Why "whirlwind" Tauranac's legacy will stand the test of time

The legacy of Ron Tauranac, the designer of world championship-winning Brabham Formula 1 cars and founder of Ralt who passed away last week aged 95, lives on in UK motorsport. The hub that was Tauranac's Ralt factory in Weybridge through the late 1970s and 1980s is arguably responsible for much that we are seeing today.

Arguably Carlin and Double R Racing, the two most successful teams in British Formula 3 and 4 over the past half a decade, would not exist quite in the form they do today without his enormous influence.

"The reason I'm still based at Woking is because of Ralt, there's no doubt about it," says Double R chief Anthony 'Boyo' Hieatt. "Weybridge, New Haw, Addlestone and Woking was a big heart of motor racing. It was this part of the world rather than the Oxford valley it is now."

Carlin founder Trevor Carlin adds: "Bowman Racing [the predecessor to Carlin Motorsport where Carlin and Hieatt both worked] were Woking, and Carlin started in Byfleet. It was all because of Ralt."

While Carlin's team has since moved via Aldershot to Farnham - still not that far away from its roots - the Tauranac effect even extends into the British Touring Car Championship, where current top dog West Surrey Racing (the clue is in the name...) is even now just up the road in Sunbury.

WSR, where Carlin and Hieatt also worked after the closure of Bowman, claimed all five of its British F3 titles with Tauranac's Ralts - Jonathan Palmer in 1981, Ayrton Senna in 1983, Mauricio Gugelmin in 1985, Mika Hakkinen in 1990, and Rubens Barrichello in 1991.

Tauranac, who was venerated within Honda thanks to success with the Japanese company's F2 engines in 1966 with Brabham and 1981-84 with Ralt, also played a part in WSR's programme with the manufacturer's Accords in the final years of Super Touring.

"When we ran the works Honda, Ron helped us by going direct to Japan," remembers WSR boss Dick Bennetts. "We were having trouble with Honda Europe's R&D department. JAS [which designed and built the Hondas] built a car with no power steering. I got Ron involved and he contacted Honda Japan and then they gave us some development money to run power steering. 

"He helped us out because he had a strong relationship with Honda. He would come along and look at the car's aerodynamics. He also helped us get the deal."

It was in F3 where Tauranac's role was more visible, as the guru of unpretentious, well-engineered, reasonably-priced customer cars.

"The ability to spend time at Ralt and learn a trade was absolutely invaluable because Ron had a presence. When he walked in a room you felt it, and everybody got their heads down" Anthony 'Boyo' Hieatt

"His cars were all made using right-angle extruded aluminium sections, but the machines he had to cut them would always have sharp corners," recalls Bennetts.

"They weren't radiused. We used to call it the Ralt rash, because all the corners were so sharp your hands would be cut to smithereens. When we would build them we would radius everything. 'No no you can't do that. If everyone sees that it will slow down production,' he said. Do it back at your own workshop. 

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"Another one of his sayings was you turn the nut and not the bolt. When we were in the factory building the cars, if you're in a hurry you have a ratchet each end. 'No, no, no, you must keep the bolt still,' he used to say. He gave us a real bollocking."

Hieatt remembers being "in awe" of Tauranac when he got his first job in motorsport, with the Brands Hatch-based Jack Brabham Racing British F3 team in 1986.

"I'd read every Autosport since I was 10, so to look at this factory and see Ron Tauranac was an incredible experience for a young 17-year-old from Wales," he says. "It was a great factory and there were some fantastic people there.

"The ability to spend time at Ralt and learn a trade was absolutely invaluable because Ron had a presence. When he walked in a room you felt it, and everybody got their heads down, not because they were scared of him but if you weren't doing something Ron would spot it and give you another job.

"He was a whirlwind. He'd be in the Formula 3000 shop, then back in the production shop, sorting things out, he was a proper one-man band. I had a huge amount of respect for him. You felt lucky to be in the same room as him. And he was such a modest person you wouldn't believe.

"He'd be back in the production shop on the Monday morning, telling you about the 3000 race and how they'd done and how they'd screwed up - he'd never blame anybody else. He was his own worst critic I think."

