STRIKE BACK
With a company-wide strike threatening RAC honour in 1978, Boreham needed a backup plan. Welcome to ‘Dealer Team Ford’.
I will never forget the build-up to the 1978 RAC rally, for I had been drafted in to run a two-car team, at arm’s length for Boreham. Before then, Ford had seemed all set to win the 1978 World Rally Championship — until Boreham’s plans were then thrown into confusion by a company-wide strike, which had been called by the unions to back their rapacious pay demands.
Starting in late September, and heavily picketed, that strike eventually dragged on for nine weeks, and every AUEW-affiliated Boreham mechanic was forced to obey his union’s dictat. Pickets mounted in the lane leading to the airfield meant that there could be no movement of people, cars or parts in and out of the famous workshops.
That, at least, was the theory, but things did not quite work out like that, for all of Boreham’s plans were fluid, including the cancellation of entries in other events like Quebec and Corsica. For the motorsport enthusiasts at Boreham, even though they were union members, this was an impossible situation.
Except that Peter Ashcroft was quite determined that his team would take the start in November, to defend their record of having won the previous six — yes, six — RAC rallies, all of them in Boreham-developed Escorts. The drivers were all available, the expertise and experience was certainly available — it was merely a case of getting six cars built, and building a back-up team to keep them going. This, mind you, would all have to be achieved in just six weeks.
None of the workforce, especially the pickets, although superficially in agreement with their unions’ aims, could see much point in paralysing the rallying effort, so many of them proved to be surprisingly blind, or often seemed to abandon their posts, and there was much movement of cars and components before the strike officially began, and during the evenings, and weekends during the strike itself! Somehow — and the strategy and tactics involved seemed to change by the week — six competitive cars had to be made ready.
Making do
Workshop foreman, Mick Jones (who was not a union member) once told me what actually happened:
‘Before the strike we shipped the cars out to people like David Sutton and Haynes Of Maidstone, to prepare them. I came close to building one car in my own garage at home. Peter Ashcroft, Charles Reynolds and I used to raid the stores at night when the pickets weren’t looking...’
But it was all very much of a patch and mend operation. I will never forget the evening meeting before the start, in Birmingham, when Peter Ashcroft’s co-ordinator, Charles Reynolds,
“THE CARS WERE GOOD ENOUGH, THE DRIVER’S THE BEST IN THE WORLD, BUT COULD THIS BE THE LUCKY TEAM?”
looked up wearily from his brief and said, rather sadly: ‘Welcome to Dealer Team Ford’. He looked, and no doubt was, utterly exhausted by trying to make up a new team against impossible odds.
Ashcroft, Reynolds, Jones and engineer Allan Wilkinson could only watch as the private effort unfolded, but four of the cars finished first, second, third and seventh — and the strike finishing in the same week. All in all, the service train included eight privately-owned Transit vans, two Boreham Granada estates, two caravans and a Dunlop tyre truck.
Three pairs of cars were run by three team managers, in theory to operate independently of each other. David Sutton, Hannu and Ari, therefore, had to stay away from Haynes Of Maidstone, Roger and John Taylor, while Andrews Heat for Hire, Russell and Bjorn Waldegard were the other team, but that didn’t always work. At some service points everyone dived in to help everyone else. It could have been a shambles, but it worked well.
Dunlop, Boreham’s contracted tyre suppliers in fact, excelled itself, for they carried three different widths of M&S tyres, normal and wide A2s, racing slicks with simple patterns, smooth slicks, plus narrow snow tyres. Minilites were in 6 and 7 inch rim widths — all of them being 13 inch diameter.
Take a chance
But would it work? The cars were good enough, the drivers were the best in the world – but would this be a lucky team? Peter Ashcroft could only hope so. Every single one of the drivers thought so (and I talked to all of them) and thought that another victory was likely.
In the end, it all went well. In five days of rallying, from Birmingham to Birmingham, by way of all the forests of the Lake District, Keilder, Yorkshire and Wales, these so-called private Escorts proved that no-one had forgotten the experience gained by six previous RAC rally successes. We all knew how good a works Escort could be. Now it was possible for a private Escort to make its point as well.
It was Markku Alen’s Lancia Stratos which worried the Fords — and though Hannu Mikkola faced up to the Lancia, neither Waldegard, nor even Walter Rohrl’s Fiat 131 Abarth, could match their pace. In the end it was the five stages in Keilder which made the difference, where Alen progressively lost nearly three minutes to Mikkola’s Eaton’s Yale Escort. As Autosport’s Rupert Saunders later wrote: