Postcard from Belfast

Gerald Mooney was a Dunmurry local, born just 600 yards away from the pastures known as The Cutts, which separated Protestant and Catholic communities. It was 34 years later, whilst working for Belfast architects Brodie & Hawthorn, that he had the honour of designing both factory and test track. ‘The primary purpose of the test track was not to be evaluation of vehicle dynamics, but quality control,’ he tells me.

As a consequence, every feature was designed with a different QC challenge in mind. There was a skid pan to test lateral grip and handling. A water splash to challenge the integrity of the door and body seals. A combination of those savage rumble strips to brutalise the steering and suspension systems. And most excitingly of all, a high-speed banked corner.

‘It needed to produce sufficient G-force to stress test the fuel delivery system and suspension,’ Mooney continues. ‘The civil engineers worked with the vehicle design team to calculate the super-elevation required.’

One man who was particularly keen on a super super-elevation was Director of Product Engineering, Mike Loasby. But first, some context.

The four legendary Indianapolis corners tilt at nine degrees, Zandvoort’s aggressive bank ramps F1 cars to 19 degrees, whilst the famous historic racing line at Brooklands runs at a mighty 25 degrees.

Towering above all these is the now disused Monza banking, at a preposterous 38 degrees. I tried to climb it once, and realised it was a job for chalk dust and carabiners.

Astonishingly, Loasby, a veteran of the MIRA high-speed bowl (as prior Chief Engineer of the Aston Martin Bulldog project) wanted the Dunmurry banking even steeper. He wanted to achieve a ‘neutral speed’ (where the car would follow the curve without steering input) of 50mph, and the ability to test the UK legal limit of 70mph. The maths dictated this would have required a bank of 45 degrees, practically a wall of death. Unsurprisingly, the civil engineering team said no – the maximum angle their road rollers could manage without sliding down the bank was 26 degrees.

So that’s what Loasby got, along with a neutral speed of 35mph and a maximum limit of 50mph. Still, he was apprehensive of the plant’s recently hired test drivers, who had no experience of high-speed bankings. Yes, 50mph might not sound fast, but on a 270-deg corner with only a 50 metre radius it certainly feels it.

‘There is a tendency for inexperienced drivers to enter the curve too low,’ Loasby observed. ‘They then lose control upwards and end up over the top, leading to hurt feelings and bruised reputations, amongst other things.’ Did those other things perhaps involve audition tapes for The Dukes of Hazzard? A crash barrier was duly erected around the top of the banked curve.

Aware of the potential for calamity, the DeLorean Motor Company instigated a certification programme for all drivers on the track. However, such was the deficit of high-speed banking instructors in Northern Ireland that the examiner was an ex-fork lift truck operator, whose vehicular experience seemed to tick enough boxes to pass the Health and Safety standards of the day.

One problem though that did cause those antediluvian standards some consternation was flying bricks. Launched by local teenagers from the adjacent field, they posed a serious risk to the gleaming new machinery rolling out of the factory. So a high catch fence was erected perpendicular to the bank, leaning over the cars as they rocketed beneath. The logic being any bricks that cleared the fence would also clear the track below.

The track was completed and ready for action in time for the first cars off the line in January 1981. Given John Zachary DeLorean’s well-documented grandiose personality, you might have expected him to crow about his new circuit tripling the banking angle of the famed Indianapolis, but Mooney recalls no opinion being voiced by the boss. Instead, the absence of JZD’s favourite and oft-used aspersion, ‘asinine’, was credit enough for anyone involved in working with him.

The track quickly proved remarkably successful at its primary purpose of quality control. So calamitous was the quality of initial assembly and so ruthlessly did the track expose it that a new stage had to be integrated into the QC process.

All the pieces that fell off the car during a single lap were deposited into the passenger seat, and the car sent back into the finishing stage of the factory. It would be reassembled, and then sent back out to the test track to spontaneously deconstruct once more. This iterative process would repeat perpetuo absurdum.

A little over a year later, and it was all over. The last cars assembled at the factory were said to be the best of all, the irony being that the company’s reputation was already lost for good. The unifying hope that the community had for a project that had so successfully brought Catholics and Protestants together dashed with the embarrassment and shame of John DeLorean’s downfall.

The factory was eventually repurposed by French cylinder head manufacturing firm Montupet in 1989, and its successor Linamar. But neither had use for the test track, which was already in the process of being consumed by nature. Despite occasional clearing for DeLorean events, decades later the verdant invasion had rendered the once pristine facility almost unrecognisable.

So in 2024 a crack commando unit set about the epic task of clearing the maximum arboreal stockade. The overgrowth of moss, grass and trees was so great the track was barely wide enough to walk on. It was far from a straightforward mission. The team had to cobble together the necessary equipment to escape the facility’s overgrown incarceration, and overthrow the nefarious botanical cartel.

‘It took a track machine, rubber wheel digger and yard brush-equipped tractor,’ DeLorean Revival team member David Mathers tells me, before having to consult his notes again. ‘Then a hedge trimming tractor and a small track machine with a special branch cutter that was able to precisely chop long branches that sprawled across the track.’

It was a gruelling process that took months, the sheer volume of green and brownery to be disposed of being one of the greatest challenges. The grand end game, though, was Eurofest 2026 – when a record number of DeLoreans were due to return to Belfast from all over Europe, for the first running of the event in a decade.

Mine was one of them, driving 500 miles across land and sea for my first Eurofest in 15 years. But this was a short hop compared to those who drove from Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Hungary. No fewer than 130 cars in total arrived in Belfast for the four day event, the majority travelling thousands of miles and across two bodies of water to make it. It was the largest assembly of DeLoreans in Europe since the factory closed its doors almost half a century ago.