Carlin had got his start in the sport with the PRS Formula Ford constructor run by his uncles Steve and Vic Hollman, before that company closed its doors. Steve Hollman had answered an advertisement in Autosport placed by Ralt in 1983 for a customer relations person.

"About a year later Steve said there was a job going in stores so I took it," says Carlin (pictured below). "Ron paid a lot of his suppliers up front for stuff. What that did then was gave him loyalty. I remember the first day I turned up at Ralt in stores, the other stroppy storeman handed me a broom and said, 'Every morning at 7.30 when you get in you've got to sweep the stores out.' I said, 'OK no problem'.

"I was sweeping down the back part of the store and there were 20 brand-new Hewland F3 gearboxes, and I was like, 'Oh my God'. At PRS we used to pick the gearbox up the day before we delivered the car, because the only time we could ever pay for it was when the customer made the second payment.

"I'd dash round the countryside, pick up all the consumables, all the proprietary parts. I remember having to go to Hewland, give them the cheque and they'd give me the gearbox. And I turn up at Ralt and there were 20 just sitting there. Ron had paid for a whole year's supply up front."

In 1986 Carlin went to the US to work for Ralt America, the importer for the constructor's RT4 Formula Atlantic and RT5 Formula Super Vee derivatives of the talismanic RT3 F3 car. He stayed in the States for 1987, the year when Ralt's Bruce Carey joined Jack Brabham Racing, where Hieatt was still working.

"Bruce [who died in 2004] came over from Australia, and he became Ron's right-hand man," says Carlin. "Ron would come up with the idea and Bruce would go down to the workshop and try and find a way of implementing it, but towards the end their ideas started to conflict a little bit.

"Bruce wanted to do things to the nth degree and make it perfection, which is all well and good, but Ron being the pragmatic businessman building customer cars wanted to built something cost-effective, and therefore their paths started to part."

"For sure he was a bit cantankerous but he was a racer at heart. He didn't have time for the bullshit, he just wanted to get on" Anthony 'Boyo' Hieatt

Carlin returned to the UK in 1988 as team manager for Steve Hollman's new Bowman Racing British F3 team, with Carey, Hieatt and driver Gary Brabham - the second son of Jack - joining from JBR. Brabham was runner-up to JJ Lehto that year, before younger brother David drove a Bowman Ralt to the 1989 title (below) after a bitter fight with WSR/Bennetts charge Allan McNish.

"Steve had left Ron at the beginning of 1987 and gone and worked for Eddie Jordan Racing as team manager [Johnny Herbert won the title in a Reynard, thanks in part to the team obtaining an exclusive-for-one-year deal to use the Spiess-tuned Volkswagen engine]. That then gave Steve the contact with VW, they wanted another team and Steve managed to get the Spiess engines."

With Carey, Bowman was almost a quasi-works Ralt operation.

"Bruce was paid by us but he was actually based at the Ralt factory, and we built our new cars there," laughs Carlin. "We had the Ralt factory, all the machines, all the stores, so our cars when they left the Ralt factory were basically a step better because Bruce had built them with all their resource. It was very good of Ron - our cars probably cost Ron double the price of anyone else's!

"Bruce was the first person to come up with the concept of the low engine. Back in the early days they used to have an eight-inch flywheel, so the engine sat up high. Bruce pioneered the concept of the small F1 clutch, drop the engine an inch and a half or two inches, which made a massive difference to the centre of gravity, which everybody does now. Bruce did all the development work for that in 1987 at Jack Brabham Racing, and Ron took it as standard for 1988."

Hieatt adds another story of Tauranac being responsive to others' ideas and solutions.

"For sure he was a bit cantankerous but he was a racer at heart," he says. "He didn't have time for the bullshit, he just wanted to get on.

"I remember the RT32 [of 1988]. The rear upright was a bit flexy, and it had massive bumpsteer and toe change on it. The car was a bit average, and when they found the solution, I saw Ron in the workshop and you've never seen a bloke so excited. 'We've found the problem, this is what we're going to do.'

