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Supervan!
4 years ago
The latest – and fastest – Ford Supervan
But it seems that even this was not the first V8 Transit. Drury himself referred to the inspiration coming from a Transit into which some Ford apprentices had somehow shoehorned a street V8 with the gearbox from a V6 Transit, so perhaps there’s a Supervan Zero out there somewhere…
The real Supervan was not like that, but nor was it as you’ll read elsewhere ‘a GT40 wearing a Transit body’. For while the GT40 was a pure monocoque car, Supervan had a unique spaceframe really sharing only its mid-mounted powertrain with Ford’s multiple Le Mans winner.
When it first appeared in 1971 the result looked fairly scary even when parked, which was as nothing compared to how it looked on the move. The standard steel Transit body did no favours either for Supervan’s kerbweight nor its centre of gravity and required exceptionally skilled handling to exploit to the full. Former F1 and Can-Am competitor, as well as Le Mans podium-sitter Chris Craft is one of just a few who mastered it. Film of it at various race tracks around the UK, often on three 15in Revolution wheels, sometimes on two, with improbable amounts of bodyroll, Goodyear racing tyres sticking out far beyond its extended wheelarches showed very clearly what a handful it must have been.
Not that it was a very quick handful, even back then. With a 0-60mph time of 7sec and a 0-100mph time of 21.6sec, a standard Porsche 911 S of the same era would have had little trouble staying with it in a straight line. Today a Ford Fiesta ST would eat it alive.
"Unlike Supervan, Supervan 2 didn’t even try to be Transit based. When it appeared in 1984, it was a pure racing car, its 7/8ths scale body merely silhouetting that of the van from which it purported to be derived
Jaguar XJ220 mule
When Tom Walkinshaw Racing wanted to test the powertrain for the forthcoming XJ220 in public, it needed to ensure no one ever twigged what it was. So it was installed inside a Transit van body, complete with sweet wrappers on the dashboard. Mid-engined like all the Supervans, it directed 542bhp to the rear wheels, which later increased to 640bhp when found and restored by Don Law Racing. What was perhaps most notable about this Transit is that of them all, it’s really the only one you might easily mistake for a real working van. It even has a roof rack. Until that is, you either heard it, or saw it move. Then you’d be under no illusions whatsoever
But it wouldn’t eat Supervan 2. It would more likely be blown clean off the track, for this was an altogether more serious effort at making a racing car look like a commercial vehicle.
Unlike Supervan, Supervan 2 didn’t even try to be Transit based. When it appeared in 1984, it was a pure racing car, its 7/8ths scale body merely silhouetting that of the van from which it purported to be derived. Underneath lay the powertrain of a Ford C100, an unsuccessful attempt to take on the Porsche 956 in the early days of Group C. To that end it also came with a Ford V8 sports car motor, this time a 3.9-litre Cosworth DFL producing a rather more serious 590bhp at 9500rpm. The chassis was an aluminium monocoque, the body made from Kevlar, carbon fibre, Nomex and glass fibre. Underneath, a full length venturi provided proper ground effect aerodynamics. It was a very serious thing indeed.
Built by Auto Racing Technology and engineered by none other than Tony Southgate, when driven by Rex Greenslade it pulled 9300rpm in top gear along Silverstone’s Hangar Straight, later calculated to be 174mph. There is no evidence of anyone having been brave enough to ‘max’ the first Supervan, but if it ever did 150mph I’d be surprised.
Technically and contrary to all appearances, there was no Supervan 3. A car bearing that name and styling akin to the third-generation Transit appeared in 1994 but underneath it was actually good old Supervan 2, repurposed for the modern era. Power now came from a Ford ‘HB’ Formula 1 engine used by Benetton, McLaren, Lotus and many others, producing in this form some 650bhp from its 3.5-litre capacity. It was seen in this guise until 2001, before retiring and being restored to its original livery in 2004, minus the HB and with a rather less exotic 3-litre Ford V6 motor producing around 260bhp.
Renault Espace F1
Ford wasn’t the only one to play the super van game. In 1995, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Espace minivan, Renault teamed up with Williams to create the Espace F1 and it made even the Supervans look quite tame. It came with a bespoke carbon fibre chassis, a 3.5-litre Renault V10 motor from a Williams FW15C which slotted neatly between the rear seats (yes, it had four of them) and within a monstrous, be-winged, carbon fibre reimagining of the Espace’s body. With 800bhp, it did 0-62mph in 2.8sec, 0-124mph in 6.9sec and topped out at 194mph. Today it lives in the Matra Museum in Romorantin, France.
And that was that, until the new all-electric, 2000bhp SuperVan (not Supervan 4 apparently) was unveiled at the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed, a van getting on for being three times more powerful than the next most potent of its predecessors.
And what of those earlier cars? Well I’ve read in more than one place that Supervan was scrapped in the Seventies because no one was interested in it any more and genuine GT40 components were becoming hard to find. But I’ve also had a conversation with someone who really ought to know who reckons Supervan lives on in private ownership somewhere in the UK.
Obviously Supervan 2 is no more because it became Supervan 3 which remains owned by Ford to this day, though whether it works at present or not I cannot say. It is to be hoped that what everyone will call Supervan 4 will have a long life, not least because with a tiny fraction of the moving parts of its forebears, it should be a damn sight easier to keep on the road, and track.
