How a standard bearer of BTCC’s golden era replicated Vauxhall glory with Nissan

In a motorsport context, they were soulmates, as well as being good friends. Ray Mallock and his number one pilot David Leslie were cut from the same cloth – engineering-driven, yet both excellent development drivers and racers in their own right, neither of whom ever carried the hype and momentum to take them as far as peers of similar, or even inferior, ability. After they had shared an Aston Martin AMR1 in the 1989 Le Mans 24 Hours, Mallock, by then 38 years old, retired from the cockpit as a professional – he still races now as a 73-year-old for fun – because he knew everything was safe in the hands of his Scottish pal.

“Looking back on it, it was a bit bonkers thinking I could combine being engineering director of the works Aston programme as well as being the development driver and race driver – it’s too much,” laughs Mallock, whose Ray Mallock Limited company this year has been celebrating its 40th anniversary. “But I was fortunate enough to have David there, so I was confident to hand over the baton as development and lead driver. That worked out OK really…”

It did, but in a different sphere to what Mallock would have imagined. RML, with Mallock and Leslie at the wheel for Ecurie Ecosse, had come close to winning the Group C2 title in the world sportscar championship before Aston came calling with its project in the Group C top flight. Then a radical revamp of the regulations calling for 3.5-litre Formula 1 engines meant “we were left with an insurmountable challenge of creating a brand new engine from scratch. We didn’t have a budget to create a Formula 1 engine. Group C was incredibly popular – it was getting more popular than F1, and I think that was the worry…”

After working with Nissan at the 1990 Le Mans 24 Hours, RML needed a change of tack. It would lead to British Touring Car Championship victories at the height of the 1990s Super Touring era with both Vauxhall and Nissan, and begin a tin-top dynasty that continued with multiple World Touring Car Championship titles with Chevrolet, and goes on today with RML as the supplier of spec subframes, suspension and steering systems to the entire BTCC field, a deal it has held since 2016.

“It was the realisation that we needed to get back into a manufacturer-backed race programme,” reflects Mallock. “As Group C was dwindling, Super Touring and BTCC was on the up.” Scottish coal magnate Hugh McCaig, the latter-day patron of Ecurie Ecosse, was key.

“I was busy knocking on the doors of all the relevant manufacturers that I thought might be interested,” continues Mallock, “and it was Vauxhall that took the most interest, and we were able to stitch a deal together for 1992 whereby they loaned us two ex-works Dave Cook cars and engines.

Leslie, Ecurie Ecosse Vauxhall and Dunlop tyres gave RML its first BTCC taste in 1992

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“Hugh put up the budget for David to run in one car, and we had some good gentlemen drivers in the other car – Bobby Verdon-Roe, Harry Nuttall, Alex Portman. We were fortunate to have some good drivers with budgets, and we were able to persuade Dunlop to support us – no one else was really interested in Dunlop, but that was part of our stitching the programme together and we couldn’t have done it without Dunlop’s help. We were their lead partner and development team.”

At the time, Yokohama was the tyre of choice in the BTCC, including on the factory Vauxhall Cavaliers run by Cook’s team for John Cleland and Jeff Allam. Dunlop’s determination to keep a toehold with Mallock would pay off big time shortly afterwards, when Audi went the Super Touring route with four-wheel-drive machinery and romped to countless championships worldwide on the company’s tyres…

RML’s toe-in-the-water exercise in 1992 netted seventh in the final BTCC standings for Leslie, and for 1993 the team went its own Cavalier-shaped way. In large part, this was again due to philanthropy from Vauxhall, but there was an ulterior motive.

"We took the car out at Brands and John did a couple of warm-up laps, and I do remember him coming in and saying there’s something wrong with his dash! It had just given him a time that was about a second quicker than we’d ever done before" Ray Mallock

“It was our first full RML design, and Vauxhall kindly allowed us to use the funds from selling those ex-works cars to put into our own cars, because I was able to persuade them that we could create a better car for ’93 by starting from scratch,” recalls Mallock. “Part of that was creating a new gearbox with Xtrac. I knew Mike Endean very well, and between us we came up with what was their first Super Touring gearbox – a six-speed sequential.”

This was groundbreaking for Super Touring, and had the full support of Leslie, who had become used to the concept from his days in gearbox karting.

“That allowed us to drop the whole engine by something like three inches,” says Mallock. “That ground-up design was all about lowering the centre of gravity of the car, getting the torsional rigidity right, getting the suspension right. All the fundamentals. It was instantly quick.”

