RML at 40: The rise of a motorsport giant

The crash at the Druids hairpin looked nasty, especially when fire broke out with the driver stuck inside. But, for those who believe that all things happen for a reason, it was validation.

Ray Mallock’s new company, Ray Mallock Limited, was in its first year of operation when it pitched up at the 1984 British Grand Prix meeting at Brands Hatch to compete in the Thundersports support race with its Ecosse C284. RML had been running the Ecurie Ecosse programme on behalf of the team’s patron Hugh McCaig in the world sportscar championship while, in parallel, Mallock himself was driving for the Nimrod-Aston Martin team. At Brands, Mallock was having a rare outing in the Ecosse, leading the race and about to hand over to David Leslie – the start of their feted relationship as racing partners – when disaster struck.

“The brakes failed – it wrote the car off,” reflects Mallock today. “I was stuck in the car while it was on fire – all on TV with Murray Walker commentating! Horrible crash but fortunately Hugh had insured it for that race, and that enabled us to create our own chassis for the following year.”

Mallock’s son Michael, then not yet two years old, adds: “One of my earliest memories is being at Brands Hatch, and looking out of the window and seeing Dad have an off at Druids when he had a brake failure. It’s amazing how these things stick. It was exciting!”

Today, Mallock Jr is CEO of the RML Group and in charge of a workforce of 120 – but which can expand to 180 during build projects – at its factory in Wellingborough, eight years after his father handed over the reins. “I essentially retired although I remained as chairman,” explains Mallock Sr in this, the company’s 40th anniversary year. And the work has continued.

RML may be famed for its title successes in the World and British Touring Car championships, and before that its world sportscar exploits. But its influence continues: a swathe of high-performance projects for track and road, a clandestine involvement as a key supplier of battery technology to teams in Formula 1 and the Le Mans Hypercar class, not to mention every car in the modern-era BTCC carrying RML spec parts including subframe and steering system.

Ray Mallock, pictured with Yvan Muller (right) and Rob Huff (left) after the Frenchman won the 2010 WTCC title in a Chevrolet Cruze, is celebrating 40 years of the RML concern he founded in 1984

Photo by: Sutton Images

When Mallock ‘retired’ from the company he founded, he never slowed down. He still competes today in Historic Formula Junior in machinery built by his own father Arthur, whose influence was – and remains – key.

“I was very fortunate to have Dad as my tutor in motorsport,” he says. “His thing was always about looking at a problem from first principles and being as simple as possible. He loved the idea of a racing car with well-thought-through dynamics, particularly on the suspension side – he was one of the first people to really understand the importance of kinematics in suspension.”

Mallock’s own reputation as a driver flourished until “I was getting enquiries about testing and developing cars and I set up my own business in 1979, and that was really a forerunner to RML. We got our own premises just over the road from my dad and brother.”

"We took a heavy mould of the Nimrod and got a rotary jigsaw out, cut it up along the lines and stuck it all together again, and created what was a fabulously effective Group C2 car"
Ray Mallock

Two Formula Atlantic titles in 1979 and 1981 sandwiched a campaign in the 1980 Aurora British F1 Championship, before the glass ceiling in single-seaters sent him on a different path. Group C was starting in the world sportscar arena, and there was an Aston Martin effort for 1982. Mallock describes it as “a Boy’s Own project that was full of good intention and ambition”, but crucially it enabled his pre-RML business to establish its reputation.

“It got quite a few people’s attention, and we really did punch above our weight. I still drive it sometimes. It’s like putting on an old pair of slippers – it’s a lovely car to drive.”

When McCaig came calling, wanting to create an Ecosse Group C2 car for his proteges Leslie and David Duffield, Mallock was receptive. RML was born: “I’d been doing all the work on the Nimrod. I’d created the new bodywork design for the 1983 cars – that’s when we first went into the wind tunnel at MIRA in Southampton.

“Amazingly, using my dad’s ethos of taking the simplest, most economical, most straightforward route, I was able to cut and shut the Nimrod bodywork and clothe what was a De Cadenet Group 6 car in that cutdown body. We took a heavy mould of the Nimrod and got a rotary jigsaw out, cut it up along the lines and stuck it all together again, and created what was a fabulously effective Group C2 car.”

