A Magnette at the Palace
Report by Malcolm Eades
Petrol-heads who parted with £10.00 at the entrance to the Sevenoaks and District Motor Club’s “Motorsport at the Palace” event were handsomely rewarded with two days of excellent sprinting on a tight little track nestling in the natural amphitheatre at Crystal Palace. In case you missed it, I’ll just repeat that entry fee: just ten pounds, including parking the car!! As the day proved, this excellent two-day club event would have been good value at twice the price. The sprint track includes a section of the old motor racing circuit so anyone “of a certain age” will be full of nostalgia hearing again the roar of engines in this attractive wooded and grassy-sloped venue with so much history behind it. With a field that ranged from Norton-engined single-seaters through a predictable assembly of MGs, Minis, Escorts and Lotuses to Ferraris and full racers, there was something to suit every taste. And apart from the on-track activity there was a display of club and spectators’ cars that offered a tasty selection of desirable classics. The Alfa Romeo Montreal was probably the pin-up that I would have taken home, even faced with a choice of prancing horses. For the Magnette enthusiast there was a special treat in the competitors list: Darren Brock’s very modified 1954 ZA (KAE13/9320 reg’d 225 FMK).
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This is almost a single-family- from-new car. Darren’s father acquired it from the family doctor in 1957. After service as the family car it ended up going into storage until Darren took it on early in his driving career. His mates eventually convinced him that it wasn’t doing his street cred any good so it went back into storage for another spell. Then Darren was taken with the idea of competing in motorsport and he decided that the Magnette deserved another life as his track car. Faced with the need to turn a lightly modified 1950s saloon into something that could hold its own in club events, Darren went back to the drawing board and took a radical approach.
There is no disguising this car’s competitive intent. It has some very obvious external visual clues. Along with the huge wheels, the extra air vents in the bodywork are the most noticeable. At the front there is a huge intake pod grafted onto the nearside of the bonnet, with the adjacent wing cut away to match. This supplies air to the engine induction system. The bonnet is louvered along most of its top surface to rid the engine bay of heat. The front end also carries ducts to take cooling air to the disc brakes and the oil cooler. On the offside front wing there is a small duct outlet that vents fumes from the catch-tank and behind the off-side rear door is a vent to keep air moving through the cockpit.
Lift the bonnet and the reason for all this extra air becomes obvious. Notwithstanding the MG badge araldited to it, the engine is a 1997cc Mercedes unit built to DTM (German Touring Car Championship) spec with gearbox to match. The bonnet catch platform, the inner wings and the cross-brace have all been removed to accommodate the plumbing and accessories that this drive-train modification brings with it. The big radiator is custom-made in aluminium, with a remote header tank that sits on the nearside of the bulkhead. An electric fan is fixed in front of the radiator and, in the absence of its standard catch, the bonnet is held in place by external spring clips and safety straps either side of the grille. To replace the structural stability lost with the inner wings and the cross-brace, the car has diagonal bracing struts mounted between the top corners of the bulkhead and the front of the chassis legs, above the suspension tie-rods. Behind that air intake runs a huge carbon fibre duct channelling air to the fuel injection throttle body. In almost surreal contrast, behind all this muscle the standard master cylinder sits on its usual bracket but Darren says it is perfectly sized to deliver the right amount of pressure to the callipers.
To transfer all this extra power to the road via the wide TR6 wheels, the rear suspension has been completely re-worked with twin trailing arms, telescopic dampers and a Panhard rod. There are also disc brakes to the rear. Finding wheels strong enough to take the extra BHP is a problem. Darren spent the evening before the event welding the centre back into his rear off-side wheel, having ripped it out on a previous competitive outing.
Darren readily admits that this is not a car for the originality purist but, as modifications go, this one is well conceived and well executed, giving the car a very purposeful look that says “I mean business!” A little ruefully, Darren also predicts that he is unlikely to be competitive on a short track that crams a hairpin, a chicane and several tight corners into a mere 0.7km. “I won’t get out of first and second” is his summary of his chances. By the time a bit of forward momentum is achieved, it is time to brake and line the car up for the next bend. Even so, as he gets the power down on the up-slope after the hairpin, the Magnette’s ample curvaceous rear gives a seductive wiggle and the exhaust note fulfils all the promise of our visual inspection in the paddock.
Darren’s pessimism is unwarranted: he is third in his seven car “Sports Libre” class with his fastest run of 40.83secs. The class winner, Amanda George in a Chevron B19, only beats him by 0.85secs and FTD is 35.18secs by Duncan Cowper in his Dax Rush.
