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Terrapin Imp - Are the 1990's History?

My early years in motorsport were spent as helper on a Vixen-Imp hillclimb car.  My mum had an Imp when I was 12. As a result of these experiences I know that anybody running an Imp engined car to its limits is a brave man. Step forward Douglas Mclay.

Douglas has been in touch after last month's piece on the Terrapin - statistically at one time the most successful car in Mono with one win from one entry - 100%. Douglas writes: "I own the Mk7e Terrapin shown in Allan Staniforth's Race and Rally Car Sourcebook. It's the one with the rubber band suspension. In fact it rather infamously raced in Mono B ( the fore runner of Mono 1200).

The car hated Mono! It ran quite well in the FIA Historic Championship, but never ran more than a few laps in Mono! Maybe it prefered the sun, or the continental lifestyle. It famously ran perfectly all weekend at Paul Ricard, and promptly seized its diff as it came off the trailer two weeks later at Silverstone for a Mono race. It never even made it to scrutineering!

I still have the car. It eventually ran a bearing in a Mono race at Silverstone, and I was an easy target for Rays advice to buy a Monokent car. My Royale RP29 was the result. and the Terrapin hasn't run since!"

I asked Douglas about the car at Silverstone. Douglas acquired it from Allan as a cheap entry into historic racing.  At that time it was fitted with Allan's Imp engine / Mini gearbox conversion. "It was eminently suitable for hillclimbing where the car runs for just a few minutes, and usually not much more than a minute in anger.  Allan had bolted a thick alloy plate onto the bottom of the Imp engine and then cut the gearbox away from a Mini engine.  The plate formed a flange which bolted  onto the the gearbox.  This was fine for hillclimbing but was less than oil tight when we ran a race distance.  However, "Ginger" Marshall had, during the 1980's run a Reliant Kitten special saloon with an Imp/Mini Hybrid."

A Reliant Kitten, for our younger readers of whom we have none,  was a 3 wheel Reliant Robin with an extra wheel. Quite a clever concept really, and amazing that 4 wheels had never before occured to anybody. It was attractive for special saloons because it had a long wheelbase in a small car. But I digress.

"Ginger's brother was the mechanic and I spoke to him. They had had 5 special blocks cast which included the block itself and the adaptor to fit the Mini box.  That gave a relatively reliable oil tight seal.  As luck would have it, one of the people who had bought an engine from the Marshalls advertised it a week or two later in Autosport, so I bought it and fitted it, which solved a lot of problems."

The car proved reliable in the mid-90's on the continent but as Douglas has said it was a disaster in Mono, so when one day he was working "happily"(!) away on it in the paddock Ray Dackombe wandered up and asked if it had occured to him that a straightforward Formula Ford based car usually ran without trouble and finished races. It hadn't, but it soon did occur to Douglas and the Terrapin was put onto a mezzanine (that's a "big shelf" for readers from Walsall)  and  has stayed there. "Although it's the lightest racing car I've ever owned, it needs a crane to get it down. I'm still quite fond of it, and enjoy looking at it, but I'm not sure I want to return to the endless spannering. So it will probably stay there for some time yet."

Tony Cotton

If you haven't seen the first article about Terrapins, click here.
Ginger Marshall's Imp / Mini hybrid powered Reliant Kitten at Cadwell