Boreham Motorworks Alan Mann 68 Edition review

That six-figure sum? I’ve met the people, read the material, asked my questions, driven the car and still have no idea. I was told to look up the price of the Mk1 RS announced in December and make an educated guess based on that. There’ll be 150 of those, each one costing from £295,000. So what, half a mill at the very least?

It’s described as an ‘exact recreation’ of the car Gardner drove to a dominant championship victory in 1968. Everything is new: the bodyshell, the 1.8-litre twin-cam beneath the bonnet, the seats and harnesses, the suspension, the Dunlop racing tyres, the lot. Boreham Motorworks meticulously disassembled and scanned, or ‘digitally mapped’, every component of Gardner’s actual winning Escort – its registration, XOO 349F, will be familiar to many – to ensure the new cars were authentic in every detail. Yet they are built using modern techniques and materials, and to tolerances Alan Mann could scarcely have dreamt of.

The bodies are manufactured and painted at DRVN Automotive’s facility in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, before being trucked south for final assembly at Alan Mann Racing in Chobham, Surrey.

It really is something to behold: tiny, beautifully finished, eye-catching in red and gold, both dainty because of its size and purposeful with those iconic bubble arches and fat 9in rear tyres, and about as inviting as motor cars get. You just want to get inside, strap yourself in, fire the fizzy engine into life and let rip.

But first, a history lesson. During the 1960s, Alan Mann Racing campaigned works Falcons, Mustangs, GT40s and Cortinas in the UK, Europe and beyond. That famous Ford win at Le Mans in 1966? In another world it could have been an Alan Mann car winning that weekend, for one of its two GT40s was leading at one-third distance until its front suspension broke. By this point the team, only founded in 1964, had already won the 1965 European Touring Car Challenge and in 1967 it won the first of two successive British Saloon Car Championship titles. It was mothballed by the end of 1969 having packed a great deal into five short years.

Much of what the squad learned on the GT40 programme, specifically relating to suspension design, was transferred directly to its Mk1 Escort. The Escort was brand new in 1968 and public relations supremo Walter Hayes wanted to raise its profile, so he turned to Alan Mann to take the new car racing for the very first time. Built to FIA Group 5 regulations, meaning the showroom model’s suspension layout could be junked altogether, it won that British championship at the first time of asking. The livery, swollen bubble arches, Frank Gardner, even the registration plate, all became instant legends. It’s fun to wonder how different the Escort and even Ford itself might’ve been today had those first competition cars been complete no hopers…

Against more powerful competition, Alan Mann’s Escorts (six were built) had one particular ace up their sleeves: they handled properly. The Escort’s compact size, lightweight build and front-engined, rear-wheel drive layout were the ideal basis. To it, Alan Mann Racing added suspension components inspired by or even borrowed from those GT40s, all carefully designed to keep the tyres square to the road when cornering, plus a live axle with torsion bars instead of coil springs and an unusual upside down Watts linkage pivoted underneath the differential nose to lower the rear suspension’s roll centre, improving control and stability. They weren’t the quickest on the straights, certainly not compared to the V8-powered Falcons that made up much of the competition, but elsewhere they left the rest for dead.

All of it is present and correct here. The dry sump 1840cc twin-cam four-cylinder makes a shade over 200bhp snorting through twin 45 Webers. The gearbox is a four-speed manual with a beautifully precise and wonderfully weighted shift. In ‘Period Correct’ configuration and without fluids, the car weighs just 795kg. Ready to race, like the car I drove, with a roll cage, a modern seat and harness, proper fire suppression and so on, it weighs a little more.

I’m not sure driving environments come any better: a simple hardshell racing seat with a five-point Schroth harness pulled down tight, a bank of toggle switches in the dash, four beautiful white-on-black Smiths dials in the binnacle, an extravagantly dished steering wheel that puts the leather rim just where you want it, three pedals and a ball-topped gearlever sprouting from the floor.

Strapped in tight, you feel everything. You feel the whole car fizz as engine revs pick up, the weight in the clutch pedal, the precision in the gearshift, the suppleness in the suspension the moment you start rolling, the sheer lightness of the car, its balance, the grip at the front axle through the wheel rim and traction at the rear through the throttle pedal, the point at which the brakes will lock if you squeeze just a fraction harder…

It’s all about feedback. The steering goes heavy if the front end ever washes out, the rack admonishing you for your greed, and if you don’t execute perfectly blipped downshifts the drivetrain will let you know about it. It’s not difficult to drive, but to drive it well takes skill and consideration. You’ll be going quickly after a lap or two, but to wring absolutely everything out of it could take a lifetime.

This is a car built for a fast and flowing circuit, like Goodwood or Brands Hatch, and on the one or two quicker sections of M-Sport’s recently constructed Cumbria test track, the sense of the car settling on its springs and pressing its tyres into the track surface was just delicious. These are exactly the sensations I enjoy most in driving – a very light car on relatively supple suspension with inherent chassis balance, flawless steering, enough body roll to let it flow through bends, messages flooding back through every touchpoint… Honestly, you can keep your active aero, 1000bhp, rock solid springs and semi-slick tyres. This is all I want and need.

And that’s to say nothing of the engine. To exit a slow hairpin in second gear and throw third and then fourth at it, winding it all the way out to 8000rpm each time, the motor honking loudly through its Webers with the nose up high and the tail down low, is to understand that 200bhp has been enough all along.

Any time I drive a car like this and love it, I feel elated for a while until I remember that so few will ever exist, that they will cost far more than I’ll ever be able to spend on a car, and that I will probably never drive one again. There’s the high, then as night follows day, the comedown. But this world is a better one with cars such as this in it, and if we celebrate them loudly enough, maybe word will spread. At least I hope so.

Photography by Jordan Butters

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