Sideways to victory!

So what, exactly, have we here? It started life as a 1967 Mustang Fastback which was bought by HERO-ERA in 2022 as a rusting barn find. The decision to offer the project to Prodrive might seem slightly left field given the famous Banbury company has precisely zero experience in building historic rally cars or working on a muscle car, but such is its record in the WRC and on the Dakar Rally that HERO-ERA boss Tomas de Vargas Machuca didn’t want it going anywhere else. Even so Prodrive founder David Richards almost changed his mind when he saw the state of the car on offer.

But time and talent turned that around. It took 600 hours to get the rot-filled body to where it needed to be, 250 hours to paint it and over 1500 hours to put it together. That process involved sourcing a block from renowned aftermarket specialists Dart, based on Ford’s famed Windsor 302cu in small block V8, but enlarged by around 500cc to displace 5.4-litres. In full race trim such an engine these days could be expected to deliver close to 600bhp breathing through the obligatory four-barrel Holley, but because this motor is intended to run for many thousands of kilometres, often on fuels with similar combustion properties to tea, it has been pegged back to a still potent 400bhp in a car weighing just 1500kg with all safety equipment installed. It took 45 hours just to get it running right.

Surprisingly the engine runs through a modern five-speed Tremec TKX transmission, not the four-speed original, because it’s stronger and HERO-ERA’s rally regs allow it. A smaller, lighter T5 transmission would have taken the torque, but not with the safety margin you might want pinging and skipping between the boulders in the middle of the Gobi desert. It runs as expected to a leaf-sprung live rear axle containing a mechanical limited-slip differential. But another major change is the repositioning of the rear dampers (now Bilsteins) so they are now vertical not diagonal. ‘There’s no way in the world you’d have got through Peking to Paris with them in their old location,’ said Prodrive’s Richard Thompson, who oversaw the whole operation.

The car runs on Michelin Aglis Crossclimate tyres and if you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of them, it’s probably because they’re designed for a van and, as such, are incredibly hard to damage.

Today we meet at HERO-ERA’s HQ at Bicester Heritage where a three-mile partly tarmac but mainly gravel stage has been laid out for us. My first lap is in the passenger seat with Tomas at the wheel, showing me round the lap and talking about the project.

‘We wanted to do something different, I love muscle cars and I got to wondering what else would be as fast, fun and safe to have on our Arrive and Drive fleet, especially over the huge distances of our longest rallies. It wasn’t much of a leap from there to seeing what we could do with an original Mustang as our start point. And that’s the aim: to provide customers with something developed by the best, to survive some of the toughest conditions on earth. And, of course, to provide a little competition for all those 911s…’

What is most notable from the passenger seat is the sense of space and comfort and, adore them though I do, it is a very different environment to that provided by the main Porsche opposition. Significantly the seat is no thin carbon shell to act like a jackhammer on your coccyx, but a properly padded chair, still offering good location support, but also recognising that the only way to pull significant ‘g’ in a car like this is to drive it into a tree.

My turn. I adore this kind of car. It was for many years my good fortune to race a Ford Falcon of not dissimilar vintage and while that car was lighter, more powerful and FIA compliant than this, they are cut from very similar cloths.

The engine fires with that familiar old music. It’s loud but not overwhelmingly so, probably because even the charms of a competition small block motor might wear thin after a month or so of having it in your ear. For now all it means is that Bicester’s sound sensors remain untroubled.

At first it all feels a bit disjointed. Compared to the race ’box in the Falcon, the modern Tremec feels a little vague and a couple of times I found fifth while looking for third. The regs require it to still have a steering box rather than something more precise like a rack and pinion, and as a result there’s quite a lot of arm movement required before it will head off in your chosen direction. And on the tarmac section where the stage starts, it wants to understeer and has to be provoked into neutrality, a condition for which the Falcon prepared me very well.

But then we hit the gravel. It felt like a sea lion slipping off an ice flow into the ocean, an environment for which it was born. At once this slightly gangly, ungainly beast transformed into something that was in its absolute element. Gravel spits, hands blur, the Windsor bellows its approval. And when you have a V8 at one end, an LSD and a live axle at the other, and when such elements are separated by a long wheelbase, what comes next is not difficult. This is not a car and these are not the conditions in which slides are to be caught and dismissed; they are there to be ridden, and for as long as possible.

In the middle of one of these I glanced across to Tomas in the passenger seat, suddenly aware I was perhaps taking one too many liberties with his precious prototype. He caught my eye and simply said ‘keep going! Mustang style!’ so I did. It was also the only time I heard the car referred to by the name with which it had been born.

I even managed to quite deliberately spin it through 180 degrees at the conclusion of a dead end track created for specifically this purpose. And here you felt the Prodrive effect, which has been building cars with handbrakes that are almost as important as their footbrakes for several decades. I left it in second, turned in, pulled up and immediately dropped the lever, got back on the gas and slithered by in the direction from which I had come. From the outside it would have looked utterly brilliant. From within? Childishly simple.

If you want to enjoy that level of fun, in a car created by the best in the business, as previously mentioned the price is £350,000 including both VAT and the donor vehicle. And given what you can do with it, the pedigree of the people behind it and relative to the cost of other restomods which you can take to the pub or on your favourite road but not much else, I actually don’t think it’s that expensive.

Would I prefer it to a 911? I’m not sure: both are breeds I love more than most, but for rather different reasons. But certainly on a long distance rally where space and comfort are unusually important, I’d say the HERO-ERA 1 is a mighty tempting proposition. Which is perhaps why HERO-ERA 2 is already in build with orders for more already starting to arrive.

Photography by Will Broadhead