Alan Mann Racing turns 60 – be taught its historical past

The U.Ok.’s Alan Mann Racing right now makes a speciality of sustaining basic automobiles and creating restomods, but it surely was as soon as a mainstay of the racing scene, as this video explains.

Alan Mann Racing, or AMR for brief, was based in 1964 by racing fanatic Alan Mann, who’d gotten his begin operating a storage that ready race automobiles for competitors. Mann quickly negotiated a cope with Ford to run Lotus Cortinas. It was the beginning of an in depth partnership between AMR and the Blue Oval that will outline the crew.

This was the period of Ford’s Whole Efficiency push, when the automaker sought to win in as many classes of racing as potential in an effort to market its street automobiles. AMR took full benefit of Ford’s largesse, racing not solely Lotus Cortinas, but additionally Mustangs, Falcons, and, maybe most famously, the Mk1 Escort with which AMR received the 1968 British Saloon Automobile Championship. All had been decked out within the crew’s signature crimson and gold livery.

2022 Ford GT Alan Mann Heritage Version

The livery wasn’t the one factor that set AMR aside. Drivers and mechanics from the period nonetheless recall Alan Mann’s gentlemanly persona and the impeccable preparation of the automobile. Whereas not precisely a fan of the Lotus Cortina, which he thought-about troublesome to drive, racing legend Jackie Stewart acknowledged that the AMR automobiles had been the “crème de la crème” in comparison with different groups’ Cortinas.

Stewart—who went on to turn out to be a three-time F1 champion—was simply considered one of many well-known names to race for AMR. Others included Graham Hill, Jacky Ickx, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, and Mario Andretti. Throughout that very same interval, AMR additionally did some film work, together with serving to with car-chase scenes in “Goldfinger” and constructing automobiles for “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

AMR additionally ran the Cobra Daytona coupe which, like the usual Cobra roadster, was developed within the U.S. by Shelby American, earlier than leveling as much as the GT40. It even helped develop a light-weight physique for the Ferrari-fighting GT40, with two examples constructed and raced within the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. Each ended up retiring, however Ford celebrated the partnership in 2022 with a particular model of its fashionable GT supercar.

Apparently not discouraged, AMR started work on a clean-sheet sports-racing prototype for Ford referred to as the F3L, powered by the Cosworth DFV V-8 from F1. The objective was to realize 200 mph with 400 hp, which the automobile did, but it surely was tough to drive and by no means completed a race. By that point Ford was additionally curbing its racing efforts, successfully ending AMR’s time as a front-line race crew. Alan Mann shifted focus to the aviation business.

The corporate would then return to racing in 2004 by getting ready historic race automobiles, steadily increasing into different initiatives, together with an electrical conversion of a Sixties Mustang. Extra lately, AMR signed on to turn out to be the high-performance division of Boreham Motorworks, a fellow U.Ok. firm engaged on a fashionable iteration of the Ford Escort Mk1 that AMR famously raced in its heyday.