How a timely change of chassis transformed Formula 3 forever

The title was beginning to slip away, but help was at hand in the form of a shiny new Dallara. Par for the course for Formula 3? Not in 1993, when a belated switch rescued Kelvin Burt’s season.

“Yeah, I would say 100%,” he reflects when asked whether the arrival of the Italian machine 30 years ago was his salvation. “From that point forward we would have struggled to get any more wins.”

The Dallara revolution in British F3 was one of the biggest hammerblows to the UK’s racing car industry. For all its success in Europe, Dallara’s products were untried (save for a brave, and brief, effort from Tech-Speed in 1989), and the conservative – some might say complacent – British scene was reluctant to take a punt.

Former Bowman Racing staffers Trevor Carlin and Anthony ‘Boyo’ Hieatt, who half a decade later would combine to make the former’s new team the dominant force in British F3, had tried to put a deal together to form a squad to run a Dallara in 1993. But they were short of money and backing, and it was the unfancied Richard Arnold Developments team that finally took the plunge.

This was via engineer Chris Weller, who had been working with Alan Docking Racing. Weller was convinced the Dallara was the way to go, and had befriended Arnold, whose team was set up to run son Steven. Docking’s deal to be the de facto works Ralt team sent Weller to the Arnolds, and the revolution started…

By the time Burt switched to a Dallara F393, immediately after finishing a distant fourth in the British Grand Prix support race at Silverstone in July, the championship had boiled down to a fight between himself and F3 rookie Oliver Gavin. With Gavin on a winning spree in his Dallara, his deficit to Burt was down to 11 points (with nine for a win), and six races still remained. Hence Burt’s opening remark…

It was a fascinating dynamic. The laid-back Burt, in his second season of F3 but already a veteran of the junior categories, was with the all-conquering Paul Stewart Racing, run and engineered by Andy Miller. Fresh-faced 20-year-old Gavin, meanwhile, was fighting out of the corner of Peter Briggs’s Edenbridge Racing. Miller, like many of his contemporaries, is a lovely man and perhaps something of a motorsport puritan; Briggs, while he’d paid his dues as a mechanic with March and Surtees in F1 and F2, has a bon viveur charisma whereby you’d not be surprised to learn that he’d managed bands in the swinging sixties.

Briggs had future Red Bull head of race engineering Ian Morgan working with Gavin on the important stuff of making the car go quicker, which freed him up to take a big-picture view. For the start of the 1993 season, this sent Briggs in the wrong direction. Edenbridge had played its part in rescuing Reynard’s market share in F3 in 1991 when Gil de Ferran won races and, when the Brazilian moved on to PSR in 1992, that team switched from Ralt to Reynard and claimed a dominant title. So, for 1993, Edenbridge went to Ralt…

Burt started the season well in PSR Reynard, but recognised a switch to the Dallara F393 would be needed to avoid Gavin running away with the title

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“Basically I always had the theory of when you have the same as everybody else, you’re not going to get any advantage,” explains Briggs. “The idea was to have something different, and in theory with the factory supporting you, which was the plan, you’d make an improvement. But sadly it was a bad car to start with. It just would never really work.”

Meanwhile, the Arnolds had taken delivery of a second Dallara in time for round two at Thruxton, and given the reins to their driver coach: Edenbridge’s 1992 pilot Warren Hughes. Suddenly, the goalposts had moved and everyone could see how good the car was.

“The thing was an absolute missile!” laughs Gavin. “The boys at Dallara had really done their homework and it was super-efficient, it seemed like it just glided through the air so much more efficiently than anything else out there at the time. It was like Warren was running quarter of the wing level that the Ralt was, but it still was going around the corners just as fast, and so its efficiency levels were significantly higher.”

"When we started running the Dallara, the traction that the car had off the slow-speed corners was just phenomenal, and it was a real breath of fresh air in how driver-friendly it was, how it did so many things just nicer than the Ralt" Oliver Gavin

With the Ralt, Gavin had taken a best result of seventh from the opening three rounds, and just a single point had been scored by the RT37 courtesy of a sixth for Docking driver Ricardo Rosset. When the field assembled at Donington for round four in early May, Edenbridge had doubled the Dallara count to four, with Gavin and Gualter Salles joining Arnold and Hughes in the Italian camp.

“The Arnolds got the first Dallaras with the Fiat engine and you could see how good they were, and so we made the big rush and sent the lads down to Mr Dallara, bought two cars, ran them round their little test track down there just down the road at Varano, brought them back and immediately Olly found the big jump forward,” relates Briggs. “The Ralt was a big bulky thing. And also underneath the chassis was a splitter, and if you ran over a kerb it cracked the chassis. I sold them to [David] Gould who turned them into hillclimb cars.”

