The weirdest Formula Ford ever
Halos, fins, aeroscreens – cockpit protection devices are commonplace today. But back in the 1980s, Hugo Spowers was ahead of the game with his unique Formula Ford design, although its windscreen was created for a very different reason
Few cars blur the aesthetic lines quite so much as the Formula Ford Prowess. A Perspex windscreen wraps around its scuttle and sweeps over the driver’s head, but it doesn’t form a complete roof, so the car is neither a true open or closed-cockpit racer.
It only adds to the Prowess’s divisive charm and popularity, and some might say the bizarre creation has looks only a mother could love. Others would argue that particularly the secondgeneration example still looks futuristic some three decades on.
The car takes its name from its creator, only not in the conventional Ferrari or Lamborghini sense. Hugo Spowers – Prowess being an anagram of his surname – studied engineering at the University of Oxford and during that time co-founded the Dangerous Sports Club. Naturally, getting involved in motorsport was the next step when he graduated.
“I never really had enough money to do much racing,” reflects Spowers. “But I did engineering at university because I wanted to design racing cars, I wanted to improve the efficiency of engines and I always wanted to drive them.”
He started out as a race mechanic at ADA Engineering, working on a shoestring budget to build its Group C2 car, but left the team in 1983. That same season, Spowers received a commission from the owner of the remaining assets of Sark – with whom Donald Macleod won the 1979 Formula Ford Festival. James Howe had bought the Sark name and wanted to relaunch the once-victorious marque with an assault on Formula Ford 2000.
Howe turned to Spowers to design the challenger.
The “huge opportunity” remained largely untapped, however, when the funds didn’t come together. As a result, Spowers went his own way, taking the work he’d done on the Sark and setting about constructing his own machine for 1986. This led to the firstgeneration Prowess FF1600, complete with its unusual windscreen.
Although Spowers often set out to improve an engine’s efficiency, that was strictly limited within the constraints of the FF1600 regulations. If he didn’t have much wiggle room within those parameters, then he could improve the way the car cut through the air, hence the slippery screen.
“I remember the first time I drove it at Donington and I’d broken my leg; I had to ask the doctors to take my plaster cast off so I could do it,” Spowers says. “We used to look through the windscreen and it was a pretty cheap and cheerful attempt. There wasn’t distortion, but it was less than perfect. This happened with the car I built the following year in 1987, which I spent more money on too!”
The distortion from the Prowess’s screen, perversely, gave Spowers more and more confidence behind the wheel. That meant he could wildly adjust the car’s set-up.
“[The screen] basically made the car feel as though it was too soft,” he says. “That was extraordinary! You just wanted to put stiffer and stiffer springs on. It was weird. If you took the bodywork off and drove it without, suddenly it felt firm as can be.”
The windscreen was, of course, the most striking aspect of the Prowess compared to its FF1600 contemporaries. But the
“I’D BROKEN MY LEG; I HAD TO ASK THE DOCTORS TO TAKE MY PLASTER CAST OFF SO I COULD DRIVE”
innovations didn’t stop there, as the car also experimented with a hydraulic ‘anti-dive’ link that connected the front and rear suspension. Equivalent to an anti-roll bar, instead it ran down the length of the car to stop it from pitching under braking. Unfortunately, this was another innovation that a sparsity of funds would put paid to – a homemade master cylinder leaked persistently.
The expectation would be that the Prowess’s additional bodywork plus the trick suspension hampered performance as a result of the weight penalty. But apparently not, with the Prowess comfortably under the 420kg weight limit of the time.
“I had a huge amount of lead in that car to meet the minimum weight,” adds Spowers. “Howard Drake [maker of Lasers] looked at my chassis when I first had it down at Brands Hatch because it was very rigid… he said it was built like a brick shithouse and was surely going to be overweight. I said no, and I had 12kg of ballast in there.
“Because of the very low seating position I had the rollcage inside the bodywork and the chassis itself was very deep. That meant the roll hoop was very short. I didn’t have any aerodynamic problems and it was just a one-inch tube whereas most other chassis were two inches.”
The complexities hadn’t impacted weight, but nor had the thinner tubing adversely affected the Prowess’s strength should it have crashed.
“I did a torsion test of my car, we spent a long time setting it up and we had 2600Ib ft per degree,” Spowers recalls. “According to John Crossle, that was about four times better than your average
Formula Ford at the time. By having it fully triangulated and with very light tubes, although it was very strong it was very lightweight.”
Of course, with the Prowess the defining feature is its appearance and why it remains so divisive. As veteran FF1600 racer Wil Arif says: “It looks like a helicopter with no rotors on it, that’s the only way I can describe it!” Unfortunately for Arif, however, the first-generation Prowess more than just visually resembled a helicopter.
“I got bruised each side quite badly when I drove the car down the straight towards the chicane [at Donington] because the wind blew it from one side to another,” he says. “It literally would leap from this way and that. The thing was, the rear was made too flat and upright. It was predictable though, it steered in nicely but it was definitely a prototype. The Prowess was unusual. It was the most outrageous car I’ve ever driven!”
For the following year, Spowers developed the package. This time around the bodywork received much more attention. He worked in conjunction with an American university, which built bicycles for speed record attempts. The resultant bodywork proved extremely efficient.
“It was very slippery indeed,” Spowers says. “The radiators were tiny, only about a quarter of the size of most contemporary Formula Fords. They could stay cool but they didn’t like sitting still for very long.
“I put a lot of effort into the duct design and the intake and exhaust. I managed to get out of the Government a report done in the 1950s, which was protected by the Official Secrets Act for 20 years, about the Royal Aircraft Establishment’s post-war analysis of cooling system design for aircraft. It was just so good in its analysis about how you can reduce the [drag] losses of your cooling system by 90% if you’re careful about it.”
The 1986 Prowess only raced once at Brands Hatch, while the 1987 car never made a competitive outing and so didn’t get to prove its worth. It did, however, get tested when finances allowed. One such outing at Silverstone proved the dynamic capabilities of the revised bodywork as test driver Derek Higgins clocked 127mph – the same figure as the works Van Diemen he’d driven the same day. After the test the Prowess, which was running “certainly not a special engine”, was found to have a bent exhaust valve meaning in all likelihood it could have bettered the Van Diemen.
Later in 1987, the Prowess was displayed at the Motorfair exhibition at Earls Court where it drew the interest of then racer Rob Wilson. Now more famed for his work coaching most of the Formula 1 field, Wilson offered his services for free and became the main test driver.
“It really was a testbed for Hugo’s brain that car, and to his credit it was just so good to have something different,” says Wilson. “The Perspex was a bit wallowy, so visibility wasn’t always high on the list! It wasn’t quite as clear as it might have been, but we were used to that. You focus straight through that. When you’ve been doing the Daytona 24 Hours enough times and the windscreen is misted up, you’re using a rubber broom to clear it on the banking so those sorts of things were more normal back in the day.
Slightly distorted Perspex didn’t affect you at all.”
Having run the car in open test days across the UK, it would be natural to expect that the Prowess garnered plenty of attention up and down the pitlane for its distinctive shape. But not so, as Wilson recalls: “It was an unusual design, it did look a bit strange but don’t forget people had seen six-wheeled Tyrrells. It was a slightly more inventive time so people would just wait and see what was going to happen. There were always odd things that were going on. It would look stranger now because these days everything is so standardised, more to the pity.
“I think you need these characters to do something different. Hugo, I still believe he can add to contemporary racing, he has one of the most inventive minds.”
But Spowers decided to step away from motorsport as he found racing increasingly difficult to justify alongside his environmental concerns. Subsequently, Spowers established Riversimple, makers of the Rasa hydrogen-powered car, which has run up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed and its design earned Spowers the Royal Automobile Club’s prestigious Simms Medal in 2016 for outstanding contribution to motoring innovation.
While the Prowess might not have starred on the race track and is fondly remembered as an oddball of its time, Spowers still has an avenue for his creativity and can attempt to emulate his motorsport idols.
“I put a lot of effort, and always do, into simplicity and that’s the goal,” he says. “The focus is on keeping the parts-count down and on simple and elegant solutions. Colin Chapman is near unto God as far as I’m concerned, from that point of view.”
No one is suggesting that the Prowess was a game-changer like many of Lotus’s road and race cars. Nevertheless, for their quirks of design the two examples remain rightly celebrated for adding to the pioneering spirit that motorsport encourages.
Spowers, now 60, still owns both cars but says they’re in a “pretty sorry state” – the 1986 car is without an engine and the 1987 car is missing bodywork and hasn’t been started in a quarter of a century.
When Formula Ford celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017, the phone rang for Spowers to bring the cars out, but the commitments of Riversimple meant time didn’t allow for their restoration. But if nothing else, it shows there’s certainly an appetite for both cars to be seen on track once more.