THE SIERRA RS500 WAS THE ULTIMATE TIN-TOP
Andy Rouse doesn’t look like your typical racing driver. He doesn’t act like one either. There is no ego to have to pander to, there is no smoke that needs to be blown in any direction. He is a man who loves motorsport and loves the challenge of unearthing the latest trick from the chassis or the engine. After that had been achieved, he set about chipping the odd tenth of his lap time from his position behind the wheel.
Despite retiring from the British Touring Car Championship back in 1994, he still maintains fourth place in the all-time race winners’list with a remarkable 60 victories – despite the fact that drivers have three times as many opportunities to collect silverware in the modern generation.
Rouse was at the forefront of so many different race programmes with many different manufacturers – indeed, his quartet of titles were all taken in different types of car. However, his victories in Ford’s products are among the most memorable.
Andy Rouse and his Andy Rouse Engineering firm was at the heart of the development of what ultimately was the highpoint of Group A tin-tops with the Ford Sierra RS500. It was a brutal monster that Rouse was a master at taming and, as he did so, he secured his place in the minds of a generation of motorsport fans.
He very kindly took time out of his schedule to tackle the Motorsport News readers’ questions, and we are very grateful.
“The first car I built was a home-made jalopy”
Question: What made you start driving competitively?
Joseph Anthony
Via Facebook
Andy Rouse: “I was always interested in cars, right from a young age. It was just my thing and it didn’t really come from my family or anything like that. It was a personal passion, and my access point into it was doing autograss or, as they called it back then, jalopy racing.
Andy Rouse
“I used to get on my bike and cycle all around Gloucestershire to the nearest event wherever it was that weekend. I used to love watching the racing.
“Eventually I built my own jalopy racer while I was at school. I took part in my first race when I was 17 years old.”
MN: How did you know what to do? Who taught you the ropes to be able to build your own car?
AR: “I just looked at what everybody else had been doing and then created my own version of it for myself. I did my best to copy it.”
MN: Were you successful?
AR: “I was eventually, yes. I started off with a very basic car but eventually I had a rear-engined spaceframed car and I managed to win the Gloucester and District Jalopy Car Club championship. I was about 20 years old when I won that and then I had the desire to go circuit racing so I moved on from my jalopy to a Formula Ford car.
“I bought a Dulon LD4 chassis. It was a car you could buy in kit form and have a go at building it yourself, which was good because it saved a lot of money. And I wasn’t earning a great deal at the time. I was an engineering apprentice by then. I worked in a big factory in Gloucester so I could get bits and pieces from the factory and also get help from the guys who worked there too. I tuned my own engine too.”
MN: Were you successful in that too?
AR: “I was, I won the South West Formula Ford 1600 Championship – based around Thruxton, Castle
Combe and even Llandow and a couple of other places.”
MN sets the scene: With his engineering apprenticeship complete, Rouse then joined legendary car preparer Ralph Broad’s Broadspeed firm. This is where the motor racing really took off and it is also where the future king got his first taste of tin-top racing.
Question: What did you learn from Ralph Broad?
James Hilton
Via email
AR: “I joined in 1972. I learned an awful lot from Ralph Broad. He was a really lively guy, very sharp and very innovative in engineering terms. He was a great guy and it is immeasurable the things he taught me.
“Initially, I was a head grinder. Broadspeed used to provide the Ford Motor Company with polished cylinder heads for the crossflow engines. So that was my first role. I had been doing that anyway by sorting out the engines for my Formula Ford 1600 cars, so I knew how to do it.”
MN: And Ralph was a big supporter of your motorsport career too. He put you in cars…
AR: “He helped me, and I helped him. When I first went there, I still had my Formula Ford car and I had tried racing in the National Formula Ford Championship. I didn’t really do too well at that because I didn’t have enough time to spend on my car and I could never get the time off to go testing or anything like that because I was working for Ralph 60 hours a week.
“I eventually gave up Formula Ford because Ralph wasn’t that interested anyway, even though he had been supplying me with an engine.
