The man who launched 100s of careers is quizzed by the MN readers
Matt James talks to the legendary Van Diemen founder, who shaped junior single-seater racing for more than 30 years and simply can’t leave motorsport alone
Although he’s not sure of the exact numbers, Ralph Firman thinks that his Van Diemen company created more than 5000 racing cars under his stewardship from 1973 though to 2002, so it is not unfair to claim that he’s helped launch 100s of motor racing careers.
Van Diemen was the blue riband manufacturer in the heady days of Formula Ford 1600, which was an intense playground in the 1970s through to the 1990s. The Norfolk firm claimed more than 200 wins in the British Formula Ford category and has lifted the spoils at the end-of-season knockout-style Formula Ford Festival more than 20 times when it was in its pomp. It is a record unmatched by any other constructor.
Not only was Ralph Firman the boss of the company until he sold it to Elan Technologies, he was always at the race meetings, crouching next to the cockpit of a car and taking feedback from its drivers and stretching his engineering grey matter.
Firman was probably more connected with what was happening on the track than any other boss of a car constructor, and the factory-run (and usually Duckhamscoloured) Van Diemen was the plum drive to have in Formula Ford 1600 for almost 30 years. As well as fighting on track, he helped a raft of privateer teams achieve results they might only have dreamt of – it was all good for business.
While Formula Ford was his heartland, Firman’s company took a big bite of the cherry when single-make formulas were the new kids in town in the 1990s. Van Diemen built numerous different chassis for overseas markets, branched out into batch builds of Formula First, Multisports sportscars and Formula Palmer Audi. There had been Formula Renault cars and even a Formula 3 machine too.
The spark of invention hasn’t left
Firman and, a few years after selling his firm, he was back in the Formula Ford paddock and his company produced the original BRDC Formula 4 cars.
The Ralph Firman Racing legacy continues to shine today in Formula
Ford 1600 with the RFR chassis.
Firman took time out of his busy schedule helping racers get ready for the 2021 campaigns to answer the MN readers’ questions.
Question: Did you ever want to be a racing driver yourself, or was it all about building the cars for you?
John Charles
Via email
Ralph Firman: “Goodness me, no, I never even thought of it. I figured out very early in my life that I wasn’t ever going to be a racer. I always wanted to be a mechanic and deal with that side of it.”
MN: So how did the motor racing passion come about? Where was the spark?
RF: “I had two slices of luck, actually. Straight from school, I went to work in a garage: Cattermoles in Ipswich. I used to cycle eight miles there and eight miles back every day. The guvnor, Mr Cattermole, had at least 400 used cars on the books at any one time. They could range from anything from a Rolls-Royce down to a Fiat 500. Back in those days, you would do everything in the workshop, even down to rebuilding an entire engine. We did all sorts of repairs – rusty chassis or the finer nuts and bolts. The foreman there was kind enough to take me under his wing a bit. He used to make sure that he gave me as much variety in the jobs as he could, so I worked on many different areas of all types of cars, which was a brilliant grounding for me. That was the first bit of luck.
“Then the second bit was that my sister, Jennifer, fell in love with [racing driver] Jim Russell. He was running the racing drivers’school at Snetterton. One day, he asked me if I had ever thought about running racing cars. I thought immediately ‘well, that sounds a lot cleaner than the job I am doing right now’!
“Jim took me on at the racing school, where our job was to prep all the cars ready for the day’s new intake. The cars were based in Downham Market, and we would ferry the cars backwards and forwards from there to do all the work.
“I was lucky again, because Rudy Gates was the chief mechanic at the school. He was a really old-fashioned mechanic. He knew all about the technicalities and the design of the cars. He knew everything. He taught me an awful lot. I was just extremely fortunate.
“Then the school moved to Snetterton and I was lucky once more as I was taken on to be a mechanic for this young up-andcoming driver Emerson Fittipaldi when he was doing Formula 3 [in 1969 when the Brazilian won the MCD Lombard Championship] in a Jim Russell-run car and I also looked after his Formula 2 car for a bit. It was fine and I went on with
Jim for a few years before I decided I wanted to run my own workshop and I thought I could get one nearby, so that is what I went and did.”