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Mallock is not the most demonstrative of men – calm serenity is more his style – but his tale of a March 1993 test at Snetterton on the eve of the season opener brings a lump to his throat. It is made all the more poignant in light of Leslie’s fatal accident as a passenger in a private aircraft in 2008, at the age of 54.

Ground up work on a new car for 1993 heralded clear progress with Leslie leading development

Photo by: LAT Photographic

“It must have been our first proper run with the car, but we had a misfire for most of the day – something on the ignition,” he remembers. “And we just couldn’t get it to run cleanly. Right towards the end of the day, we made some changes to the software and David said, ‘That’s it, the engine’s running cleanly, let’s put a set of tyres on it.’

“So we put a set on, and he came round Coram so quickly – it still sets the hairs on the back of neck off now… Visibly quicker than anything else that had been going round that day. And he came across the line to the top of the timesheets. That’s when we knew we had a good car. It makes me emotional thinking about it.”

RML was on its way. Leslie dropped back to eighth in the 1993 standings, but the BTCC had taken a huge leap forward in competitiveness and it included a breakthrough win at Thruxton. Off the back of this, the company won a contract with Opel – beginning a relationship with General Motors that would continue right through the Chevrolet WTCC era – and, for BTCC, would become sister marque Vauxhall’s works team for 1994.

To Mallock’s chagrin – and something he would correct three years later with Nissan – he could not retain Leslie, because Cleland and Allam were the factory-contracted drivers. That’s not to say that Mallock did not enjoy running these two tin-top veterans, and indeed Cleland’s finest hour was to come: after placing fourth in the 1994 standings, he claimed the 1995 crown.

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“The ’94 car that John and Jeff drove was a direct descendant of the ’93 car that David had developed,” says Mallock. “And the ’95 car was again a very logical development but with the addition of the front spoiler and the rear wing. Suddenly we had some downforce. Those Cavaliers all had David’s fingerprints on them if you like.”

The introduction of aero had come in the wake of the Alfa Romeo rumpus in 1994.

“The rules changed for ’95, quite rightly, to allow a levelling up so we could have a homologated rear wing and front bumper,” says Mallock. “That gave us the opportunity to draw on our sportscar experience. On the [Aston] AMR1, the front downforce… we were able to use a very similar concept on the ’95 Cavalier and it instantly gave the grip we were looking for.

“We took the car out at Brands and John did a couple of warm-up laps, and I do remember him coming in and saying there’s something wrong with his dash! It had just given him a time that was about a second quicker than we’d ever done before. The car was just instantly hooked up and he could get straight into the apexes, all of the things that you want to have in a front-wheel-drive touring car all of a sudden clicked in. So that was the groundwork for that championship.”

Cleland on his way to the 1995 title, masterminded by Leslie's work on the Cavaliers

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Allam had been dropped for 1995 by Vauxhall, which replaced him with the talented but inexperienced James Thompson. More change arrived for 1996, with the Vectra replacing the Cavalier, and Mallock was looking for a new challenge…

“I was frustrated that we weren’t able to get the Vectra going better than we did,” he says. “To be honest, I think I was missing having David Leslie doing the development work!”

Nissan Motorsports Europe, which was competing in the German Super Touring Cup, was looking to bring the Japanese manufacturer back into the BTCC for the first time since 1994. Crucially, it already had Anthony Reid, one of Mallock’s main targets, on board… Alec Poole, the genial Irishman who had won the BTCC in 1969 and was now head of NME, was keen to get a deal over the line.

Friday favourite: Anthony Reid on David Leslie

“Alec had been talking to us about whether we’d be interested in going with Nissan,” remembers Mallock, “and as the season went on I said, ‘Yeah, could be interested depending on what the driver line-up would be’, and he said, ‘Well, who do you want in the car?’ I said, ‘David and Anthony’, and he said, ‘OK, we’ll do that.’ That’s what made the change, to have more influence over the drivers and how we ran the cars.”

“We put a lot of effort into team building. It’s the business of marginal gains – looking at where you can pick up a bit of extra performance, and we did that by really focusing on teamwork” Ray Mallock

Reid had already impressed Mallock during his stint in Japan’s Super Touring series racing an RML-built Cavalier with HKS: “He was very helpful in the development of those cars. After every test and race, he would send me a detailed report back. They were running their own dampers over there, and they were on Michelin tyres [by 1996 every non-Audi works team in the BTCC was aligned with the French company] so it was a parallel development programme almost, which was very helpful. Anthony knew our cars and I knew Anthony – that’s why I wanted him in the car.”

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RML’s first Primera, for 1997, was clearly quick, but lacked reliability.

