Focus on CLUBMEN'S FORMULA Double track test by SIMON TAYLOR Reprinted from AUTOSPORT December 4, 1969
PARADOXICALLY, the introduction recently of the new Formula F100 has resulted in a great show of strength and support for the Clubmen's Formula. FF100, using barely modified 1300 cc engines and road tyres, is actually intended to replace the ill-supported sports-racing and special GT events at some club meetings, but when it was first announced many Clubmen's drivers not surprisingly saw it as a threat to their own formula's existence. Race organisers, club secretaries and the motoring press were bombarded with letters and phone calls pledging support for the Clubmen's Formula, and a major reorganisation of their own affairs by the people who race Clubmen's cars was precipitated.
Rather than a formula which was dreamt up round an organiser's (or a sponsor's) office desk, the Clubmen's Formula gradually developed, although it was Nick Syrett of the BRSCC who, seeing expensive streamlined rear-engined machinery beginning to move in on the sports-racing class, first separated the Lotus 7s, U2s, DRWs and the like which were giving clubmen cheap, enjoyable and quite fast racing and called them Clubmen's cars. Apart from a minimum cockpit width so ensure that the cars are theoretically two-seaters, the rules are very simple: Clubmen's cars must be front-engined sports-racing cars without all-enveloping bodies (ie with cycle-type front wings), and must use pushrod engines of Ford or BMC manufacture in two classes, up to 1000 cc and 1001 to 1600 cc. One or two other rules keep costs from escalating: superchargers, limited-slip diffs, fuel injection and more than four forward gears are not allowed.
However, in direct contrast to some current "cheap" formulae, there is no limit on engine tuning or wheels and tyres. The fact that you are unlikely to win fame and you will certainly not win fortune in Clubmen's racing is itself enough to keep the overall costs reasonably low and produces atmosphere which is very friendly and probably nearer the much lamented amateur-enthusiast ambience that has all but disappeared from club racing. Nowadays a few people have sponsors nn Clubmen's racing as in most other classes, and there are one or two pretty costly cars, but it is still possible to race - and have a lot of enjoyment and a reasonable amount of success - with a car costing £750 or less. A formula becomes expensive not so much because of its rules, but because of its rewards, which attract the ambitious and semi-professional driver who is prepared to devote an enormous amount of money and time to ensuring that he goes a bit quicker than the next bloke. He won't give you a hand to replace a broken half-shaft between practice and the race, either. That this has happened in Formula Ford, for example, is not necessarily a criticism of that formula, which provides a valuable stepping stone for up-and-coming drivers, and a good spectacle too. But fortunately there are other classes of racing which suit the true club driver better and Clubmen's is one of them.
Clubmen's is actually one of the fastest of them. With full-race engines and racing wheels and tyres the cars sound and handle like the proper racers they are; there is no danger of the tyre squeal drowning the exhaust note.! Many of the 1-litre cars use second-hand Formula 3 engines with steel bottom ends and dry sumps, which give them 10,000 rpm rev limits and a power/weight ratio not far off that of a proper F3 car - yet a good second-hand F3 motor can be picked up for less than £400. It costs well over £200 to get a "standard" Formula Ford engine prepared . . . Dry sumps and steel bottom ends are less common in the 1600 class, in which there are competitive cars with fairly inexpensive sidedraught engines and about 135 bhp or so, with useful torque.
Almost ever since the BRSCC first started running exclusively Clubmen's races they have organised an annual Clubmen's Championship, with qualifying rounds at their meetings during the year. This season the situation became rather complicated because, while the BRSCC were running their championship, which totalled some 17 rounds, the BARC decided that they would run a Clubmen's Championship too. As a result some drivers did one contest, some did another, and some flitted between the two or just did non-championship events, so that all the quick cars rarely got onto the same grid at the same time. In addition the Clubmen's drivers had no organisatlon to represent their interests. Now, largely due to the efforts of Deryck Cook (a Surrey DRW driver who took part in the first-ever official Clubmen's race at Brands Hatch in 1965, and incidentally won this year's BRSCC Championship after a very consistent season), there is an official Clubmen's Register, which keeps the names, addresses and telephone numbers of all active clubmen's drivers, and is in contact with race organisers and club secretaries to ensure that Clubmen's events are properly publicised and that grids are well-filled.
Some of the Register's founder-members recently met Nick Syrett of the BRSCC and Grahame White of the BARC to sort out the championship situation, with the result that the two clubs have agreed to organise jointly a National Clubmen's Championship next year, with 12 qualifying rounds at 10 different circuits up and down the country. The reduced number of rounds should ensure that everybody who wants to follow the Championship seriously will be able to do so without astronomical expense, and still be able to take part in other non-championship events at his favourite circuits. There is a gap of at least two weeks between every round.