Mallock (left, with long-time collaborator David Leslie) enjoyed success as a driver in the Ecosse C286 he developed for Group C2

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Nimrod had ended its programme in the aftermath of tragedy at Le Mans in 1984, when tyre failure sent John Sheldon into the barrier and a marshal was killed by the debris. From 1985-88, Mallock moved over to the Ecosse project to share with Leslie and, later, Marc Duez, the versatile Belgian brought in for 1986 when the Ford Cosworth engines were replaced by the Rover V64V unit from the Metro 6R4.

Mallock himself was twice runner-up in the Group C2 standings – once with Leslie – and Ecurie Ecosse became teams’ world champion in 1986, but a move into the big league was beckoning. RML would produce a new Aston Martin factory racer – the AMR1 – for 1989.

“That was an opportunity to create a car from a clean sheet of paper, and it was a groundbreaking car in a lot of ways,” recalls Mallock. “I had very little to do with the detail design – I chose a chief designer, a guy called Max Bostrom, who worked closely with me on the Ecosse programme.

“Max’s main business was wheels actually, but he was a very creative and first-principles design engineer. That was the first Group C car to have a full carbon monocoque with an integral roll structure within the roof. Very sophisticated front aero with highly adjustable front downforce, and our own transmission with the final drive ahead of the axle centre line. It was a great shame that the programme got canned so early on as a result of the Group C regulations changing when Bernie [Ecclestone] decided that Group C needed to have F1 engines.”

RML would move into touring cars to become a colossus of the BTCC in the 1990s and, a decade later, the WTCC. In between, its work on the Saleen S7R GT car had been a huge success on track, but a dispute with the American marque had brought the company to its knees.

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

A stint in the ASCAR series at Rockingham – RML won the title with Nicolas Minassian in 2002 and Ben Collins in 2003 – was part of the survival process, “and it was interesting going into a different category and starting with basics, and trying to get our head around going oval racing on crossply tyres. It was a lifeline for us but an interesting time.”

The WTCC’s inception for 2005 brought in Chevrolet with RML, which had returned to the BTCC in 2004 for one year with SEAT. Since its BTCC programme with Vauxhall finished at the end of 1996, RML had kept a relationship with General Motors through building rally cars for sister marque Opel, and now another GM brand was ready to make a splash.

“The boss of Chevrolet Europe at the time, Nick Reilly, had been a supporter of ours since our BTCC Vauxhall days and I’d kept in touch with him – he really understood the value of a successful race programme,” says Mallock. “When WTCC was announced he realised that it would suit them very well. It also coincided with Chevrolet taking over Daewoo, and rebadging the Daewoo Lacetti as a Chevrolet!”

Mallock laments that the Aston Martin AMR1 never got the chance to demonstrate its potential when rule changes caused the project to be canned

Photo by: Motorsport Images

After a difficult first season, RML took the bold step of bringing its engine preparation in-house. The Lacetti used what “was basically the same engine, commonly referred to as the red-top Vauxhall” as the Cavalier Super Tourer, explains Mallock.

“It was the right decision because it enabled us to get more power and performance out of it, and to be able to continually develop the engine. We were constantly finding brake horsepower here and there by pushing the boundaries, which as a customer to an engine supplier we wouldn’t have been able to do. That enabled us to win the championship in 2010 [with Yvan Muller in the Cruze, which replaced the Lacetti] with a normally aspirated engine, when the odds were against us really.”

Behind the scenes, Mallock also worked with FIA president Max Mosley – handily a Mallock Clubmans customer of the 1960s! – on an early concept of touring car racing’s current creed of performance equalisation: “That was important to us, especially with the Lacetti, which didn’t have good race car aerodynamics and also it was narrow track, and quite an old-fashioned engine.

“We have excellent graduate and apprenticeship programmes, where we’ve built some incredible talents, but a lot of the F1 teams around this area know that we do that very well. Quite often those people get poached, but it’s amazing how often they return” Michael Mallock

“We did a lot of work on performance equalisation, and meeting with Max to talk about it. I presented a document to the FIA Touring Car Commission about how we felt the cars could be evened up in an objective rather than subjective manner. That was an important part of the touring car journey.”

After RML protege Rob Huff won the 2012 WTCC crown, Chevrolet pulled out of the series in the wake of giving up on the European car market. The team carried on as a privateer in 2013, claiming another championship for the Cruze with Muller, but the landscape was changing. Mallock Jr, who had been a talent in his own right in sportscar and GT racing, had acted as development driver alongside McLaren’s Chris Goodwin for the McLaren-Mercedes SLR one-make series, run by RML.

