Tanking The Tiger
Racing driver Patrick Watts gives me a lift to Brands Hatch; not half as simple as it sounds….
Good morning Mr Charman. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to accompany Mr Patrick Watts in his 1965 Sunbeam Tiger car, on a trip from his home in Kent to Brands Hatch motor racing circuit, and back again. This tape will self-destruct if placed under the wheels of a truck.”
Is that all? Hardly Mission Impossible is it? Jog off to Brands Hatch in a bright red Sunbeam Tiger, snap a few pics, easy… Well it would be, except that you should know that the said Mr Watts can put ‘Racing Driver’ on his passport. Global TV viewers know him as a competitor in the big-buck British Touring Car Championship. He’s a works driver at Peugeot – hey! Peugeot, Sunbeam, Rootes heritage, Coventry… it’s all coming together.
When not weaving tales for you lot this journo frequents the BTCC. I told fellow scribes of my appointed task, and they went quiet. One reminded me of the No Fear clothing poster featuring Patrick’s Peugeot, on the grass, sliding, the bumper falling off, with the caption ‘He’s been called everything in the world – except coward…’ No worries. I’d once been taken around Donington Park by Patrick in his 280bhp Touring Car – exciting, but not dangerous – not really…
To get to races Patrick normally uses the Peugeot 406 that comes with his works driver status. But when the BTCC visits Brands Hatch, half-an-hour’s drive from his Kent home – I thought it was 45 minutes but he would put me right – the 406 stays in the garage and out comes the Tiger.
A test day at the track provided the means for my initiation into the joys of the Tiger, and the weather was on Patrick’s mind when I arrived. “Will it rain? The car’s not half as much fun with the hood up.” A bright spot in the early morning murk convinced us that the weather would stay dry, and the hood stayed stowed.
Patrick has spent three years restoring the car, so you think he’d give it the kid glove treatment. The gravel thrown from his driveway as we left suggested otherwise. The first thing he told me was that the brakes were shot. “They’re drilled racing discs, I think I used the wrong pads and glazed them.” This he told me as we accelerated onto the tail of a van at traffic lights…
On a single-track bridge with high brick walls, Patrick revved the 4.7-litre V8. Drinking in the sound echoing back off the brickwork. “beautiful isn’t it – it’s the headers, when talking about Tigers you don’t call them manifolds…”
Patrick has not yet had the car rolling roaded, but reckons he has at least 240bhp to play with, and I believed him as we found a stretch of straight road, the Tiger bounding forward as its pilot applied pedal to metal. But a truck loomed ahead, with a Skoda pulling out to pass it. To protect the perpetrator I will only say that both were behind us before the Skoda had drawn level with the truck… Patrick merely smiled and said “You couldn’t do that in an MG!”
Twisting sweeps and a stretch of single-track lane were dispatched with equal gusto, Patrick working brakes and throttle with the microsecond reactions which BTCC racers need. Then we hit a long straight, with a dip in the middle. Here Patrick told me he could achieve serious speed in his 406, “but not in this… It’s the dip, it would take the bottom off.”
I would love to tell you how fast we were going but the speedo had ceased to work after heavy right foot into just such a dip ground its cable away. “I’ll fix it at the weekend,” my host grinned. Suffice to say the air pressure lifted the wipers from the screen, and stopped any of the drizzle that had now arrived from reaching us. “I’ve got to get the rev counter recalibrated too,” revealed Patrick, pulling up at a junction and applying revs, whereupon the tacho impersonated a geiger counter pointed at Sellafield.
Busier roads and more restrained progress made conversation audible and provided the chance to fire off questions. So was this the perfect antidote to his Peugeot Touring Car? “It’s much more fun to drive, but not the most fun – I prefer Pam’s Caterham Seven.” That’s Patrick’s wife’s competition car, and an hour behind us it would be heading to Thruxton in Hampshire for some testing. Competitive, the Watts household…
Swinging into Brands Hatch, Patrick allowed himself one glorious powerslide, then switched into work mode. The Tiger was left parked by the team transporter while its owner concentrated on chipping away at his Peugeot’s lap time. Unlike the raucous trip tot he circuit, Touring Car laps are a precise art. The slightest change to setup, or racing line, can have a huge impact on your grid placing. During the test, first to 20th times were split by three quarters of a second, and five hundredths could be worth three spots.
As for the Tiger, it was not alone for long. The Touring Car world is notoriously secretive – each team marks its territory at each circuit, and non-members are not welcome within. Yet stick a classic car in the paddock, and all that fades away. The Tiger enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, all keen to discuss its finer points with Patrick, and three rival team members all claiming to have owned a Tiger at some stage. Not all were impressed though, Swedish Volvo driver rickard Rydell shaking his head and saying to me; "You came here? In that?"
Lunchtime, and a Peugeot diff problem that stranded Patrick in the pits for a while gave the chance for some history. “I bought it in 1989,” he told me. “Someone admired my Triumph TR3 but I said I’d rather have a Tiger, so they told me of one in Edinburgh. I wanted something with a V8 but I couldn’t afford a real Cobra. The Tiger’s a poor man’s Cobra, a 1965 supercar.”
He was racing a Honda CRX at the time, and when the series visited Ingliston, in Edinburgh, he took a Transit van and £2500 with him; “Pam was horrified!”
Understandably – the car had been stripped for restoration, paint included, but that was six years before and everything was now a glorious shade of brown. “But it was superficial, the major structure was not as bad as I’d been told Tigers and Alpines go, and the car had only done 60,000 miles from new.”
