Feature: Rover Tomcats
Competition, manufacturer backing, top drivers and drama made the Dunlop Rover Turbo Cup one of the stand-out one-make series of the 1990s.
The Rover brand developed a significant sporting heritage starting in the 1960s in rallying with Roger Clark and then later with the lumbering SD1 model that Tom Walkinshaw, sometimes quite creatively, turned into a touring car winner in the early 1980s.
The first four-wheeled Rovers were built in 1904 and the company was later absorbed into the British Leyland conglomerate in the late 1960s. Traditionally, this was a brand that typified solid, dependable but terribly dull cars of the type that your dad, or even your granddad, would own.
Giving the brand a modern, sporty image was always an uphill struggle.
In the late 1980s, following the on-going industrial strife and some desperately bad cars that eventually killed British Leyland, the Rover Group emerged. Rather than go back into multi-marque competition, the brand decided to take the one-make race series route to try and develop a sporty flavour and a series for the 216GTI was introduced in 1991, replacing the MG Metro Turbo Cup. The 216 was a decent workhorse and a well-promoted race series that delivered some good racing from the crop of one-make aces who plied their trade wherever the best deals were to be had.
The Rover 200 Coupe was a new model introduced late in 1992 featuring the two-litre, 16-valve T Series engine. By bolting a turbo to the 200, the 220 Turbo was created and seemed a logical choice for a new one-make championship when the 216 reached the end of its three-year life at the conclusion of the 1993 season.
In reality, the 220 Turbo, often referred to as a Tomcat in deference to its original project code name, was a front-heavy tyre eater with a little over 200bhp on tap. However, for three seasons it was a worthy silver medallist to the allconquering TVR Tuscan Challenge at the top of the one-make pyramid in the UK.
What Rover did extremely well was the promotion, management and execution of the championship using the Roversport team that included
Chris Belton, Kevin Best and Robin Bradford. A significant budget, said to be around £4 million, made it a very attractive proposition for racers with good TV, hospitality, prize money and some top level dates including a British Grand Prix support race.
Martin Short was an early 220 convert after putting himself on the map with some feisty performances in the 216 GTI Cup. “The cars were subsidised and the whole package was there with good TV,” says Short. “It was well organised and well promoted. The 220s were a bit more expensive than the 216s and the transmission was more fragile. On reflection, the 216s were better as they were more robust.
“I ran the engine in on the 220 Turbo by putting road tyres and trade plates on it and I did 500 miles around the motorways. I even drove it to a party in London with my partner Michelle sitting on a bean bag in the passenger foot well.”
Predictably, they were stopped by the police on the way home and Michelle had to jump into the back, where seat belts were not mandated at the time.
Short managed to talk his way out of trouble by telling the policeman he was demonstrating the car!
In that inaugural season, it soon became apparent that one of the key title contenders was one-make ace Dave Loudon, who was probably the most successful one-make racer of the era. He’d won in pretty much everything and had won titles in Ford Fiestas, MG Metros and the Rover 216 Gtis. In fact, in the 216s he won two titles in three seasons and would repeat that achievement by winning the 220 title in both 1994 and ’95. Loudon was all about consistent pace and won the ’94 crown with winning a single race.
“You could certainly cover your costs in those days,” says Loudoun. “I had seven or eight fully-funded seasons and I normally had a deal to keep the prize money. There was sometimes a car as a prize at the end of the season.”
In one lucrative year, he ended the season £17,000 to the good.
“For me, it was a logical step up from the 216,” he adds.”i drove the development car that Tony Pond did a lot of the work on. It didn’t have a huge amount of power, around 200bhp, but it was 1200kg and front-wheel drive and 65% of the weight on the front axle. They were a bit heavy and you had to try and not kill the front tyres too quickly. Rover did an excellent job and really got behind it. It was a very good package and they helped people who were struggling on budget. It was all done very, very well.”