“When the McLaren and Mercedes partnership dissolved we were just kicking off development of a GT3 version,” he says. “We were going to have a full-on factory Nurburgring 24 Hours attempt, which would have been cool.”

Alongside Aston Martin and GM, the company had maintained its relationship with Nissan via numerous road-car and high-performance projects that continue to this day. In 2012 came the debut of the DeltaWing at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

After enjoying huge success in Super Touring with Vauxhall and Nissan, RML did it again in Super 2000 with Chevrolet - although only after going through early pain with Lacetti

Photo by: Sutton Images

“We were engaged by Nissan Europe to initially do an engineering simulation package to check the thing worked and didn’t topple over when it turned out the end of the pitlane,” recounts Mallock Jr. “By the end we were responsible for all the engineering, all the build, the race operations and so on, including designing a new engine for it – built by RML Power.”

From this came the hybrid-electric ZEOD RC of 2014, which, says Mallock Jr, was “very much the spiritual successor” to the DeltaWing: “There were some incorrect assumptions made before we took control of the project. It would have been massively overweight if it was at the spec it originally was.

“Battery technology at the time was very immature compared to what it is now, and the estimate was that it needed a 40kg battery; our estimate was that it needed 140kg. It actually ended up being 150.

“It would have been overweight for the tyres that Michelin had already developed for the DeltaWing, so there were two key things on the ZEOD RC: the efficiency of the battery and the e-motors, and the mass of the whole vehicle, which is why we ended up with magnesium steering racks that were the length of your finger and all this kind of incredible stuff.

“That was our first real battery project as well, which set us on the path to where we are now. We believe we’ve got the most power dense battery in a homologated road vehicle now. That’s going in an American hypercar – the Czinger C21. It ran at the Goodwood Festival of Speed this year and set the production record.”

Battery technology is now an RML speciality, with the Nurburgring Nordschleife record-breaking NIO EP9, in which Peter Dumbreck set a 6m45.9s in 2017, “a good example of the whole RML engineering capability”, asserts Mallock Jr.

“It was 1MW of power at the wheels, it had full torque vectoring, active aero, active ride height control, a swappable battery system so you could change the batteries in eight minutes instead of waiting for it to charge and cool and whatnot. Massive downforce – 24,000Nm at 150mph, which is bonkers. Which meant it needed bespoke tyres and brakes. It was a real technological marvel. And the batteries themselves – very high efficiency.”

In RML’s Power division, “we’re supporting a couple of OEMs with their next generation battery systems and development for probably the two highest profile motor racing series that there are…” Mallock Jr then confirms that these are F1 and Le Mans Hypercar, and that “we do some incredible stuff – most of which the guys can’t talk about”. A nod towards the Aston F1 factory – we’re talking in the Silverstone paddock – and an inquisitive eyebrow raise brings a denial that it’s there, so draw your own conclusions.

RML oversaw the hybrid-electric ZEOD RC of 2014 which was ahead of its time

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

What Mallock Jr can talk about is the RML Short Wheelbase supercar: “A way to wave the flag of what we can do, have a product that we can talk about, that the staff can be publically proud of.” Or the ‘Goldfinger’ Aston Martin DB5: “My favourite bit was the bullet-resistant shield that we tested at the Bisley shooting range!”

No doubt, RML’s Wellingborough facility will continue to thrive into its fifth decade amid its diversification. “We’re well respected by our peers in the motorsport industry,” says Mallock Jr. “We have excellent graduate and apprenticeship programmes, where we’ve built some incredible talents, but a lot of the F1 teams around this area know that we do that very well. Quite often those people get poached, but it’s amazing how often they return.”

What does his dad think of RML today? “It’s been a realisation of my dream as a schoolboy to make a living out of this sport, and to be able to do it with so many good colleagues and friends, and people who have given me advice over the years, has been great,” smiles Mallock Sr.

“It’s been about doing it properly and having a pride in doing it properly, and bringing a team of people along with me – the teamwork element has been so important. And now Michael’s taken the business into areas I don’t understand and he does.”

“I was a good driver and not really an engineer – I’m more commercially minded,” adds his son, “whereas Dad was a good driver and an incredible engineer.”

RML's Short Wheelbase supercar served as the safety car at the Silverstone Festival

Photo by: JEP