MR SUNBEAM: THE BOSS
Lotus MD Mike Kimberley was a driving force behind the rally great
‘I was promoted to MD in late 1976 and we wanted to re-kickstart Lotus Engineering as a high-tech engineering consultancy. Out of the blue I was called by Wynne Mitchell, an old college friend and competitions manager at Chrysler UK, asking if I was interested in supplying engines for a potential rally car. We had an informal meeting at Hethel. Wynne brought Des O’Dell, Chrysler Europe’s motorsport director, and I brought Graham Atkin, my powertrain general manager. Des wanted two engines, one standard 2.0-litre 155bhp Type 907 16-valve engine and one rally-tuned, with more power and torque [than the Escort or Chevette].
‘Afterwards, I shot up to see Colin Chapman and within 30 seconds I got a green light. We quoted a reasonable cost and Des snatched our hands off. It took us six weeks to build his rally-tuned [2.2-litre Type 911] 240bhp engine. They built it into a car and Des let his director drive it hard. The decision was made then to rally and build the homologation production cars.
‘We had to produce and sell 400 production models for homologation into Group 4, and 1000 cars a year for Group 2, so the project was a win-win for both companies. Lotus would manufacture engines at Hethel and carry out the conversion of part-built Sunbeams – transported from Linwood – into finished Lotus Sunbeams at Ludham, near Hethel.
‘If world economies had been better, production would have gone on longer, but the world was grinding to a halt, and we finished up producing 2308 cars.
‘We were over the moon with the rally wins and used them in marketing our cars and engineering business. We were doing quite a lot of four-valve heads for people, all-aluminium engines, complete vehicle design and development, the best-in-the-world vehicle dynamics for global OEMs – winning the 1980 RAC and 1981 World Rally Championship helped to endorse those capabilities enormously. We did a couple of very high-performance projects for big clients.
‘Wynne Mitchell is still a very close friend, as is Andrew Walmsley – who took over from Graham when he had a nasty accident (nothing to do with the Sunbeam!). Graham and I still get together once a year. We are still in touch with the Lotus Sunbeam Owners’ Club and support their great owners.’ handing over to me. It’s like AA Gill bashing out a few exceptional paragraphs and then stepping away from the keyboard.
Open the driver’s door and you climb over the criss-cross of the rollcage and sit in a relatively high-mounted, carbon-shelled Corbeau bucket seat (though even with a cage overhead there’s plenty of headroom for a taller driver wearing a helmet). The ambience is very much modern racecar, with its Motech switchgear (three lines of five buttons controlling wipers, lights, indicators, engine start…), a digital dash with a flightdeck’s worth of data, and a small Alcantara-wrapped steering wheel with shortcut buttons for everything from launch control to the pitlane speed limiter.
Attention to detail is fabulous: the rollcage is so neatly integrated that you don’t really notice it at all, there are beautiful carbonfibre doorcards and a carbonfibre footrest for the passenger, the upgraded seats and steering wheel feature bespoke Talbot insignia, and even the digital instrument read-out can be switched to mimic the original Smiths dials.
A process of flicking switches, prodding the AP pedal box and pressing buttons wakes the Sunbeam, and vibration fizzes through the shell and seat, so you’re gently resonating in harmony with the slant-four, already connecting with it.
Press the clutch and pull back the Drenth transmission’s long aluminium gearlever to select first (paddleshifts are used once you’re on the go), and it engages with the mechanical positivity of loading a shotgun. Ker-lunk! The clutch’s bite is friendly enough, given the grumpiness expected of such a single-minded competition car at a cautious trundle, but with space and speed everything clicks into place.
The powertrain is incredible – instantly fizzing with response, snorting air through an ITG filter like it’s mopping up class-A powder, and revving so freely and with such a thick rasp you can just tap out whatever tunes you fancy on the throttle. No doubt it’d feel incredible with the standard ZF manual ’box but, rather than detracting from involvement, the sequential transmission compounds it – every paddleshift input brings a spit of compressed air and a pop like a nail-gun as the long, slender lever punches back remotely in response.
Gears bang in, and the Sunbeam incessantly gobbles through its powerband – you’re two gears higher than you’d expect everywhere, with first, second and third a blur. 265bhp sounds