Those years have given the city a new perspective on the DeLorean project, and this is immediately apparent when talking to the public at the Stormont classic car show, where the stainless icon takes centre stage. Everyone has a story. Their father, uncle, mother-in-law or brother worked at the factory, made the parts that built the car, or had their lives touched in some way by the doomed venture.

But doom isn’t what’s remembered. It’s the hope. What the DeLorean promised, what it said about Belfast to make a car that made waves on the global stage, how it showed that fractured communities could come together and achieve things still unparalleled to this day.

‘Belfast is probably better known for the Titanic, but with DeLorean at least no lives were lost,’ Eurofest organiser Rob Lamrock tells me. He reminds me of the words of former factory worker George Crane: ‘DeLorean is Northern Ireland’s second most successful failure.’

The climax of Eurofest is the visit to the factory on the final day, with the promise of returning the cars to the test track that once shook them to their grommets. I have driven the test track before, at Eurofest 2011. But, much like the other 360 days of the year in Belfast, that day was raining. And a still mossy, wet surface in a tight convoy is never going to create spectacular fireworks. Especially when the upper half of the famous bank was off limits due to safety concerns.

But now on this particular day in June 2026, the sun is shining for us. It’s true that, like Monaco’s F1 circuit, some of the track surface is breaking up, but there’s little moss and the potholes can be dodged. This might actually be the best condition the track has been in for 40 years.

And not just that, but for once my DeLorean is in fine fettle, driving better now than ever before. I have to confess to feeling a little excited. My hands are clammy as I lead the first group of the day out onto the track. Six cars, five laps. No one in front of me.

It feels like I’ve been waiting all my life for this. I take a breath and floor it through first gear and into second, flat through the kink approaching the banking that rises intimidatingly in front of me. No question on the line. Go high, or go home.

A little lift, and a comfort dab of brakes. Still feels like I’m coming in very hot, as I whistle inches past the crowd assembled behind the crash barrier. The rise onto the banking creates a corkscrew feeling as those 26 degrees of angle get cranked on. Perhaps with enough laps under your belt you could come in flat, but that might be a bit rich for an out lap today.

I feed the throttle back in and feel the car squat into the bank, the steering wheel twitching in my hand. I have 500rpm left in second gear and I want to use every one of them. Let’s see how much G-force this baby can handle. I see 55mph. Then 60mph. We’re now 10mph over the 1981 limit when the tarmac was fresh. Bold, or foolhardy?

The back end pushes further into the tarmac, skipping across the joins and tapping the chassis into the ground as the G-force ramps up. It’s a feeling like nothing else, the car at its limit but in a different dimension to anything you can achieve on the level.

It was at exactly this final point of the curve that, some 20 years ago, a Belgian DeLorean crashed spectacularly. As the camber unwound at the end of the banking, the sudden unweighting of the back end caused the driver to lose control, spinning into and demolishing the wall that separated the water splash area. I have no doubt I am going at least as fast as that car was that day.

I unwind the lock out of the bank and the softly suspended back end goes light. My heart is in my mouth. Then the rear tyres dig in, grip again, and the car surges into the section through the woods. A fast understeery left, then a tricky right before hard on the brakes into the hairpin.

Dodge the killer rumble strips, then flat out past the marshals to begin lap two. I push harder, dab less, and get greedier with the throttle. More confidence through the corkscrew into the banking, embrace the G-force bottoming the car out as the tyres, suspension and chassis announce their deformation with even louder scrapes of epoxy on road. Push harder through the wooded S-bends. And then, at the hairpin I come up on traffic – the tail of my own group, now a lap down.

The adrenaline courses through my system. It’s only been perhaps a minute or two, but they are precious minutes I will never forget. Because 45 years ago my car did exactly this, exactly here. It’s an absolute privilege to bring it home.

My long suffering passenger is less than impressed, however. ‘It felt like a rollercoaster that you were going to fly out of,’ she tells me once we return to the parking area. ‘There was all this squeaking and vibrations. On the banking my stomach was doing somersaults, then in the S-bends I thought “Oh f***, I don’t like this”’. Needless to say, I couldn’t persuade her to go round again.

The last car to lap the track is Outadrift, a custom built, LS3 V8-engined, 600bhp DeLorean piloted by French professional drifter Alexandre Claudin. A crowd assembles outside the banking to see if physics can be bent to this monster’s will. Because drifting on a bank shouldn’t be possible. Turns out that if you have enough power, and enough talent, it is.

Did John Z. envisage this future, almost half a century after being arrested? Did Gerald Mooney expect his test track to survive, bearing witness to such glorious tyre-smoking, V8-roaring extravagance all these decades on?

That’s the funny thing about legacy. You don’t have to be a success in the first place to achieve it. Create something that inspires enough passion, and the legacy will take care of itself.

Still buzzing, I climb back into my DeLorean ahead of the long journey home. I go through my pre-drive routine. Kill switch on. Prime fuel pump. Connect phone. My mind drifts. There’s every chance someone will be driving this very car round this very test track in another 45 years. I doubt that person will be me. They may not even be born yet. It’s quite a thought.

And should they be reading this story on their Ti brain implant in 2071, one small piece of advice: this particular DeLorean motor car may be screwed together a little better than it was almost a century ago, but I’d avoid those deadly rumble strips all the same.

Photography by Martin McLoughlin and Gez Medinger

Huge thanks to DeLorean Historians for archive assistance