“That particular engine had some idiosyncrasies about it and it needed an understanding of that kind of engine,” says Mallock of a powerplant whose build and development was passed from John Judd’s Engine Developments to AER and back again. “It wasn’t a very good engine, but in the end it was.”

By 1998, Reid was able to run champion Rickard Rydell close for the BTCC title, but that summer it had been announced that he would be joining Alain Menu in a Ford superteam for 1999. Poole actively began courting Peugeot’s star driver Laurent Aiello to join Leslie, and finally got the deal done with the Frenchman.

Reid narrowly missed out on the title to Rydell in 1998 before his departure to Ford the following year

Photo by: Jeff Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Off track, new thinking in the HR department at RML’s Wellingborough factory had brought in a company called Impact, which had made a success of team-building for the British Lions rugby team’s South African tour in 1997. The principle was that the disparate elements of Nissan – RML led by Mallock and his trusted lieutenants such as Phil Barker and Stuart Ayling; NME with Poole and the late technical chief Ricardo Divila; and Japanese base NISMO, from which Hiro Nakajima was embedded in the team – needed to be brought together.

“We realised that we could get more out of the team by ensuring that all elements – whether it was the engine people, NISMO, the tyre people, the marketing people – worked more closely together,” explains Mallock. “We put a lot of effort into team building. It’s the business of marginal gains – looking at where you can pick up a bit of extra performance, and we did that by really focusing on teamwork.”

Put it to Mallock that this was kept quiet at the time, and he chortles: “Oh yeah, yeah. We didn’t want to tell everyone our secrets!”

One key motivation in this was RML’s experience of working with – ironically – Nissan North America at Le Mans in 1990, when Geoff Brabham, Derek Daly and Chip Robinson were chasing down the winning Jaguar during the morning: “It was the absolute opposite of what had happened in ’90!

“There were six works-entered Nissans – two from Japan, two from Europe and two from America – and we were all supposed to share our test and development data, and the failure that put us out with the fuel tank getting damaged was something that Nissan Europe had experienced and come up with their own fix for, and hadn’t told the rest of us about it. That lost Nissan and RML a win at Le Mans.”

Poole, who did not take over at NME until the early 1990s, had now brought a fourth element into the team-building equation: the French axis of Aiello and his engineer Ludovic Lacroix.

“We made sure we integrated them into the team in the same way,” says Mallock. “They just acted very professionally, got their heads down. Ludo worked closely with people like Stuart Ayling and Phil Barker to understand what we were doing. And of course it coincided with us going to beam axle as well, so that was quite a big change.”

This was forced upon RML by the new-model Primera for 1999, and had caused consternation among the technical department. But not Mallock, who had grown up with his father Arthur using the concept on his hugely popular Mallock U2 customer cars in Formula Junior and then Clubmans, and knew that it would provide “very precise control of camber and toe angles. I think it’s a great system, and so it proved to be! I love live axles – I drive my Formula Junior Mallock reasonably regularly and love the way it handles and the way it puts its power down. Beam axles are great in my book, and so it proved to be in ’99 BTCC.”

Aiello stormed to the title in 1999 with RML's Nissan Primera, but it wasn't to last

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Aiello stormed to the title, but Nissan was pulling out of the BTCC at the end of 1999. The RML-built Primera would be a race winner again in 2000 in the hands of privateer Matt Neal, the son of Poole’s old Mini-racing chum Steve Neal, but there was no longer an RML-run team in the series. But there could have been. Mallock got very close to a deal to produce a Super Touring MG for 2000.

“We’d had our guys on it, we’d have drawn up the rollcage, the chassis would have been done, the suspension would have been laid out,” he reveals. “We’d got quite a long way down the road. But this was when Rover and MG were being sold and split up to BMW and the Chinese, and Martin Birrane [by now the new owner of British constructor Lola] was in the midst of that financial deal with Phoenix [which handled the takeover].

“We were just about to sign this deal, and Martin got on the phone to the marketing director David Bowes who was in my office and said, ‘You need to come out of Ray’s office now’, and he told him that this deal was going to Lola and not to us. David said, ‘I’m sorry Ray, it’s not going to happen, it’s going to Lola.’ We’d been carrying all the guys for months and doing all this design work on a handshake, and it didn’t happen.”

As it happened, Super Touring had just one more year in the BTCC, an MG deal did happen with Lola for the subsequent BTC Touring ruleset in 2001 but proved short-lived, and RML moved back into the growing world of endurance racing with Saleen. But for eight years at the height of the BTCC’s greatest era, it had been the gold standard.

RML shone brightly but briefly in the BTCC's greatest era