Ford Anglia Cosworth | Improved Production Cars

Rod Dale's first racing car was a Ford Anglia. Built in the 1960's, Rod's car was typical of cars used in Australian motorsport in the era - a road car converted to racing spec, with modifications aimed at making it as fast as possible given the limited budget available. Rod progress onto various other cars, ultimately racing a 5-litre Chev-powered Sports Car. In the late 1970's with a young family, Rod's priorities changed, and his own racing was put on the backburner. He maintained an involvement in racing, working on Andrew Miedecke's Formula Pacific campaign in the early 80's, and various other cars during the 80's and 90's, including leading a crew running a car at Bathurst in 1992.

During this time, Rod's son, Sam had developed an interest in motorsport - initially racing motorcross bikes, but later turning his attention to cars, and his first up-close taste was that 1992 Bathurst, where he worked on the team. Sam visited Bathurst again in 1995, this time working on the Allan Moffat Cenovis-backed V8 Supercar driven by Andrew Miedecke.

Around that period, Sam, a keen reader of the 'Trading Post', had noticed a Ford Anglia for sale and mentioned it to Rod. Rod made a few phone calls, and bought the car sight unseen. It was transported to the team's workshop (garage) in Kempsey and Rod and Sam set about turning it into a hillclimb car.

The Anglia was initially fitted with a 1760cc Crossflow engine, and raced successfully at the local hillclimb track. The team spread further afield, racing at hillclimbs in Northern New South Wales, and sharing the driving duties. Rod acquired a rolling-chassis Sportcar - an AUSCAM, and separately bought the running gear from a Sierra Cosworth, the plan being to fit the turbocharged engine to the AUSCAM. With a lack of viable venues to race the AUSCAM if fitted with the non-original engine, and a lack of enthusiasm to run it with the original rotary engine, the AUSCAM was put back on the market, but the engine was put under the workbench.

Keen to do more than single laps at a time, Rod and Sam visited Oran Park for a test day in late 1996. The aim of the outing was to gain experience on a circuit (as opposed to a hillclimb track), and also to evaluate whether the Anglia could be competitive in the class it was eligible for - a category at the time known as 'Club Cars'. The test day was a success, with the Anglia lapping at a pace that would have put it in the top half of the Under 2 litre Club Car field. Sam was assigned driving duties, and Rod chief engineer.

Mumbo Racing was born.

The first race meeting was at the beginning of 1997, at Oran Park, and it was a disaster. The team hadn't detected any major problems during the earlier test day, but that was on the layout known as the 'South Circuit' - predominantly made up of left-hand corners. The first race meeting was on the GP circuit that had a number of right-hand corners, and caused the Anglia to suffer oil-surge. The oil-surge caused bearing failure, and an early end to the race meeting. Extensive modifications were made to the sump of the Crossflow engine, which reduced the oil-surge, but it was never totally eliminated. The team had learned that real racing cars use dry sumps.

The Anglia was a very competitive car during 1997, and always very well presented, but lacked the last few percent of pace to run at the very front of the field. The team decided that more power was required, and dragged the Sierra running gear from under the workbench. The engine was installed into the (tiny) Anglia engine bay, and would be used without the Sierra's turbocharger, it used a multi-throttle body fuel-injection arrangement instead, as well as some pretty fancy exhaust bends to clear the suspension towers and firewall. The new engine featured a dry sump.

The new configuration was a success, with the extra power enough to move the car toward the head of the field in terms of outright pace. The engine revealed a couple of other weaknesses though, with the brakes and suspension coming in for further attention to make the package consistent. Development of the car never really stopped during the whole time it was run by Mumbo Racing, and the best ever result came at the final time the team ran the car, at Queensland Raceway for the Improved Production 100 in 1999 (Club Cars had been renamed Improved Production in 1998). Another lesson was learned by the team - more power is useless without control (in the form of braking and handling).

The Anglia went through a continuous evolution, with power, braking, handling and driveline all receiving attention. It was involved in a couple of big accidents, but each time came back stronger and faster. The whole process taught the team about building and developing a car, about the compromises necessary when racing a production, road-based car. Most of all it taught the team about the importance of tenacity, and seeing problems not as problems but as opportunities to make something better for next time.

Ford Mondeo | Super Touring

In the early days of Mumbo Racing, Graeme Julius had become a de facto member of the team, through his expert dyno tuning of the Anglia's Cosworth engine. In 1999, Graeme got a lead on a Ford Mondeo Super Tourer about to come on the market (a car that Graeme had worked on previously). He mentioned it to Rod, and Rod mentioned it to Sam. The car was acquired by the team, and given a lot of TLC by Rod and Graeme, and debuted by the team at Goulburn's Wakefield Park.

Sam had never laid eyes on the car before he turned up at the circuit to drive it during Friday practice for a round of the Australian Super Touring Championship - it would be his first experience with a sequential gearbox, and the first time he had driven a front-wheel drive car. With a lot of help from the team, Sam managed to qualify 7th fastest for that first outing, and was enjoying his first race until he was turned around by another competitor, the car stalled and only rejoined the race after being towed to the pits and restarted - the team learned a valuable lesson: cars that require a jump battery to start in the pits won't miraculously start if they stall on the circuit. Sam learned another lesson - a car with power steering needs the steering wheel pointed straight ahead to avoid putting extra load on the (already heavily stressed) starting system.

The Mondeo proved to be a very reliable car, and relatively straightforward to drive. The highly tuned engine had a very narrow power band, and was only useful between around 6000 and 8500rpm. This was Mumbo Racing's first experience with this kind of engine where gearing is so important. The team learned quickly how to calculate the appropriate gear ratios, and put them to good use.

The front-wheel drive layout of the Mondeo, combined with a fairly significant front weight bias meant the Mondeo was very hard on it's front tyres, and barely used the rear tyres. Understeer was almost always present, and tyre management was another quickly learned skill the team acquired. Switching the underused rear tyres to the front helped with the balance of the car, and made certain the most was gotten from the expensive 19 inch slicks. The low profile slicks also didn't provide much protection to the rims - bouncing off the kerbs BTCC-style could quickly result in cracked rims, so the kerbs were avoided as much as possible to preserve the precious rims.

The Mondeo was campaigned in the BOC Australian Super Touring Championship, and then the ASTC, before it went on to be used in the Touring Car Challenge.

Many of the systems on the car were new to the team. The Proflex adjustable dampers fitted to the car proved to be an excellent unit, but came with no information on how to adjust or service them. The team taught themselves. The same could be said for the X-Trac 6-speed sequential gearbox - Graeme work out how to rebuild and service it. Adjustable dampers were an area focussed on in setting the car up - with no changes other than to the dampers, the front tyres could be made to work at 100% for just a couple of laps, or at 98% for a whole race. The driver adjustable anti-roll bars were also particularly useful for finetuning the handling of the car. The Mondeo was the first Mumbo Racing car with any kind of datalogging capacity, and it was fairly limited in that department - the team learned that datalogging is fine, and very useful for troubleshooting, but is not much use for driver development or setup without track mapping.

Most of all, the Mondeo was built from the start as a true racing car. Down to the smallest detail, like the throttle linkage, attention was paid to making everything perfect, and almost everything not designed to make the car faster had been removed when the car was built. Despite the outstanding efforts of Andy Rouse when building the car, it would always be a car that had been created around a road-going base. The car's character came from this fact.

Ford Mondeo | Nissan Primera | Toyota Camry | Super Touring

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