“You look back at it and you think, ‘Was I a bit green, did I not really know, and technically was I not really up to speed with the F3 car at that point?’” questions Gavin. “But when we got to that Ralt we were all scratching our heads. It was doing some really unusual, kind of random things that we were not that comfortable or happy with, so Peter took the bold decision of switching. That was the sort of thing that Peter was great at – he could stand back, look and go, ‘That’s where the next move is, that’s the direction that we need to go in’.

Edenbridge started the season with Ralt before Briggs took the plunge on the switch to Dallara, which kickstarted Gavin's run of success

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“When we started running the Dallara [at Varano], the traction that the car had off the slow-speed corners was just phenomenal, and it was a real breath of fresh air in how driver-friendly it was, how it did so many things just nicer than the Ralt, just predictable and easier to set up, and it was very fast in a straight line as well.”

On his third race in the Dallara, at Silverstone, Gavin claimed his maiden F3 triumph, and went on to make it four in a row when he won in front of the British GP crowd. But it was the third of those wins, at Donington in late June, that put the writing firmly on the wall. Gavin held off a charging Hughes in the battle for victory, while Burt’s Reynard 933 was 25 seconds adrift in third; the fastest lap by a non-Dallara was 1.02s off the new lap record of Hughes, on a 66s lap…

By the time of the British GP support, Docking was running a Dallara for Rosset and West Surrey Racing had one for expected title contender Marc Goossens. The following Monday, one had arrived chez PSR to be prepped for Burt for the coming weekend’s round at Donington.

“It was difficult,” remembers Miller, “because we were sort of the works-supported team, and just on a personal basis we wanted to make the Reynard work. Reynard worked very hard with us to try everything, including [Dallara] lookalike bodywork, radiators down the front, anything you could possibly do. We weren’t going that bad, but we realised there were a fair few races left and if we wanted to win the championship we just had to commit and cross over.

“Dallara basically bought a Reynard, a Ralt and anything else that was any good and they twisted it and bent it, and improved on anything that was out there – and they had a wind tunnel. That’s why they became unbeatable. We tried all we could but in the end we just had to bite the bullet and go and see Ingegnere Dallara.”

First time out in the Dallara, Burt took victory.

“There was usually a test at Donington on the Thursday,” adds Miller, “but we decided, ‘No we’ll rip it to pieces, build it the way we want’. We knew the circuit so that wasn’t a problem. Kelvin drove out of his skin that weekend, and Briggsy was strutting around saying, ‘Oh it’s going to take you a month to get on top of this car – you’ve got no hope’ and everything. So we were quite pleased when we went there and stuck it on pole position and won the race.

“A lot of the performance at Donington was probably down to Kelvin. He had a point to prove. He wanted a Dallara and he got it, he had to win and he did. We then did two or three days of testing and we knew what we had.”

Over the final six races, Gavin would take just one more win in a superb display at Pembrey. Burt finished second on that day, his only defeat during that time, and won the crown by 25 points.

Burt took a decisive victory on his first time in the Dallara at Donington to stop Gavin's domination

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“It was a really good car out of the box, and they [old-philosophy Dallara F3 cars] still are now,” declares Burt. “You just get the car and it’s so good, and it got better over the subsequent 20 years. Forget trying to improve it, just run the car with what they say.”

The key to success in F3, where the cars were high on grip but relatively low on power, was having the car on the edge of braking traction in corners to keep momentum as high as possible.

“I remember the biggest impression was it felt like it was on top of the road, not in the road [like the Reynard],” reckons Burt. “The Reynard felt stable and planted, like heavy on its feet, and when you got on the power in a long corner it didn’t really accelerate, and that’s all to do with torsion I’m sure. The Dallara almost felt like a car on skinnier tyres. The torsional rigidity of the car made the most out of the little power you’d got.

“In a long corner, where the car’s binding up and you’re asking it to accelerate through the corner but you’re scrubbing as well, that’s where it pays off because you’ve kind of got more power through the corner. And not only that, there was a double gain.

"So many times I wanted to throttle him [Burt]! And then he’d go and stick it on pole and give you that cheeky grin as if, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’" Andy Miller

“Neil Brown [whose Mugen engines set the standard in British F3] told me straight away that in the Dallara he could advance the ignition more on the engine. So not only does it feel like you’ve got more power – you have actually got more power because he can wind the ignition up.

“In a car that binds up, it’s loading the engine up more. Let’s say in a fifth-gear corner you go to full throttle at low revs, that’s where it’s going to detonate. If the car’s not winding up so much you can crank the ignition up more, which gives you more power, without it detonating.”

“We battled all the time to try and find out what the difference was, and in hindsight I think that the problem was the adaptor plate and gearbox assembly on the Dallara was so much stiffer and better,” explains Miller. “The Reynard had this one cast piece. And I said this at the time, because people were saying to Reynard, ‘Oh we need a new chassis because they’re flexing’, but I was under the impression that the chassis were fine, it was just literally the adaptor plate and the gearbox. That was what was winding up and taking power and so on, because there were tell-tale signs of chafing on various components within the gearbox.

