping up the pace had been truly worth it. In 1986 the world was to see the last of the ferociously fast four-wheeldrive Group B rally cars. Following a series of fatal accidents involving spectators and competitors, the international rallygoverning body decreed that cars such as the Audi Quattro and Ford RS200 were too dangerous and at a stroke they were banned from all FISA-authorised events. Teams could only participate in the Group A semiproduction specification class and the World Rally Championship for 1987 was redefined.
Meanwhile, the UK’s RAC MSA agreed a concession to allow two-wheel-drive Group B cars with less than 300bhp – such as the 400 – into the Open Championship for an extra six months as long as it was a non-FISA event. ADZ 4330 was sold to a private museum in Switzerland where it languished for nearly 20 years.
Invariably, works rally cars get modified, but when the present owner found this car he was amazed by its originality. It retained its TRX wheels and metric tyres… and there was even one of Mike Broad’s old cigarette packets hiding in the door pocket.