“It coincided with the start of the
Ford Escort Mexico Championship for the Mk1 cars in that 1972 season. Broadspeed was a Ford dealer and so Ralph did me a deal on a car and I was able to do all the preparation. I went and won the title.”
MN: So when you did the Mexico championship, did you suddenly think that saloon car racing could be a career, or did you just do it because it was something to race and you had no other options?
AR: “To be honest, I moved over to saloon car racing because it was all that Ralph was interested in. If I was going to get anywhere with Broadspeed, I needed to get a roof over my head…
“After I had won the Escort championships, there were all sorts of other championship for the Mexico opening up all over Europe. Loads of cars would turn up at Broadspeed waiting to be prepared. All these Mexicos would turn up from Belgium and places like that and the yard was so full of cars that we didn’t get time to do them properly and we had to send them back! It created a lot of business.”
MN: So how did the opportunity come about to step up to the British Saloon
Car Championship in 1973?
AR: “Broadspeed was running Escorts for the Ford Motor Company and so it was just a natural step, really. Ralph was operating the Group 2 cars and we were building 1300cc Escort BDAs and the two-litre cars as well. Because I was running the race workshops, I got into doing the testing for the cars and Ralph said I had gone quite well, and that led to be eventually getting to race the cars. I was alongside the likes of Vince Woodman and Dave Matthews.
“Then, when it changed to Group 1 for 1974, we switched over to the Dolomite Sprint. Ralph had done deal with Triumph to run the touring cars. They didn’t handle that well. It was quite a decent car, but it had no brakes, but chose it because it was the only twolitre car with a 16-valve engine.”
Question: Why did you decide to form Andy Rouse Engineering in 1981? What was the story behind that?
Russell Scobbie
Via email
AR: “I left Broadspeed after the deal to race a Jaguar in the European Touring Car Championship had finished ahead of the 1978 season and I went freelance with racing, testing and engineering.
“That led on naturally to us setting up our own workshop. When Broadspeed finally closed down, we started up. We bought a lot of the equipment from Broadspeed in the auction after it was shut down.”
MN: Before that happened, you had spent a season racing alongside Gordon Spice in a Capri and things got a bit fruity between you in 1980, didn’t they?
AR: “Yes, I kept beating him and he told me to stop! So I had to spend the rest of the season following team orders and playing second fiddle to him. I wasn’t too pleased about that, but it was a job at the end of the day.”
MN: Was that something you were always destined to do – to become a team owner?
AR: “It was something that I did have my sights set on, but circumstances just came together just to make it happen.”
Question: When you look back now, what was your favourite touring car era?
Chris Phillips
Via Twitter
MN: “I would have to say the Ford Sierra RS500 era. The cars were just great.
They were such a brilliant car to drive and to work on, and the public loved watching those cars too.”
Question: How involved was Ford with the XR4Ti project in the British Touring Car Championship in 1985? You obviously knew about the RS
“To get on, I knew I needed to get a roof over my head”
Andy Rouse
Cosworth. Where you sworn to secrecy?
Gary Jennings
Via email
AR: “Ford had approached me and said that this new Group A car was on the way, and they wanted me to be involved right from the start.
“It was a factory contract we had with Ford to develop the XR4Ti. They didn’t tell us exactly where we were headed with the programme to start with. We knew there was another Sierra coming along but we didn’t know the details.
“But that initial intention was to develop the Sierra chassis ready for the Cosworth engine, but we had got the Merkur engine going quite well by that stage anyway. It was an American engine and the Merkur was sold in Germany into the road-car market.”
MN: Ford came along with the Sierra programme to transform the image of the car, which had been not too well received by the public…
AR: “People dubbed it the jelly mould car! It was such a change from the Cortina, and it took people a long while to get around the concept, I think. To take the car and turn it into a competitive proposition was a great challenge. It worked out really well.
