Pork Bangers
Back in 1988 an unlikely racing team took on the mighty Vauxhall and others in the Thundersaloon series, and I was there.
Once upon a time, well the end of 1987 to be exact, there was a pair of racing drivers – a tall and not exactly slim one, and a short even less slim one. Both had enjoyed a few years in the Roadsaloon Championships for street-legal cars, and now both desired a bigger challenge. The answer was Thundersaloons, a mini-endurance series with mid-race driver changes, for cars that were anything but street-legal. Taking on this championship would pitch our two heroes – with limited experience and even less of a budget – against the likes of rising star John Cleland and the mega-funded GM Dealersport, run by Dave Cooke who would soon also be masterminding Vauxhall’s British Touring Car Championship bid. The challenge was irresistible and Porkies Racing team was born.
Actually the name came later, first John Chambers (the tall one) and Gary Cole (the short one) had to find a car. An ex-rally and rather tatty Vauxhall Chevette HS was found in Newcastle, a car that would qualify for the under 2.5-litre class but in its current form was rather too ordinary for Thundersaloons. The two tested it at a pre-season sprint – Gary using a caravan cushion to compensate for a seat that was totally the wrong shape for him – and immediately discovered drawbacks, such as gearbox ratios that had them exiting the final corner flat in fifth with nothing left to give.
As is often the case the opening race comes around way too quickly and little had been done to the car by the time it lined up at the back of the grid for Thundersaloon round one at Brands Hatch. But it did by now have a support team, a quartet of mechanics gathered from ex-school friends and pub colleagues of this writer. The chief mechanic, employed at the local Vauxhall dealership, knew his way around a car, and also had access to a spare garage that would serve as a workshop, along with a truck sourced from his father’s building supplies business. The others made up for their lack of knowledge with enthusiasm.
With the team now bearing its name and the car numbered 88, the mechanics took the monikers Streaky, Spare Rib, Loin and Trotter, and I arrived at round one to find a pattern for the season had been set, the squad contriving to leave Spare Rib behind. I was dispatched 30 miles home to get him, and it proved worthwhile. The Chevette was side-swiped by the GM Dealersport Carlton in practice, suffered a fuel tank leak fixed with a numberplate screw, and ran out of the precious liquid on the finish line, but went further than others to take third in class and a useful £150.Strange scheduling saw round two of the series at Snetterton in Norfolk on Good Friday, just five days after round one. At this time I was about to ‘become an item’ with Rosemary – a fellow motor sports fan and my future wife. She and her parents offered me a lift to Snetterton. They might not have done had they known that within minutes of arrival their nice new Astra would be jacked up and have all its brake pins removed to replace those of the Chevette, left in Surrey. Thankfully it completed the race without drama, though well off the podium this time, and the pins were returned to see us home safely.
A bigger adventure awaited, with a trip to Mondello Park in Ireland. It must have been bitterly disappointing to the organisers that only half a dozen Thundersaloons bothered to make the trip, but among them was the little Porkies team, complete with an engine which had been rebuilt after being removed from the car by an industrial fork-lift truck.
Racing in the Emerald Isle brought many adventures from the moment the man on the gate said he’d only give out passes for the two-day meeting on the Sunday, because if teams got them on Saturday they’d only lose them.... Again the still tatty Chevette behaved itself, and the Porkies returned home holding third in the championship!
As the season continued the mechanics started to make progress with the Chevette. It still wasn’t exactly quick, but grafting on new lightweight panels transformed its looks. But even this was not without drama. To allow work on the engine one day the new GRP bonnet was removed and rested against a dustbin. Along came the refuse men...
Thundersaloon regulars were warming to the little squad too, despite the bigger cars lapping the Chevette with monotonous regularity in each race. When it appeared at Brands Hatch looking neat in its new as-yet unpainted white panels one squad said to the writer “Shame, the little Chevette isn’t here this week.”
Bad luck never seemed to be far away, illustrated by a mid-season test session at Snetterton in which the Chevette suffered an engine fire and on the same afternoon Gary’s wife Stephanie rolled the couple’s Vauxhall Nova sprint car to destruction – this car having just been rebuilt following a previous roll...
But behind the scenes dissent was growing in the Porkies ranks. What had started as a laugh for the four mechanics was becoming a trial, with them very much behind the scenes in a team for which sustained success seemed ever distant. The final straw came before a summer race at Mallory Park. The Chevette had been dispatched to the workshops of Gerry Johnstone – of DTV fame – for engine work, and the mechanics were scheduled to pick it up. They arrived around lunchtime to find the workshops empty, the Chevette marooned in the yard behind other cars, and an ominous-looking pool of fluid under it. In fact there was no engine problem, but by then the mechanics had departed homewards, taking their truck with them.
Some hurried phone calls secured Gary and John a trailer with which they were able to get the car to the circuit – at 1am in the morning. With their respective other halves – known as the Crackling – acting as pit crew they got through the race, taking last classified place and John arriving back in the pits to hand Gary the gear lever that had broken off on the last lap.
In fact they got through the remainder of the season, and in the final championship table Porkies Racing was placed fifth in class – helped by the fact that the cash-strapped team was one of only two to complete the entire season, even the mighty GM squad bottling out of the Irish trip.