After 12 largely frantic races in 1994, Loudon beat Piers Johnson to the title by eight points as Alastair Lyall, Rob Schirle and Nick Carr rounded out the top five. Quality ran well down the order in the guise of drivers such as Short, Ian Flux, Chris Hodgetts, Andy Ackerley and Peter Baldwin.
While it was super-competitive at the head of the pack, the midfield could be a scary place and shunts were common. “It was a proper crash-fest!” says Flux, who did part seasons in both 1994 and ’95.
“The racing was fraught,” says Loudoun. “We had four starts one day at Brands Hatch – that was just chaos. In 1994 we had 32 cars and about 20 were driven by people who had won championships. There was a decent bunch of pedallers and we were all determined to win it. At the front we all
respected each other but it did get a bit hectic in the midfield.”
Short’s campaign in 1994 ended mid-season. “I wanted to race where money didn’t buy championships – I was naïve,” he says. “I did it all myself and that was the biggest problem. I was running on used tyres sometimes. I won the first race at Spa in 1994 and was leading the second race when the gearbox shredded itself. That gearbox failure was the final straw and I sold the car. Flux and Colin Blower were telling me to get into TVR Tuscans and that proved to be the turning point of my career, which ended up taking me to Le Mans. Rovers was a painful point but pivotal: you have to go through the pain to grow and develop. The level of competition accelerated me into being a better driver.”
Flux says that the cars were not always as even as the regulations intended. “I drove 19 different Rover Turbos, about half the grid. They were very front heavy. They all handled reasonably the same but there was so much variation in the cars.
“The discrepancy was in the turbo and the ECU. They started rotating the ECUS at random between cars, but there were some spare ones about to make sure the good ones didn’t get handed in! When we raced at Zandvoort I got the team to change engine overnight and went 1.5 seconds quicker on Sunday. I came into it from touring cars and it was like driving a blancmange and all of a sudden, my Peugeot 405 seemed delicate and nice!”
In 1995, the top three in the championship were the same as Loudon beat Lyall by three points, then Johnson, Stephen Day and Carr as others like Stephen Warburton, Troy Dunlop and Philip Burgess took top 10 places at the end of the season. However, for the final six races of the year, single-seater convert Richard Dean arrived with Ian Barnwell’s team and he won three times to set up a successful title bid in 1996.
After two seasons at the top with
Mike Southall’s Enterprise Racing team, Loudoun moved on for 1996. “The racing was serious with people like Lyall, Short, Johnson and Day and then it all went wild after the races. We had some great fun!”
Some of the best fun was had at the away weekend at Zandvoort as a support race to the Marlboro Masters Formula 3 event.
“We were pulling 150mph at Zandvoort on the run to Tarzan,” says Loudoun. “It was a really hot weekend and people were cooking engines sitting in the tow of the other cars.”
Another Zandvoort story was tyre consumption and one leading driver was reputed to have gone through 40 tyres in one weekend. “The first lap on new tyres was the one,” says Flux. “After that you picked up sand and you’d never repeat that lap. I remember when we went to Zandvoort, Mike Law ran the Orangesponsored car that I was driving and he had a very tall truck. It couldn’t get under a bridge near the track and he had to go and borrow trailers to get the kit into the track and abandoned the truck at a service area.”
As widely expected for a former Formula 3000 and International GT racer, Dean cleaned up in 1996, winning nine of the 16 races to win the title by more than 100 points from Day, Eugene O’brien, Lyall and Jeremy Cotterill. Dean’s success brought a new level of dominance to the championship and only in the second half of the season did Day give him some true opposition.
And that was it for the Rover Turbo Cup as Rover’s big-buck backing ended at the close of the 1996 season. Some of the cars went off to join the surviving 216 Gtis in a club-level series and many of the drivers headed to the fledgling MGF Cup when it opened in 1998.
Though it lasted just three years, the Rover Turbo Cup made its mark on the sport and on several careers. It also made quite an impact on tyre walls and crash barriers!