“When we started racing the XR4Ti in that first season in 1984, the sales of road cars went up massively. Ford did a TV advert and it was played out regularly in the middle of the News at 10 on ITV for about six months. I used to get stopped in petrol stations and all sorts of places with people asking for my autograph.”
Question: How hard was it to get your head around turbocharging, or did that come easily? It was a new thing with the Sierra in 1985…
Steven Nye Via email
AR: “It was something quite different and it was new for us as a company as well. It was a tricky process to understand all the ins and outs of it to begin with. We had a few problems early on with just keeping the boost pipes together so it didn’t keep blowing the hoses off and things like that.
“The amount of heat involved was something that we weren’t used to either, but we got it going really well in the end. It was more powerful than a Rover V8, and that was the main opposition back then. We had about 330bhp out of the Merkur powerplant.”
MN: So when you drove the first iteration of the Sierra, the RS Cosworth, did you realise that it was going to be a game-changer in terms of the tin-top championship?
AR: “Nobody expected the Merkur to be a title-winning car and Ford was surprised. That led us to the Sierra RS
Cosworth to begin with while we waited for the RS500 to be homologated officially. The RS Cosworth had a smaller turbo and pushed out about 360bhp, I suppose. Then, when we got our hands on the RS500, it would race with just over 500bhp and we would use about 530bhp for qualifying…”
MN: What is the trick to driving an RS500 quickly? Many people tried, but not all were successful…
AR: “You had, really, to set the car up to understeer. Then you drove it with your right foot and the steering wheel and you would steer the rear around.
The trick was also to try and keep it on boost too. It wasn’t a car that you latebraked with. You braked early and got on the power as soon as you could to keep the turbo spinning, and then you balanced it through the rest of the corner on the throttle.”
Question: What one car do you wish you had have kept from your glorious career?
Chris Phillips
Via Twitter
AR: “That would be the last RS500 we built I suppose, which was obviously the best one that we put together with all the lessons we had learned. That was in 1990.
“The car went into the Coventry Transport Museum for 10 years. Ford convinced me to bring it out to do the Goodwood Festival of Speed and run it up the hill there. But I crashed into a straw bale and wrecked it. It was the first year they put those massive twoton straw bales alongside the course and I collected one of those.
“By the time I had it repaired, I had lost my place in the Coventry museum and so I sold it to a guy in Singapore. I wish I had kept it.”
Question: Was your race-long dice with Steve Soper in the British Touring Car Championship at Brands Hatch in 1988 as exciting in the cockpit as it was stood trackside? How satisfying was it to get the better of the Eggenberger car?
Van Car Hairs du Mans
Via Twitter
AR: “It was a fairly tricky race because it rained halfway through. Steve and I were pretty equal and even, and it was an exciting race but it seems to be the one that most people remember.”
MN: You had done all the legwork with the RS500, so it must have been satisfying to beat the German works arm of Ford, which was Eggenberger?
AR: “Eggenberger had been doing the World Touring Car Championship and the European Touring Car Championship. There was a significant rivalry between both our operation and theirs. We beat them at the Touring Trophy at Silverstone in 1988 which snookered their title chances and that didn’t go down too well. It was great to see them come over and try to beat us.”
MN: Have you any idea how many RS500s you built?
AR: “We built about 30 complete cars and must have supplied more than 100 engines. It certainly was a golden period for us. We were even exporting cars to places like Japan.”
“Nobody expected the Merkur to be a winner”
Andy Rouse
Question: Which co-driver did you enjoy
racing with most in your career?
Damien Docherty
Via email
AR: “I enjoyed racing at Bathurst with Peter Brock, because there was always plenty of attention on him as you can imagine at Mount Panorama.
“I think Alain Ferte was a great co-driver for us because he raced one of our cars in the French Championship and some of those were longer races. He came over and partnered me at the TT, which was a great win for us. He was a good guy.”
Question: Professionally, what was your most testing season?
Chris Phillips
Via Facebook
AR: “Probably for me it was the transition to front-wheel drive in
1991 when we took on the Toyota
Carina. The set-ups were different, and the gearboxes were agricultural and it felt a bit like hard work after the RS500. I had to learn to drive again too!”