MN: Why did you want to run cars? That is a bit of a leap from being a mechanic…
RF: ‘Well, I could see there was more money in it, and I figured there was more to be made than what I would have been earning at the school! When we started out, we did testing work for people that already had cars and we re-prepared them, essentially. Then I got Dave Walker to come along for a fiver a day and test those cars, with the customer there too, to make sure they were OK.”
MN: So he was the first official Van Diemen works driver…sounds like he was on the books...
RF: “Well, I suppose! He was in Formula 1 at the time, but he was happy of the extra money. That business was all good, but one day I was thinking. Lotus had decided not to build a new Formula Ford car. I had close connections with them because
I had built Emerson’s F3 car in their development shop so I knew what was going on, and they had decided not to build any production racing cars at all, if you like. So in 1972, I decided it was the right time for me to create my own Formula Ford car.
“This seems like a common theme, but here we go again: another slice of luck. There was a young chap from Canada who had come over to take part in the Jim
Russell Racing Drivers School, and he said he would like to drive the car I was building when it was finished. He paid up front for his car [the very first car, the Van Diemen FA73], and a whole season’s running budget. That was very helpful…”
Question: Is it true that you invented the jet washer?
James Richardson
Via email
RF: “Not quite! I had a partner in the early days, Ross Ambrose [father of Aussie Supercars champion Marcos]. He had bought a Merlyn F3 car and he was racing it a bit in the early 1970s but when he saw what I was doing, he said he would like to be a part of it. He had his own designs too, but nothing to do with motorsport. He had designed a high-pressure washer machine. It would go on a gantry on garage forecourts with a high-pressure hose, soap suds and all of that kind of thing.
“I thought that was great, because we could make those in the summer while we manufactured racing cars in the winter. Give Ross his dues, he actually got one of these gantries – with 250Psi though it – up and running. But, for whatever reason, after a while it just didn’t feel right to me.
“Ross realised that the forecourts [where Ambrose could sell a high-powered car washing machine] didn’t operate in the same way as they had Down Under, where he was from. Back in his home, they were all independently run and owned. In the UK, you had to go through Esso or BP to get a slice of the cake. He gave up on it, but he didn’t spot the other uses it might have had, like farmers who might want to clean their ploughs and so on.” MN: This leads us to why the very first
Van Diemen is called the FA73 [Firman Ambrose], rather than every subsequent car being the RF [Ralph Firman], doesn’t it?
RF: “That’s correct. It wasn’t going to work between us, so we decided to part on good terms. I was on my own from that point, which is why it became the RF designation for the cars. It was a shame we went our separate ways, really because I liked Ross a lot. I ended up running Ross’s son, Marcos, in British Formula Ford in 1998, so the circle was complete, I guess.
“It was a great shame that Marcos didn’t win the Formula Ford Festival in 1998 for us. He had a good lead, and it was a little circlip that hadn’t been fitted in correctly that pulled the bearing out of the gear linkage. I felt very sorry for him.”
Question: How important was [Van Diemen designer] Dave Baldwin to your career? Did you ever argue? Russell Scobbie
Via email
RF: “David was totally important to me. I had known David from my time at Lotus prepping Emerson Fittipaldi’s F3 car. He had been working there, and I knew he was good. Van Diemen had a bit of a low when we got to 1976 because Hawke – which was run by Dave Lazenby, again ex-Lotus – created a really good chassis.
“I realised that it was no good to keep on modifying what we already had. We needed something new.
“I went up to meet David, who was working in Lichfield at the time, and we sat there and discussed it until 0300hrs. Eventually, he agreed to come and work with me and help me build a new car.
“He wasn’t reluctant but he had already got a job, I think it might have had something to do with Formula 1, but it took him a while to weigh things up.
“We always got on ever so well. We are still good friends now. I asked him to do this one new car for me [for 1977, to fend off Hawke] and when he had, things started to look up – in terms of on the track and for Van Diemen as a whole. I wanted to keep David involved, so I offered him a 10% share in the company to stay with us. He took that on, and that is how we got established, really.
“We were going to build a Formula Atlantic car too at that time, which David was very involved with. But the people in the USA who wanted the car didn’t meet the agreement we had made and so we stopped that. That was the point I asked him to come and work for me full-time because we were looking to do other cars that weren’t just Formula Ford cars. And he did, he joined.
