My rally history and other stories

MINI MANIA!!

My grandfather Harry Harris was the son of a North London cabinet maker. He was quite a man for many reasons. Three weeks after the outbreak of the First World War joined the Army and spent the next four years driving ammunition trucks up to the front line and then bringing the wounded back to safety. Incredibly his truck got hit by shell fire on three occasions and each time he survived. He had a great career and finally left just weeks before the Armistice in November 1918.

Once out of the Army, Harry, who was one of the few in civilian life who could drive (and with a love of automobiles instilled by the Army), found employment as a chauffeur with the Guinness family. He moved from north London to Bengal Manor near Towcester in Northamptonshire. Then he met his wife Gertrude and settled down. They had two sons, Arthur and my father, Leslie.

Les grew up with a love of cars and often told us how the Guinness family would allow Harry to borrow their Rolls Royce Silver Shadow in the 1930s and take the family to Clacton for two weeks by the seaside. It must have looked very impressive outside the boarding house!

I remember my grandfather telling me the story of how he used to drive the Guinness's up to Wick every August for the annual grouse shooting. Apparently it used to take three weeks to drive there! Motoring in the 1930s was clearly a very leisurely affair!

My father did his National Service just at the end of the Second World War. He served with the RAF and they gave him a sound training in all things mechanical and electrical. He was an LAC with a Mosquito bomber squadron. The Mosquito was the fastest fighter bomber in the war, so my father came out of the RAF with a love of speed! Coupled with his love of cars and mechanical skills, the first thing he did when he was demobbed was to build a little Riley sports car.

After he and my Mum married, he was still regularly tinkering with the car. They did not have a garage in those days, so he was always fixing it outside. Bob Freeborough was the local milkman and when he delivered bread and milk to my parents' house he always stopped for a chat to my father.

Bob never knew one end of a spanner from another but he loved cars. He always thought my father was some kind of mechanical magician and would look on in awe as he fixed numerous cars. They soon became firm friends and both joined the Northampton & District Car Club (now defunct).

At first in the early 1950's they competed in 12 car rallies, navigation trials, auto tests and then road rallies. It didn't take long before the allure of the new stage rallies grabbed them. Bob took the plunge and bought EBD 90C - a white and black Mini Cooper S. And so began a lifelong love of the Mini Cooper!

In many ways Bob and my father made an ideal team. Bob was a quick driver but being mechanically minded, he was hard on the car. The early Mini’s could be brittle, especially when pushed to the limit by hard, fast driving over rough terrain. My father Les was a magician – he could, and often did, fix the Mini on the side of the road with little more than three spanners and a hammer!

In the early days of stage rallying, there were no chase cars or service barges, so your co-driver had to be a mobile mechanic as well as an ace navigator! Les was old school – he could always “mackle” something together from whatever was to hand to keep the car running. He never lost that skill – I remember in 1985 we did the Circuit of Ireland together. The driveshaft went through the gearbox and my father fixed it with a tin of peas!

As rank amateurs with no sponsors, Bob and Les had quite a lot of early success with class wins. Soon the fledgling “team” evolved into a proper garage next door to Bob’s dairy yard.

Rallying was in my blood from an early age –one of my earliest memories was my father taking to see the RAC rally in Clumber Park I must have been 5 or 6 at the time but was hooked by the sight and sound of the cars as they blasted their way through the forest.

Inspired, I spent a lot of evenings as a young boy down Bob’s garage with my father, helping out with prepping the Mini. There were three incidents that stick in my mind.

The first was getting the Mini ready for the Monte Carlo. I was sitting in the rear of the car, holding a spanner on the rear shock absorber nut whilst my father lay under the car welding some strengthening plates into the top of the rear arch. All was going fine, until the inside of the car began to fill with smoke as the upholstery caught fire!  I learned how to quickly exit a burning car!