I recently track-tested two very successful clubmen's cars, one a 1000 cc car which was designed and built by its driver (as are several Clubmen's cars), and one a 1600 cc version of one of the most popular proprietary Clubmen's chassis, the U2.
The Ellova
The 1-litre car is the property of Sid Marler, who has been in motor racing for a very long time - in fact in the days when he did 750 Formula racing most of the races were being won by one C. Chapman in a thing called a Lotus. His first Clubmen's car, which he built and raced in the middle 1960s, was based on a front-engined Elva-BMC Formula Junior which was modified in the centre to make it a two-seater. The result, called the Ellova, went very quickly and is still around in Clubmen's events.
For his current car, the Ellova Mk 2, Marler decided to follow a similar pattern, and bought a Cooper T76 F3 chassis in bits, complete with suspension, intending to move the engine to the front and modify the back to take a wide cockpit. This proved to be more of a job than the heavy old Cooper chassis was worth, so he designed a new chassis to take the Cooper suspension, which employs inboard front coil/damper units operated by rocking top arms, with lower wishbones. The chassis was built by Braden at Muswell Hill, using mainly 1/2 ins and 5/8 ins square tube, and GP Metalcraft of Fortis Green clothed it in a beautifully finished alloy body, with a long nose section which houses a ducted radiator. The rear suspension is as on the Cooper, with the uprights located by lower wishbones and links, with a single top link and single upper trailing arm. The 7-ins front, 9-ins rear Cooper wheels are now used for the wet, and 8 ins and 10 ins Minilites are used for dry condition's, shod with 970 mix Dunlops.
The engine, mounted well back in the car, is a straightforward sidedraught Cosworth MAE, similar to the F3 engine except of course that in the Clubmen's Formula there is no carburation limit and so twin Webers are used. The car is immaculately turned out in white with smart black trim in the cockpit, and the professional origins of the body show in the neatly flared tail panel, with a duct to cool the differential mounted just behind the driver's right shoulder. Tony Harvey, who runs Flintstone Racing in North Finchley, helped Marler to build the car and assists in the preparation.
I drove the car on a bone dry day on the Silverstone club circuit, where Marler holds the 1000 cc Clubmen's lap record in 1m 6.4s. The car instantly felt right the moment I sat in it, for all the controls were neatly laid out and everything was well finished. It felt right out on the circuit, too. After a few exploratory laps I started to go more quickly and found that the Ellova was wonderfully sure-footed. The outboard discs all round, which come from the Cooper, were tremendously powerful, and this, combined with the rock-steady stability of the car, meant that it was possible to rush through Maggotts and down to Becketts flat out in top and then go hard onto the brakes well after the 100 yds. marker board, down two gears and push it through the corner. If the braking was left impossibly late, so that the brakes were still on when the car started to take the corner, naturally strong understeer set in, but this could be counteracted by easing off the throttle which would bring the tail round nicely. None of this treatment seemed to upset the car's balance. At Woodcote, too, the braking could be left to just before the 100 yds marker and, taking third gear and cutting a late apex, the Ellova would come smoothly out of the corner without any drama at all. A fast corner like Copse showed that the car was well set-up, feeling absolutely neutral.
If anything, the engine felt slightly less powerful than the latest downdraught motors in other Clubmen's cars I had driven, but the Ellova's lap records here and elsewhere show that its first-rate handling more than makes up for any power deficiency. In all I did about 40 laps in the car, the latter half sans mudguards as one of the front ones displayed signs of parting company with the car thanks to a cracked mounting (the wings are designed to be rapidly removable, making the Ellova eligible for monoposto and formule libre events). Despite sticking religiously to a 9000 rpm rev limit (in races Marler uses 9800 rpm), I found to my surprise that my best lap was a few tenths faster than the car's official lap record, which would support Marler's feeling that when he set the record he was being badly baulked by a 1600 cc opponent in the corners The Ellova is certainly a car which a novice could drive quickly straight away without getting himself into trouble. For next season it is being equipped with a downdraughted 1600 cc engine.
The Tech-Del U2
Certainly one of the fastest Clubmen's cars at the moment is the Tech-Del U2, sponsored by the famous magnesium wheel manufacturers and raced by Jeremy Lord, the Bournemouth solicitor who has been drivng U2s for five seasons. U2s, produced by Arthur Mallock, have an ancestry stretching back to 750 Formula racing; over the years they have developed considerably, so that the latest Mk 8s have double wishbone front suspension replacing the familiar swing-axle IFS to reduce camber change and improve stability under braking, although they still have the coil-sprung BMC rigid rear axle, located by trailing arms and a Panhard rod. The basis is still an 18 and 20 gauge square and round tube spaceframe, which Mallock believes to be the only design in existence with all six sides of the chassis fully triangulated. The familiar boxy shape of all U2s comes from the fact that, apart from the fibreglass nose cone, the body is simply made up of single-curvature alloy panels riveted to the frame, although on the Tech-Del car the tall has been swept up at the back in a fashionable wedge, an idea which has been copied by several other U2 owners.