Question: You took Ford back go to into the two-litre era in 1993. How satisfying was that? Was the Mondeo the best car you’d built?
Malcolm Munt
Via email
AR: “The Mondeo was certainly the best Super Touring car we built. We won the Touring Car World Cup twice with it with Paul Radisich driving.”
MN: You were instrumental in getting the two-litre era off the ground. Did you expect the Super Touring era to be such a huge success?
AR: “It took off unbelievably well, didn’t it? It was absolutely the right thing to do because the Group A RS500s were coming to the end of their homologation. We had good television company with the BBC and we were under pressure to keep the TV interested and bring in manufacturers.
“Initially, the idea for the two-litre formula came from me. Then we developed the process with Alan Gow and David Richards at Prodrive.
“The original concept that I had was to have two-litre turbocharged cars. If you look now that is exactly what they’ve got in the BTCC today…”
Question: Do you think you would have won even more if you had been concentrating solely on driving rather than engineering too?
Abi Crowther
Via email
MN: You could have got close to 100, like Jason Plato!
AR: “Ah, but we didn’t have so many chances to win as they do these days with three races in a weekend. We were lucky if we got 12 a year…
“I will admit that it did get a bit stressful for some periods. That was especially true in the Super Touring era, because not only was there all the things to do with the team and actually driving the car, we were running TOCA too, so we were effectively in charge of the championship as well.”
Question: Everyone remembers Steve Soper-John Cleland BTCC finale in 1992, not to forget that it was actually Tim Harvey that won the title! But people often forget that was your last race win. How did you feel when the others stole all the headlines?
Leo Barclay
Via email
AR: “It was such a controversial race, wasn’t it? I was a bit miffed that I was on the podium and everyone else was talking about what had happened at Luffield.”
Question: What are your memories of working with Nigel Mansell in the 1993 TOCA Shootout?
Steve Martin
Via Facebook
AR: “He was great: he was really easy to work with. He spent loads of time with the fans. The thing that impressed me most was that on race day he turned up with his security guards – and boy, did he need them as well. There were 60,000 people there that day, more than they had at the grand prix at the same circuit.
“Mansell did struggle a bit to start with because he couldn’t drive slowly enough. He couldn’t get the hang of braking early. When we went testing with him, he wrote off a couple of spoilers and things because he was going off when he would take too much speed into the corners. He did a load of damage before he got the hang of it.
“We only did one day of testing. He drove my car, but he wrecked mine so we had to put him in Paul Radisich’s one. But come race day, he was fairly au fait with it.
“That was the best piece of publicity Ford ever got from touring car racing, and that is probably because he had crashed so badly.”
Question: Is there one motorsport title and a major race that you wish you had won?
Stuart Herriott
Via Facebook
AR: “That would have to be the European Touring Car Championship. I only did odd races in Europe and I did the World Championship with Thierry Tassin. We had done a deal with Dunlops, but Pirellis were the thing to have on the continent and so we struggled.”
MN: And is there one big race that you wish you would have won?
AR: “I would like to have won Bathurst, that would have been good.”
Question: It must have been a joy to share a car with your son Julian in Britcar back in 2003...
Chris Phillips
Via Facebook
AR: “It was good, we had a couple of good years racing together. It was just an ambition of mine to go racing with Julian before I was too old.”
MN: Who was quicker, you or him?
AR: “He did all the qualifying and he was quicker, because he had all the new tyres and I was just left with the old worn-out rubber! I had all the second-hand stuff…”
“Bathurst is a race I really wanted to win”
Question: Is there a project you’ve been involved with that never saw the light of day that you regret?
Emma Facey
Via email
AR: “That would be SCV8 [the Supercar V8 series inspired by Rouse, which was a rear-wheel-drive spec chassis and was launched in 2001, but eventually never happened]. It was only the politics that thwarted it really after a couple of years of trying.” ■
Andy Rouse