SPACEFRAME ANGLIA CIRCUIT RACER
Cathedral Garage’s vividly green 105E Special Saloon featured in these pages in 2013, running a Vauxhall engine and a distinctive livery. Eight years later, it’s spawned a radical Cosworth-powered o spring.
With over 500 bhp and a lightweight, spaceframe chassis, this Anglia 105E — aka Green E — is taking no prisoners on the circuits of the UK.
The year 2013 may not seem that long ago, but it only takes a quick scan through the cultural highlights to reveal how rapidly the last eight years have slipped away. Daft Punk released Get Lucky, Elsa and Anna crooned their way to over $1bn at the box office, and British viewers tuned into Gogglebox for the first time. All things that seem like age-old elements of the social fabric now. Of course, as society evolves and these touchpoints stand firm, the day-to-day elements of our lives can transmogrify in surprising ways, and that’s very much the case with the vivid green 105E race car you’re seeing here.
Seasoned readers will most likely recognise the car, featuring as it did within these pages back in 2013. It was itself an evolution of a previous format; having enjoyed a season of racing in the Anglia’s first bright green iteration, its owner and creator — Steve Moss of Cathedral Garage in Suffolk — was hungry for more, and the pursuit of superior track prowess saw the creation of a full spaceframed chassis upon which to hang the angle-box silhouette. “There was never any doubt about going for the Anglia shape again,” he told us at the time, “and the green would be staying because it attracted attention.”
On trial
Today he recalls the process with a combination of nostalgic fondness and, perhaps, relief at not having to do it again: “There were many hours of trial and error with
that bodyshell,” he recalls. “The car was built by myself, my father Richard, and Martin Hubbard, aka Marty — our senior technician at Cathedral Garage. We made all of our own moulds from an Anglia 105E shell that we have here at the garage. I have to say it was a huge learning curve for us all, with lots of late nights and weekends, too many hours to mention really. It took months.”
Back in that second iteration which flexed before Michael Whitestone’s lens in the Get Lucky era, the car was running a JRE-built 2.4-litre Vauxhall XE, running back to a Sierra diff with Quaife straight-cut internals and a Quaife LSD, and that cunning bespoke spaceframe chassis was positively bristling with treats: all-round independent suspension with custom Rose-jointed wishbones, Protech coil-overs, repositioned steering rack, extended steering arms, whacking great AP Racing Pro5000+ brakes… it all added up to a formidable track monster. The spaceframe itself started as a heavily modified ladder chassis from a race-spec kit car, so the essence of being an Anglia is really more of a conceptual one than anything else. That said, elements of the body are lifted directly from the real deal, and there’s no denying the reaction when people see it on the track — it’s unmissably a 105E, and a pretty darned ferocious one at that. And this authenticity is key when you’re running in the Special Saloons race series; no matter how madcap or off-piste the chassis construct may be, it must have exactly the same wheelbase as the model it purports to be. Furthermore, while the track can be (and evidently, in this case, very much is) far wider than stock, everything above the window line needs to have the same dimensions as the production car. This is how the lurid green shell has arrived at its bonkers profile, looking for all the world like a shopper saloon that’s been dropped from a great height into the bigger underpants of a full-fat rallycross car. Those arches are just gargantuan, and serve as a glorious counterpoint to the slender pillars and airy glasshouse. (Well, perhaps we ought to call it a polycarbonatehouse these days.)
“WE MADE ALL OUR OWN BODY MOULDS FROM THE ANGLIA SHELL WE KEEP HERE AT THE GARAGE”
Evo 2
So what happened? Is this the same car, or something other? For the clearest explanation we must once again turn our attention to the music charts of 2013; not Get Lucky this time, but instead the presence in the album chart of The Offspring’s Days Go By. Those Orange County punks were right, days do have a habit of going by without you really realising; it was 2021 before they came out with the follow-up record, Let the Bad Times Roll, and by coincidence this was around the time that Steve was unveiling the new-wave remix of the Anglia. And yes, it is the same car… but again, in wildly different guise.
“What you’re seeing here is an evolution of the 2013 car,” Steve explains, “with a new turbocharged engine, larger wheels along with bigger arches to accommodate them, and new paintwork and livery.”
The new motor is the key change here, Steve opting to oust the Griffin and bring the
Neat digital display is mounted on the roof bar.
very essence of the machine back to the Blue Oval. “I wanted to move to a Cosworth YB, with the aim of achieving greater power,” he goes on. Forging your own path when it comes to this type of caper is not without its hurdles, naturally, and the team soon discovered that while the Anglia was more powerful, it was also entirely different in terms of increased weight and the distribution thereof. “With the car being heavier, it wasn’t as nimble on the track,” he says. “We found, for example, that we were 1 second slower at Oulton Park after the changes had been made. So the quicker engine, new gearbox and larger wheels didn’t really do what we set out to achieve at first.” Again, that’s just the nature of being a pioneer, and the team have had lots of fun tweaking the settings to optimise and improve the performance of the new set-up. The box-fresh transmission is a proper game-changer, being a meaty Quaife