Complete kits of parts to build a U2 are available from Mallock, and from then on it's up to the bloke putting it all together. The Tech-Del car was built by Bob Le Sueur, known to one and all as "Haggis," and the standard of workmanship is superb. As befits the company that owns, enters and sponsors the car, it naturally uses Minilite wheels front and rear, as well as Tech-Del magnesium bell-housing gearbox casing, and there are several other light alloy bits and pieces on the car, like the rear brake drum spacer units, for Tech-Del use it as a test-bed development vehicle for many of their ideas.
For much of the season the car has been plagued with various engine troubles, but C. Lucas Engineering were asked to rebuild the unit around mid-season and, although they had never tackled a down-draught pushrod 1600 unit before, the result was 143 bhp at 7200 rpm on the brake, with max torque of 117 lbs/ft at 6000 rpm. With a wet weight of 8 1/4 cwt, the performance is therefore considerable.
The potential of the car was first properly realised at Brands Hatch in October, when Jeremy got pushed off on the first lap and, knocked almost 2 secs off the Clubmen's lap record and left it at 53.6 secs. Even coming through the field from last to sixth, so Derek Wootton of Tech-Del, the driving force behind the equipe, and Mike Brown, who prepares the car, reckon there is more to come. This time the track used for my test was the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit, on a horrid drizzly day. Although it wasn't actually raining in the afternoon and the track eventually dried here and there, most of it was still very greasy. The only other occupant of the circuit when I was out was the works prototype Lola T190 F5000 car, which Trevor Taylor was testing, and that looked a real handful ! The cockpit of the Tech-Del U2 has the rev-counter in a binnacle ahead of the driver, where it is very easy to read, with the auxiliary instruments and switches in a separate angled panel on the left. The canted engine is mounted well back and angled to the left of the car at the front to give plenty of pedal space, and the carburetters sprout impressively out of the bonnet. Under some conditions they can spray petrol onto the driver's goggles, which can be a bit disconcerting !
The first impression on driving the car is one of tremendously torquey power. Lord only uses third and top in races apart from leaving the line, even on corners like Druids at Brands, and although 8000 rpm is used in extreme circumstances I found that with the 4.22 to 1 diff that was fitted I was having to lift off very early on along Hanger Straight to avoid exceeding the 7000 rpm limit we had imposed for the test. On the slippery surface, incautious throttle openings in third or top gear made the car snake even on the straight, and it was not possible to accelerate coming out of a corner until the car was in a straight line again. However, going by the antics of the other Taylor in his F5000 car, who always seemed to be going sideways whenever he blasted past me, I think that the 'track was exceptionally slippery that day.
In the places where the track did get a little drier I was able to discover that the roadholding on smooth, fast corners was excellent, helped no doubt by the wide Dunlop 970 tyres. U2s normally understeer under these circumstances, but the Tech-Del car has large nose fins which undoubtedly help to keep the front wheels sticking, while the central engine position and wedge tail ensure plenty of traction. However, on bumps the back end was not quite so happy, for the rigid rear axle involves a fair amount of unsprung weight, and between Copse and Maggotts the back wheels bounced a good deal, although there was no loss of directional stability.
It was a shame that I could not try the U2 on a really dry track as I had the Ellova, for with its extra power it did seem quite a handful, but there is no doubt that in Jeremy Lord's hands it is an excellent weapon, as its lap records at Castle Combe and Brands Hatch prove. It certainly is quick enough. as are all competitive 1600 Clubmen's cars, to give a fairly experienced club driver quite an exciting season. If you compare the lap records at any circuit for Formula Ford, prod sports machines and GT cars to those of Clubmen's cars you will see that Clubmen's do go very quickly. Their supporters hope that 1970 should be the best year yet for the formula; with. many new cars appearing on the circuits and an increasingly high standard of turn-out and competitiveness, they could well be right.
	1969 National Clubmen's Championship Rounds March 15 Snetterton March 27 Cadwell Park April 18 Castle Combe May 3 Thruxton May 17 Brands Hatch June 6 Oulton Park June 21 Croft July 11 Castle Combe July 25 Rufforth August 9 Mallory Park September 5 Rufforth September 27 Silverstone
Clubmen's Register; All enquiries to Deryck Cook, Thorne Cottage, Glazier's Lane, Normandy, Surrey. Phone (home) : Normandy 2215 : (work) : Shere 2051