"There was never any cost issue, he always put everything into the cars within reason, and then he was on to the next problem. I was lucky to be working with Bruce and Ron who were both incredibly clever, but two more different people you could never wish to meet."

At the end of 1988, Tauranac sold Ralt to rival constructor March, although carried on working for the company until the time of the Dallara invasion of 1993. He then became his own man again under the Ronta name, building cars for Honda's Suzuka Racing School in which several future Japanese leading lights - including Takuma Sato - would cut their teeth. A Ronta Formula Renault followed in 1995, but lacked resource to get established.

"The engineering on the Ronta was way better than most of the Renaults at that time, but of course no one wanted to gamble on breaking the known formula," says Hieatt. "Ron had given the car out to various people, and of course you had to have a special engine to do anything. The car resurfaced down at Reg James and Mo Gomm's workshop [located right next to Ralt, and very much part of the Ralt story].

"I got the phone call from Ron. 'Hey, are you busy?' 'No, Ron.' 'Right, meet you at Mo Gomm's, half an hour.' Off I went to Mo Gomm's. 'We got this but it's a bit shit. It hasn't been looked after.'

"At no point was any money ever talked about or expected, but Ron wanted his car to be rebuilt and gone over, so for a couple of weeks we went over it, and Ron would pop in and say, 'Yeah, I'll find the drawing for that.' We got an engine and did a test day with Reg's son Ian James, and it was going all right. We changed the dampers, changed a few things. We turned up at Brands Hatch with a van and trailer, with only enough money for two sets of tyres, and Ian put it on the second row.

"With Ron's cars we used to joke that it was bracketry in motion. It was always on a bracket, on a bracket... But it worked as long as you knew how to maintain the car" Dick Bennetts

"It had validated Ron's work, and he never talked about it again. With good prep and a good driver he was happy."

Hieatt remembers Tauranac selling the Surrey home in which he lived with wife Norma: "Ron was paranoid about the death duties so he bought a flat in Weybridge. He used to call me and I'd go round and fix things onto the walls because he wasn't very good with drills.

"He would come down to Carlin Motorsport with his ski boots, and we'd be on the surface table measuring the angle, because he had to get the angle right of the boots. We'd be there with the protractor and camber gauge, adjusting the boots. It's an image that you think is completely bonkers, but to Ron he just wanted to get it perfect."

And even today there's an embodied direct link from current UK motorsport to Tauranac-era Brabham.

"We still have today working for us a chap called Dave Kelly," says Hieatt. "Dave worked with Ron since he was 14. He started sweeping the floors at Brabham, then he could weld, then he could machine.

"He was a fabricator at Brabham, he was a fabricator at Ralt, he worked at Bowman, at Carlin, he's still living in Woking and he's still fixing up f*cked race cars. He welded more Ralt wishbones than every other human being put together."

Everyone remembers an unpretentious, totally straight and pragmatic man.

"With Ron's cars we used to joke that it was bracketry in motion," says Bennetts. "It was always on a bracket, on a bracket... But it worked as long as you knew how to maintain the car. There were so many nuts and bolts holding the brackets together. They were only 15, 20 minutes away from our workshop, so we had a very good relationship."

Hieatt adds: "I think motor racing owes him a huge debt. Without Ron there'd literally be thousands of people who never got the training that they got. He was a good honest bloke, never did any harm to anybody."

And, according to Carlin, whose team is now famed for running Dallara cars successfully in IndyCar, Formula 2, GP3 and old-school F3, there's a fragment of that Weybridge-Woking-Byfleet set that seems to have permeated Italy.

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"Everything with Ron was sensibly priced, he wasn't a rip-off merchant at all," he says. "Very similar in a lot of ways to Giampaolo Dallara. I'd say they're cut from the same cloth.

"They're both absolutely geared up to build fantastic racing cars at a sensible price so people can go racing and keep racing, and their quality is an evolution and just gets better and better all the time.

"I think that's why I get on so well with Giampaolo, because I see a lot of Bruce and Ron in him."

Dick Bennetts interview by Gary Watkins