HISTORIC TOURING CARS
A VERY COOL SWEDE
When fans of touring car racing, and the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) in particular, think of Swedish marque Volvo, the picture that usually pops into their heads is of a curb-hopping 850T station wagon being driven by Rickard Rydell or Jan Lammers.
The car that garnered the ultimate goal of the manufacturer’s multi-year, multimillion-krona investment — the 1998 BTCC crown — was actually one of the newgeneration S40 models, not one of the big, boxy 850T station wagons and sedans that Tom Walkinshaw Racing started with back in 1994.
Christchurch businessman and keen Historic-category competitor Lindsay O’donnell owns and races one of those S40s, R7-004, a car that Brit Kelvin Burt drove to 10th place in in the 1997 BTCC.
Although he was not especially looking for a Volvo S40, that’s what a contact in the UK turned up, Lindsay says, but “as so often happens with these things, I actually had a connection with the car and team.”
The year was 1999 and — after winning the BTCC title in 1998 — Rickard Rydell returned for what would be his final year with Volvo and the S40.
Found it
O’donnell was in the UK on holiday and, at a round of the BTCC, bought a model of Rydell’s S40 and sought the Swede out to sign it.
Genuine works cars like R7-004 don’t come up for sale every day. However, Lindsay’s contact in the UK, Johnny Westbrook, was restoring one for his own collection and had been dealing with a Swedish collector, Volvo race car collector and authority Gregor Petersen, who owned the other two 1997 cars.
“My timing couldn’t have been better,” remembers Lindsay. “He had just been saying to Johnny, ‘look, I’ve got two cars, but I only need one — if you can find a buyer’.”
Bought it
As it turned out, the car that Lindsay was offered — and which he bought sight unseen on Westbrook’s expert recommendation — also has some blue-riband local provenance.
“At the end of the 1997 BTCC season, the car was shipped out to Australia where Jim Richards drove it to third place — with race wins at both Phillip Island and Eastern Creek — in the 1998 Australian Super Touring Championship,” says Lindsay.
As Volvo then shipped out its then-latest car — R8-002 — for the 1998 AMP Bathurst 1000, which Rydell and Richards won, R7-004 was relegated to second-car duty, with Mark Adderton finishing sixth in the following year’s Australian Touring Car Championship, and Craig Baird and Matt Coleman third in the Bob Jane T-marts Super Touring 500 race at Bathurst.
Job done, R7-004 was then shipped back to Sweden, where it was effectively parked up — bar the odd day-release for promo work — before being sold to Gregor Petersen a couple of years later.
Racing again
Having only ever raced rear-wheel-drive cars before — with H-pattern gearboxes to
boot — Lindsay says that driving a pukka factory front-wheel-drive, sequential-gearbox-equipped S40 super tourer took a bit of getting used to.
“The thing you learn fairly quickly with these front-wheel-drive cars is that you have to have confidence that if you keep your foot in it, it will pull itself out of a corner,” he says.
“It’s also very hard getting enough heat in the rear tyres in the first couple of laps, so it’s a bit of a balancing act in terms of how hard you can push it, because, if you lift, around you will go.”
With a couple of years’ experience driving R7-004 in the Archibalds Historic Touring Car Series, Lindsay is now much more of comfortable pushing both his and the S40’s limits and remains very happy with his purchase.
“Oh yes,” he says, with obvious feeling. “I love it, it’s a great car.”
“The thing you learn fairly quickly with these front-wheel-drive cars is that you have to have confidence that if you keep your foot in it, it will pull itself out of a corner”