“I would have input into the designs and have my point of view, but they were his designs, so it was done his way. We would look at things and I would say that I wanted this or that, but then David would point out how much my ideas might cost: so he always won! These are customer cars, after all. I would say that we never had an argument, but we had plenty of discussions. I had plenty of ideas on the mechanical side of things, but he had his ideas too but I never really interfered. The relationship just worked. He worked with us right up until we sold the company,”
Question: Did you know just how good Ayrton Senna was going to be when you ran him in Formula Ford 1600 in the works Van Diemen team in 1981? James Hilton
Via email
RF: “We had been running Chico Serra,
and he kept going on about Ayrton Senna da Silva. I could never pronounce his first name, so we just called him ‘Quick Man’. We used to use the Doric restaurant in Attleborough a lot. We took Ayrton in there to do the first deal and he was a tough guy to negotiate with – which I never held against him. We eventually did a deal and I got him in one of my cars.” MN: Did you spot his level of ability from the very first time he sat in one of your cars?
RF: “I suppose I did, I knew he was good, but it took him a couple of races to shake off all the habits he had learned from karting – but that is the same with a lot of drivers. A lot of the drivers expect a car to do what a kart would when they first drive it. It is a traditional problem. They seemed to think that you can barrel into a corner and turn the wheel but with only 100bhp that would kill the momentum of the car. So Ayrton had to get that out of his system, but it didn’t take him long. Once he got it, away he went!
“We knew that he was a fantastic driver, but I wouldn’t say that we marked him out to go on and become the great champion he was. I wouldn’t have been thinking ahead on that.”
Question: How disappointed were you that Ayrton Senna walked away from the Formula Ford Festival in 1981? He could have won it in one of your cars...
Jon Wood
Via email
RF: “He had a bit of a personal problem and he went back to Brazil, and that was why he missed the Formula Ford Festival in October
“At the end of the season, he said he would let me know on a specific date whether or not he would come back over to take part in the Formula Ford Festival. He said ‘well, you didn’t contract me for that event’. I just assumed it would be pretty obvious that he would come back and do it, it never crossed my mind that he wouldn’t. As the event got closer, I started to get a bit panicky and I don’t know why I never built another car, just to be on the safe side. I hadn’t heard from Senna, and so I asked Tommy Byrne if he would like to do the Festival in that car.
“On the very day that Ayrton has said he would be in touch, he phoned me to tell me he was at the airport ready to come over and do the Festival. I had a problem! I had to tell him that I had already offered the car to Byrne and I didn’t need him. I don’t think he was angry.
“But then, a few weeks later in early January, he phoned again and said
‘Ralph, I want to do Formula Ford 2000 in 1982’. So that time I told him to get on the plane, come over and we would talk about it.”
MN: In Mark Hughes’s Tommy Byrne book, Tommy says there was a bit of needle between him and Senna because Ayrton accused him of stealing his Festival drive…
RF: “Well, if anything that was my fault. If I had waited until the very day that Ayrton said he would be in touch, then he would have been in the car at Brands Hatch. I had to make sure I was covered for the Formula Ford Festival.”
Question: What qualities did you look for in a young driver? Apart from enough budget, obviously…
Malcolm Munt
Via email
RF: “You would obviously assess his driving, but the attitude towards it was also important. Put it another way, once or twice – or maybe 10 times! – a young driver would come along and declare that they wanted to drive for my team. I would ask them how many races they had won and they’d turn around and say ‘none yet, but I have never had a spin or a crash’. I would straight away say ‘thanks for coming along but that is the end of the conversation, goodbye’. That showed me that they clearly weren’t trying hard enough.”
MN: You often had two or three of the season’s best talents in the works
Van Diemen team. Was the man management difficult?
RF: “There was one or two incidents but it wasn’t about rows so much. Take [Mexican racer] Alfonso Toledano, for example. I mean he was good, very good, but it was just unfortunate that he was in Formula Ford 1600 at the same time as Ayrton Senna [1981]. His mother came over with his lawyer and they wanted to know why Alfie wasn’t winning. I said to Alfie and his mother and the legal guy, ‘look, what you should do is just learn from Ayrton. You are good and quick, but you are probably lacking a little bit in completeness as a driver and thinking things through, and you can learn that from Senna’.
“They went away and they weren’t very happy with that, but about four or five years later, they came to see me at the workshop. They had bought me a lovely glass replica of a Ferrari road car and they said they were there to apologise and they’d understood what I had been on about all those years beforehand. It was a lovely touch.”