Patrick’s aim was “visual originality,” and a car that would not rust. Achieving this cost him £1500. The shell was seam welded, then stuck in a 450&Mac251;C zinc bath which burnt off the last bits of paint and rust. Next came an acid bath to remove the zinc, followed by another galvanising bath after which the shell looked “like a shiny new dustbin.” It then had to be left untouched for nine months, so Patrick stuck it on trestles in his garden; “Nine months under soggy trees and there wasn’t a patch of rust on it.”
There followed lots of exterior work with a rasp, straightening several panels and applying much zinc filler, before acid-etch priming the shell and applying two-pack Rosso Red paint.
Patrick planned to rebuild the car’s 4.3-litre motor, but was then offered a 4.7-litre V8 from a Ford Mustang, as fitted to the very rare Mk2 Tiger. The unit came with Holley carb, flowed heads and dual point ignition, while the Watts touch included moving the oil filter under the wheelarch and fitting an oil cooler to counter underbonnet temperatures; the heat reaching the cockpit when press-on motoring is impressive.
Patrick fitted a stainless steel exhaust; “I got the parts from Alpine West Midlands, but not the exhaust, to my regret. It was a cheap system and caused me a hell of a lot of grief, turning right when it should have turned left, and so on. It shows that you get what you pay for.
He uprated the clutch, added stiffer, but not too stiff springs, and using his racing contacts joined everything with Aeroquip hose and fitted the four pot AP racing brakes, housed behind “fake” Minilites and Yokohama AVS rubber; “Oh and don’t forget my retro Clarion radio.”
It did not look too retro, this radio, as I took my seat for the return run – another high speed blur as Patrick enjoyed his car. The do-gooders out there may well by now be slating this idiot who treats the public road like a race track. Well, maybe. But what I learnt was that this racing driver has competitiveness running through his blood, and never really switches off. But neither does he switch off his concentration – Patrick used the Tiger’s power, but only when he was sure he had the space to do so. His alertness never wavered and I never actually felt like I needed to get out.
By now it was nearly over, and Patrick was discussing what he intends to do, and could do, to the car. “I’ll stiffen up the front anti-roll bar and replace the ageing Spax with Konis. I’ve got to do the brakes, I’ve got some lightweight ones in the garage. Then I’ll dump the headers for a free-flow system, which could release another 20 horses…”
He was now searching for gears. “It needs a better diff, and I could stiffen it up and improve the handling – but that might ruin it. It rides quite well now. Then again I might just leave it as it is and get a TVR.”
Sounds good to me Patrick – your Tiger’s more than enough fun already…
Who is Watts?
Now 41, Patrick Watts is regarded as one of the characters of Touring Cars, famed particularly for his take-no-prisoners driving style. But Patrick’s race career started in the ’70s, initially on the hills – until he rolled his Mini into a bog. So he took to the circuits, racing against the likes of fellow Touring Car star Steve Soper, and in 1979 won the National Mini 850 Challenge.
Soon he'd be known as the king of one-make racing. He took second in the 1980 Mini 1275GT series, “because I kept changing down too early and breaking engines,” and then second in the Metro Challenge to Soper.
Austin Rover then put Patrick into the British Touring Car Championship, but the drive disappeared when the firm quit the series. An Escort was followed by a Fiat Uno Turbo in Production Saloons, and then Patrick went one-making with a vengeance – Honda CRX titles in ’88 and ’90, and the Mazda MX-5 series in the same year.
When a rumoured Nissan Touring Car drive came to nothing in ’91 Patrick won the Group N championship for Peugeot. Mazda took him into Touring Cars in ’92, and he spent two years with the team. For the past three years he’s been at Peugeot, searching for that elusive win but without the quality of machinery to ensure it. As the season ends Patrick is considering his options for ’97 – he wants that victory, badly...
Tiger Feat...
Patrick’s Tiger and his Peugeot Touring Car are both descended from the same family tree – both products of what was formerly the Rootes Group. But (are you sitting down?) the Tiger wasn’t really a Sunbeam at all (shock horror!). The engine was an American Ford lump, and the bodyshells were made by Pressed Steel and Jensen.
The Tiger evolved from the Sunbeam Alpine, launched in 1953. Alpines had sensible 1529cc motors, but the Tiger was very different, its engine bay housing a whopping 4261cc V8. Naturally suspension, steering and brakes were beefed up to match, and the result was a serious sports car that promised 120mph from 164bhp. The 1965 Motor Show catalogue revealed that you’d pay £1195 plus £251 in purchase tax for hairy motoring.
Sunbeam went further. In 1967 it revealed the Mk2, its engine now a 4.7-litre pumping 200bhp and promising 125mph. But its life was as short as it was spectacular. Chrysler had taken over the Rootes Group, which included Sunbeam, in 1965. Chrysler was embarrassed by the Tiger, with its V8 engine from rivals Ford, and in 1968 the car was canned. It never had the chance to give the AC Cobra serious rivalry on the US sports car market.
Chrysler found the ’70s tough going, and eventually sold its European operations to the French PSA Group, owner of Citroën and Peugeot. Which brings us back to the beginning – there’s more to connect the Tiger and Touring Car than a certain Mr Watts…
Patrick Watts –
Sunbeam Tiger
ENGINE
Type: V8
Capacity: 4737cc
Power: 240bhp “at least”
Torque: “Masses”
SUSPENSION
Front: Coil springs, anti-roll bar
Rear: Semi-elliptic
BRAKES
Front: AP Racing drilled 11.02in discs, 4-pot calipers
Rear: Drums
WHEELS AND TYRES
Wheels: 14in Minilite replicas
Tyres: 195/60x14 Yokohama AVS
PERFORMANCE
0-60: 7.5sec*
Top speed: 122mph*
Qtr-mile: 16.0sec*
* Standard figures, Patrick’s car with its mods is likely to be quicker.