The second was again to do with the Monte Carlo rally, probably 1968 or 1969. By now Ralph and Terry Kaby had joined the team to prepare the car and also to service it on events. As somewhat minor local celebrities, the team had also secured the services of Towcester’s very own Lord Alexander Hesketh to drive the chase car for the Monte. I remember on dark winter’s evening when he turned up with the chase car. It was a brand new bright red Ford Cortina 1600E with gold wheels – flash to say the least! However, what made it even worse was that he had put his name in big white letters across the boot lid! Bob and my father made him take it off.

Lord Hesketh had a whale of a time on the rally and this was the start of his involvement in motorsport, first via motorbikes and then Formula One tm.

The third was the summer of 1967. Bob and my father were tackling the London Gulf rally – a fearsome car breaker that my father always ranked as tougher than the RAC. By now the Minis were was running Hydrolastic suspension and these units, especially on the front used to fail regularly on the Gulf rally. My father and I spent the summer rehearsing removing the units from a spare shell and fitting new ones. I remember too that he made a special bent spanner to get in to a hard to reach nut. All that practice came in handy because they swapped the Hydrolastic units several times on the event.

By now, Bob and Les were kind of “semi-works”. They had a strong relationship with Special Tuning at Abingdon and were frequent visitors there. I often used to go to Abingdon with my father to collect bits. I remember meeting Paul Easter (who lived down the road at Stony Stratford and knew my father from the car club) as well as Rauno Aaltonen, Timo Makinen and Paddy Hopkirk. Rauno was an especially friendly man who would always have time to chat to you.

Bob and Les would effectively be part of the Abingdon team. The factory drivers would decide if they would enter Group 1 or Group 2 and if they would run 998cc, 1071cc or 1275cc. Bob and Les would then often cover off whatever class and engine size the works were not in so that the Mini’s had the maximum chance of class wins. They had several shells all kitted out to the different specifications so that they could easily run whatever variant was required. Bob and Les rallied all over Europe, including the Alpine and the Geneva rallies. The latter was one of my father’s especial favourites.

I went to a dinner a couple of years back and Paddy Hopkirk was there signing his book. I introduced myself and he immediately remembered Bob and my father. He said to me “Bob was quick but hard on the car.” Then he paused, gave me a thoughtful look and continued “Good job your Dad could fix just about anything.” We had a long chat about how Bob and my father used to run alongside the works cars and I was pleased that my boyhood memories hadn’t been wrong!

In the late 1960’s/early 1970’s Bob and Les secured some sponsorship from local meat packers, Buswell. At this time, EBD 90C lost its white and black livery and became red and silver. I recall one of the first times that EBD 90C ran out in its new livery, it had been prepared by Abingdon. I’d have been 9 or 10 at the time and my father and I went over to Abingdon to pick the car up. We drove back her back from Abingdon to Towcester.  I still vividly remember snuggling down in the comfy black velour of the co-driver’s seat and the deafening whine of the straight cut drop gears and gearbox. Sometimes we’d take one of Bob’s blue VW milk vans over to Abingdon to pick up bits and occasionally even a car before an event!

Ralph and Terry Kaby had been long time members of the car preparation and service operation. Terry was becoming a bit of a heart throb and my teenage sister Annette and her friend Gail (Bob’s daughter) began to spend a lot of time in the evenings in the garage too!

EBD 90C was beginning to lose its competitiveness by 1974 and the Ford Escort was becoming all dominant. Bob and my father could not bring themselves to break their allegiance to their beloved Mini. So they gracefully retired EBD 90C from competition.

My father was not yet quite done with competitive co-driving. Terry Kaby was keen to progress from a member of the service crew to being a driver. He built BOO 911F, a very quick Mini Cooper S with an unusual 8 port head (in the photos of the car, you will see a strange box on the front of the bonnet (they had to cut this to fit the carburettors in). My father co-drove with Terry in his first two seasons in 1974 and 1975. Terry went on to become a very successful driver and is still involved in rallying today.

My father “retired” from rallying in about 1975 and I started rallying in 1981.

Funnily enough, I started in a Mini that he built for me. I still have 831 YOO and has been fully restored and I am now using it to compete in the 2015 MSA British Historic Rally Championship.

Competing really helps to  keep in touch with the graa roots issues affecting the industry and as a specialist motorsport accountant, that is really important.