Question: There seemed to be some animosity between Van Diemen, Swift and Reynard in the 1980s in terms of trying to be the top dog in terms of chassis. Was it hammed up in the press? Or was it real?
Russell Scobbie
Via email
RF: “My philosophy was always to fight like crazy on the track and then we would all share a beer in the bar afterwards. We kept all the battles to the circuit, but we were friends away from that. I always stuck to that, and nothing was ever personal.
“It was intense and stressful on the track though. We were testing, testing, testing all the time like you could do back then, and we were looking for any small advantage to put one over on the other manufacturers.
“But you have to remember, we were fighting for our livings back then. The old adage of win on Sunday, sell on Monday was particularly true for the manufacturers of Formula Ford 1600 chassis.”
Question: Which one win are you most proud of?
Danny Roberts
Via email
RF:
“I am not much of one for reflection Each win was important, but as soon as the chequered flag has fallen, you are immediately looking ahead an trying to think of ways to win the next one. I never wallow in those things, I have never really thought of it in those terms.”
Question: Which was more important to you: was it winning the British Formula Ford title, or was it winning the Formula Ford Festival?
Michael Hills
Via email
RF: “Well both! But the Formula
Ford Festival was the thing that went out worldwide. If you won that, then everybody got to hear about it around the globe. The publicity was huge so in my mind, that was the big one. It helped open up the overseas markets to us, so there was no shop window like that.”
Question: Which car are you most proud of building?
Graham Lister
Via email
MN:
You have always said to MN that you were pleased with the Formula 3 car, which you built for 1992 which
Jason Plato and Julian Westwood drove… RF: “I was proud of that F3 car, but if we just talk about Formula Ford, I was proud of the RF81 in 1981.
“David did a great car there, and the next one would be the 1991 car, the
RF91. It is not that the others were bad, but I liked those ones particularly.
“There was also the RF85, which was a really important car for us. I had been over in America the previous year for the Runoffs [the benchmark for up-andcoming talent in the USA], the Swifts had absolutely creamed us. I came straight back to David and I told him that they had taken Formula Ford to a whole new generation. It had its own cast oil tank and they had extended the rear with the gearbox and what-have-you. I knew they had gone way in front of anything we had designed up to that point, so
I told David that we had to have a total rework on our cars.
“A friend over there shipped a Swift over to us so David could see what it was all about and then we set to on our version. Some of those design philosophies we carried on using right up to our last designs together.
“So that RF85 was a very important car for us. David worked from 0800hrs until midnight all through the design process. He did the whole lot himself and it turned out to be a great car. It just came out and ‘bang’, we were in the mix. Then the RF86 had a few more minor changes, and that was a super car, it really got the business going again. I think if we hadn’t have gone through all the effort that we did on the RF85 and then the RF86, we would have lost the market. It was that intense.”
MN: And the F3 car in 1992? How do you remember that now?
RF: “Well, I think I expected too much from it. I certainly expected too much too soon. The company had some other bothers at the time and I just didn’t feel comfortable with the programme. We had [renowned engineer] Andy Thorby working on it to resolve the issues we had, but we weren’t getting the results on-track so I said we weren’t going to continue with it. We drew line under it.”
MN: But that wasn’t the first time that you’d been in F3, was it? You had been there in 1975 with a modified GRD chassis…
RF: “That’s right. I bought what was left of GRD when it went out of business, and we built six or seven F3 cars. But it [the GRD 375] was an old design anyway, and it needed a total update.
It was part of the reason GRD fell over, really – it just wasn’t competitive.
“So, for whatever reason, I just never had my heart in Formula 3 really. It was tremendously expensive for what it was and certainly to do it properly. I was more interested in concentrating on the bread and butter part of the business, if you like. That was the thing that was going to guarantee our survival financially.”
Question: Did you ever look at building a car for the road?
Nikki Waters
Via email
RF: “Yes I did, and greatly regret that we didn’t. That is a plan that I had in my head for the 1990s. We should have done that, but I just decided to keep on going with the racing cars. We had so much going on in the 1980s and 1990s. We had almost cornered the market for junior one-make series.
“While it was purely financial, we were chock-a-block, selling cars to here, there and everywhere, all over the world.”