Burt's style and temperament both behind the wheel and off the track paid dividends in 1993

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“I honestly think that’s where Dallara had the advantage. They had a very nice gearbox assembly and a separate adaptor plate, and it was very, very stiff I’m sure. We never did rig tests or anything like that, but I’m convinced that’s where it was.”

Miller doesn’t necessarily agree with Burt’s remark that the Dallara could be run straight out of the box. “Obviously the base Dallara set-up is very good, but you’ve got to do all you can to make it better, haven’t you?” he points out. “You’re up against everybody else and you’ve got to find that little adjustment that makes the difference. You just really go through a sweep of all the things that you can adjust, and then you get in a nice envelope of performance, and you know where to go when the driver’s complaining of something. It’s the same with any car – somehow you’ve got to try and make yours better than they’ve got.

“We’d been running Quantum dampers – we got them first with [David] Coulthard on the Ralt [in 1991], and then we put them on the Reynard and I think they became original equipment on the Reynard, and then exactly the same thing happened with Dallara, because I ran Quantum dampers on it. That’s the sort of difference you can make with just little bits and pieces like that.”

Edenbridge, meanwhile, had its own differentiator: it was the only team that used the Spiess-tuned engine that was so successful in Germany as an Opel, and ran in the UK as a Vauxhall. The marque’s motorsport boss Mike Nicholson wanted to promote drivers from his Formula Vauxhall Lotus series, such as Hughes in 1992 and Gavin in 1993, and this helped the team with publicity and some budget. The engine was regarded as strong, with Hughes, using the Fiat motor in his Dallara, remarking at the time about Gavin that “it’s easy for him”.

What wasn’t easy for Gavin was Burt’s first-time-out win in the Dallara.

“Not that I gave up, but that did really take the wind out of my sails because I was riding on the crest of a wave; I’d pretty much got everybody else covered even when they’d gone and got a Dallara themselves,” he recalls. “Marc [Goossens] was quick and on his day, if Dick [Bennetts, WSR chief] had really got the car in the window for him, he was really fast and tough to beat, but most of the time we could just about see him off and anyone else.

“But when Kelvin turned up with the car and with Andy working his magic on it, it was a bit of a slap in the face, we needed to double down. It taught me a lesson that you need to keep learning, digging, keep working away at making yourself better, understanding the car better, working with your engineer to get it better for you.”

After a brief foray in F3000 for 1994, Gavin returned to Edenbridge and conquered British F3 in 1995

Photo by: Motorsport Images

But Gavin is magnanimous that the right man won: “That was the thing about Kelvin. It was effortless. That’s just his manner and just his way. At times it did turn Andy Miller grey I think. Kelvin was just so relaxed, so cool about it all, and when he was in the zone he was unbelievably difficult to beat. He had great overall pace, but he also really understood about how to build a race and make the tyre work and last, and switch things on after a restart. He was the full package there in F3 that year.”

Miller concurs about Burt.

“It was good fun, but he turned me grey – he was such bloody hard work to run because he was so laid back, and took absolutely no responsibility on anything himself!” he laughs. “But it was worth it in the end. So many times I wanted to throttle him! And then he’d go and stick it on pole and give you that cheeky grin as if, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’

“Turning up five minutes before practice at Donington because he’d still been in his bloody bed… Kelvin was so laid back, you’d wonder if he was awake. To be honest, most of the time he was just sitting in the sun somewhere. But he was very, very talented, there’s no question. When we got the Dallara, that was impressive what he did then.”

"Reynards and Ralts, when you bought spares it was always an effort to fit them. Dallara spares just bolted straight on, everything just fitted – it was perfect" Peter Briggs

PSR had staved off an attempted heist by the little guys at Edenbridge – for two years anyway, because Gavin would return to F3 with the team in 1995 and win the title, with Morgan (“He’s right up there with the best three or four engineers I’ve worked with in my racing career”) in his corner again.

“Did we have the resource of some of the others?” asks Gavin. “No we didn’t. But Peter and Ian and the guys worked their bloody socks off and kept giving us a good car.”

And Edenbridge will always go down in history as the first to take a Dallara to victory in British F3.

“Reynards and Ralts, when you bought spares it was always an effort to fit them,” recounts Briggs. “Dallara spares just bolted straight on, everything just fitted – it was perfect. And they were such lovely people to deal with. Mr Dallara, whenever he sees me, he always says, ‘Thees is the man who made us successful in Britain!’”

By the end of the season all the top contenders were running Dallaras. Here Burt leads Gavin and Marc Goossens (West Surrey) at Silverstone

Photo by: Motorsport Images