ADE BRANNAN CONTRIBUTOR
The beating heart of this impeccably crafted 1003 is its National Hot Rod-spec XE motor. And the soul? That's the firm and unbreakable bond between father and son.
Ade met up with Steve and Ryan Brown to photograph Steve’s now-finished Pop, and it’s turned out great.
There’s a clear and inescapable truth behind why so many of us choose to putter around in classic cars. On paper, it makes no sense – they’re slower and less well-equipped than modern cars, less refined, more likely to break down or present us with huge bills at MoT time, less economical, less comfortable… why do we do this to ourselves? Well, for many, it’s because of what our parents drove. It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that if your folks had, say, a Fiesta SuperSport or a Mk1 Mexico when you were growing up, and you find yourself buying such a thing in later life, you’re forging a clear bond between your grown-up reality and the misty-eyed halcyon days of youth. You were cheery and carefree, bundled up in the back of that then-modern motor, off on a family holiday or to visit your Grandma at Christmas… those rose-tinted memories can become part of your daily commute or weekend shopping trips, simply by adding the constant factor of the car in question.
A further development of this way of thinking is to share the passion with your own offspring once they come of age. “This 100E has been a real father-and-son project,” beams proud owner, Steve Brown. “I never had that kind of relationship with my father, so it’s really important to me that this car was built closely with my son, Ryan. We’re a team!”
Ryan himself has a particularly cool car — a turbocharged Mk2 Fiesta in black, sporting all kinds of unique mods. In fact, it was the act of this dynamic double-act building that car together which slightly halted progress on the 100E. They just got carried away with the details, they’re perfectionists, and the Fiesta had to be done right; scooping myriad magazine features on completion, it was plain that these fellas know what they’re about, and it was time to crack on with the 100E with gusto. So was it the usual story — a knackered shell saved from the crusher and granted rebirth?
“No, actually,” says Steve. “This was a really nice car when I bought it. It had been in a mate’s garage about 15 years, it was lovely — solid shell, original wings… it was
his dad’s car, and probably too good to cut up if I’m honest, but you know how it goes. It only needed a new carb to get it going again.” Of course, it was never destined to stop at just a new carb. These guys have form and, with a history of drag racing stretching back decades, Steve was always going to build something racy.
Drag destiny
“I used to own Stan and Paula Atkin’s old drag 100E back in the ’90s,” he explains, “and I’ve always had a thing for these cars. About nine years ago I built a new garage on the side of my house, and the first thing I did was to buy this 100E to go in it!”
The plan from the off was to fit a spicier engine because, well, when you’re used to drag-racing, an old sidevalve just isn’t going to cut it. And if you’re swapping something gnarlier into one of these cars you’ve got to chop the bulkhead, so you might as well make it something good… although interestingly, given his past with running Rover V8s, Steve decided a more-modern four-pot was the way to go this time. “I put a dummy XE in there first of all, but then Ryan’s Fiesta changed my mind and I decided to fit a Zetec,” he laughs. “The reason I went back to XE was that I have a mate who’s into National Hot Rods, and he knew of a race engine up for sale — it was running 246 bhp and had an amazing spec. I just had to have it.”
Steve cites this purchase as the turning point of the project. It was never intended to be a show car, but having spent a small fortune on the full-house Hot Rod motor (“I could have bought a really nice car for what I paid for that engine,” he winces), it was time for the rest of the car to level-up.
“I knew I had to go the whole hog, so it turned from a cheap project into, er, not quite such a cheap one,” he grins. So despite the car’s inherent solidity, it was stripped down, put on a spit and taken back to bare metal; it was then sandblasted, and treated to three coats of paint and three coats of lacquer, including the underside. The plan initially was to paint it black to match Ryan’s Fiesta, although it had always been a blue car and Steve was keen to maintain the thread of that story, so he opted for a modern BMW shade of Yas Marina Blue. This is the colour you’d find on the new M3 and M4, and it’s not something we’ve seen on a 100E before; there’s a subtle metallic glimmer to it in the right light, and it suits the cute three-box shape down to a tee.
“It was never meant to be this clean,” says Steve. “We’ve taken it to concours shows and accidentally picked up top 10 trophies!” That’s not to say it’s a pampered show queen of course, Steve’s focus has always been on function over form — and with a form this good, you can
“MY MATE KNEW OF A NATIONAL HOT ROD-SPEC XE ENGINE WITH 246 BHP FOR SALE; I HAD TO HAVE IT”
imagine how startling the functionality is. That all-singing motor is mated to an uprated Type-9, running back through a single-piece prop to a Squires custom-built Atlas double-pinned and narrowed axle with a Gripper LSD, and the tail end really loves to play! It’s all custom throughout the chassis too, with unique suspension at either end joining the timeless favourite Princess four-pot fronts with Cosworth brakes out back. The wheels are a masterstroke — genuine 1980s Compomotive splits rebuilt with Autocross barrels. You can see why it’s drooled over by the old guard and the up-andcomers alike.
Hard-fought
The entire car is a riot of detail, from the colour-coded dry sump tank hidden in the inner wing to the authentic GT/E boot badge in the correct Vauxhall Astra font. And as a fusion of form and function, Steve must be spending every second of every day in it, right?
“Have you ever driven a 100E?” he laughs. “There’s no power steering, no air-con, it’s hard work — particularly with the triple-plate clutch. I might swap that for a standard clutch actually, to make it friendlier for road use — the triple-plate can always go back in for the strip. But yeah, it gets used for more than just shows; its maiden voyage was down to McDonald’s — me and Ryan in convoy, father and son.” And that is essentially the point of this project — yes, it’s impeccably finished to a show-winning shine, it’s ludicrously fast and absurdly agile, but most of all it’s a bond between dad and lad. The passion has passed to a new generation, and when these guys go out cruising it’s about more than just brutal horsepower. It’s about family.