That, however was the end of Porkies Racing. The Chevette raced once more in Thundersaloons, a non-championship event in May 1989 in front of TV cameras, the two drivers hoping to sell it. John went to production saloons with a Vauxhall Astra, while Gary contested the occasional Thundersaloon event over the next few years in cars as diverse as a BMW 635 and Rover Vitesse, before going off to win a Citroën 2CV title. He briefly returned, in of all things a mildly-modified Citroën BX, a precursor to a frankly outlandish and never realised plan to take the car into the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC). As for the Chevette, it eventually disappeared inside Gerry Johnstone’s workshop in exchange for engine work on John’s Astra. But none of us ever forgot the year the pigs flew...
One of the lesser claims to fame of the Thundersaloon series was that it spawned the publishing career of yours truly. Rolling Thunder was effectively a newsletter on the series and ran between 1989 and 1992. |
Rolling Thunder
Soon the magazine ran to 30 pages or more and took up all our spare time – we even spent the last weekend of our honeymoon reporting from a meeting at Zandvoort in Holland. Initially it was all done on an electric typewriter which produced narrow columns which we then cut out and pasted onto card pages, complete with Letraset titles and black and white photos which I printed – I was a photographer then – deliberately flat as these photocopied more effectively. Later text quality improved when we got our first home PC, but the magazine was always photocopied and over its life was responsible for murdering at least four copiers!
Days of Thunder
Legend has it that a chat over a pint created Thundersaloons. It took place in 1984 in the bar at Brands Hatch involving among others the circuit’s then owner John Webb and veteran driver Tony Lanfranchi.
The aim was to revive the “big bangers”, missing from tin top racing since the demise of the Super Saloons typified by Gerry Marshall’s famous Baby Bertha Vauxhall Firenza. Thundersaloon races would be 50 to 75 miles long with a pit stop to swap drivers in the middle third. The two classes were split at 2.5 litres, and technical rules were pretty loose so long as the original body was retained – no spaceframes!
The first series in 1985 attracted a variety of cars. Rod Birley entered one of the first Sierra XR4s to race, but had to give best to the RS Capri of Vince Woodman and Jonathan Buncombe. GM Dealersport soon joined in, with firstly a big Vauxhall Senator and then the Carlton forever identified with Thundersaloons. One of its drivers, a certain John Cleland, went on to be a Touring Car star.
Gerry Marshall also competed in several Thundersaloon events, other ‘names’ including veteran Tony Lanfranchi, future BTCC drivers David Leslie and Tim Harvey, and former F1 driver, truck racer and ABBA drummer Slim Borgudd.
Many short circuit racers were attracted to the series from the ovals, particularly in the under 2.5-litre Class B which as a result became populated by Escorts and Toyota Starlets, and later by Fiestas and Astras, along with one-offs such as the legendary Transpeed Vauxhall Firenza. While not as exciting as their big rivals the class B cars were generally more reliable and provided better racing.
The awesome stuff was in the big class, however, where engines of six and seven litres pumping 600bhp plus were common. Rivalling the Carlton for star status was an Opel Manta which ran a variety of powerplants including a big Chevrolet lump, and whose US flag colour scheme earned it the name Stars & Stripes. Capris were plentiful, while other cars included a Honda Legend, Colt Starion and a stunningly quick Cosworth-powered Mazda RX7. Brian Chatfield campaigned a long line of BMWs, the story going that if one broke he simply extricated another from his West Country garden. And over time as the Ford Sierra RS500 turbo monsters were banned from the BTCC, they found their way to Thundersaloons, followed by their Escort Cossie successors.
Thundersaloons always teetered on the brink of becoming really big, but repeatedly showed itself to be a club series unworthy of star billing. The complex and therefore potentially unreliable cars involved meant organisers could never be sure how many would turn out. The high spot was a Donington race in 1988 that boasted 30 cars, but others that year only just broke double figures – not helped by races too often being scheduled only a week apart.
What seemed to be the series’ big break, but led to its decline, came in early 1992. Now headed by Nicola Foulston, the Brands Hatch Leisure Group was reaping rewards from the rocketing success of the BTCC, but not happy with the increasing power wielded by a championship it did not control. BHL wanted its own headline series, and saw a revamped Thundersaloons as it.
Thundersaloonies crowded into the conference centre at Brands Hatch to be promised a new series, more heavily promoted than the BTCC, with big prize money at each round and extensive TV. “The series has every chance to go to the pinnacle of motor racing,” Foulston said.
The new image demanded, however, that the driver change pit stops – an exciting part of each round – were scrapped, each meeting instead staging two races. Most controversially it was proposed from 1993 to ban any car model out of production more than three years – aimed at creating a modern rival to the BTCC, but effectively rendering more than half the field obsolete.
The three-year rule never happened, but nor did the brave new dawn. While the BTCC went on to superstardom, Thundersaloons lasted only a few more years. Today a few of the cars can still be seen, in Formula Saloon sprint races.
Today when I see such cars as the BMW M3GTR in the American Le Mans Series, I am reminded of the glory days of Thundersaloons. A memory that stands out is of a Donington race in 1989. A sponsor’s guest found her way into the pits and sat down to watch the driver-change pit stops. This was before the time of pitlane speed limits, and within 10 minutes the entire field hit the pits, Escorts sliding to a halt, one driver falling out, the other diving in, having the door slammed on him and roaring back to the fray, jinking to miss seven litres of Opel Manta sliding into its own pit. I glanced at the guest, and she was shaking at the drama of it, quickly heading out the back to light a calming cigarette. That sort of excitement is missing from the racing of 2002...