MN: Well, you had things like Formula First, Multisports, Formula Forward – all alongside your existing Formula
Ford business…
RF: “[Brands Hatch boss] John Webb had a great vision in where he wanted to go with Brands Hatch and the sport and he wanted saloons, sportscars and single-seaters all Van Diemen manufactured. It was a real shame when [Brands Hatch owner] John Foulston died [in a Thundersports testing accident at Silverstone in
1987] because the impetus got taken away from a lot of things after that.
“I had first talked about a road car to David in the early-1970s, actually. I knew that Lotus was going to stop building the Elan. I asked David about doing a road car then. When we got together a few years later, he wanted to stick to the racing cars. If we had done it, I wouldn’t want to have done a kit car. It
“Watching drivers develop was a joy for me” Ralph Firman
would have been built in-house by us because then you have the quality control. I have no idea if it would have been a success or not though. It is something I would love to have done.”
Question: Which was the driver you ran who you thought was destined for the very top but didn’t make it?
Emma Facey
Via email
RF: “I guess Eddie Irvine was one of those drivers. When we took him on, he hadn’t done anything really in terms of results. I could see that he was so good, but he was driving a car that was absolutely rubbish and he was preparing himself with his mates.
“I said ‘come on, Eddie, let’s do it, let’s do the British championship’. He said he had no money, but eventually we struck a deal and we did it very, very cheaply. It paid off, because he won the British title and went on to win the Formula
Ford Festival in 1987 too.”
MN: Is it right that he came and gave you the rest of the budget for that season a few years later?
RF: “He had been racing in Japan at the time and he came along to the Racing Car Show and he put a cheque in my top pocket to level things up with me. I said ‘well, thanks Eddie, but what about the interest…?!’
“But he is a good example of a driver who we took who was doing nothing and most other teams would have turned him down flat, but they didn’t know the state of the car he was driving before he came to us. The is a nice sense of satisfaction.”
Question: Why does FF1600 survive so strongly today?
David Graham
Via email
RF: “It is still going because it is a fantastic formula. It is underpowered, despite what output some people can claim they had been getting from the engine. I had Ford on one day to me and they said they had done some tests on the Kent engine and they couldn’t understand all these claims that engine tuners were making about the horsepower they could generate from it. People were saying 110bhp and 120bhp. Ford told us they could only get 98bhp and they had spent weeks on the dyno. I told Ford they were exactly right, there were lots of people making silly claims then about what they could do with a Kent.
“But, the cars in general were underpowered as the chassis kept on getting better and better. The grip was limited, and the power-to-weight ratio was spot on. The best thing about it was, though, that the drivers had to be good to get the most from it.”
MN: When you built your cars, did you build them with the customers in mind so that they could work on them easily, or were you solely focused on ultimate performance?
RF: “Whenever we brought a new car out, to get a gauge on how good the car was, I never looked at the front of the pack if we were winning. I looked down the grid to see how well the lesser drivers liked it and how they went. If they were happy with the car, that meant it was easier to drive. They would tend to go quicker.
If it was tricky, then they would be further down the order than they should have been with the skills they had got.
“I always studied that, and that would tell me whether we had built a good car or not. You had a rough idea of where you expected the potential superstars to be. That was my judgement.”
MN: You had a good relationship with the customer teams to the point where you could almost control the driver market to a degree…
RF: “We would often hold off signing our drivers for the works team and make the decisions about who we should have. Once we had decided, we would then try to put the others into the good teams. We turned down some bloody good drivers due to that.
“But we wanted everyone to have a good chance, and the more stars there were in Van Diemens, the better it was for us on the whole. I used to love seeing the customer teams win races – to me that was great, because it showed that we were doing the whole job properly in building the car and running them. It showed that anyone could win in a
Van Diemen.”
MN: Was there a driver you turned down that you regret?
RF: “No, not really. We had all kinds of people turning up on our doorstep, some offering to pay us double if their son could get in a factory Van Diemen but I never went for those kinds of deals, ever. We picked whoever we felt we were going to get on with.”
Question: Do you look at Formula 4 and its front and rear wings and cringe? Graham Lister
Via email
RF: “It has never really taken off in a big, big way. Once you put wings on cars you take away from the racing, and you are never going to be able to recreate what Formula Ford 1600 had in its prime.
“That is what keeps Formula Ford 1600 so popular to this day. Formula 4 is more technical. Even when you look back to Formula Ford 2000 – OK, so the Europeans were keen on it – but it never really took off in a big way because it took away some of the magic of the racing without wings.”