How Harris transformed his Darvi 877 for a comeback

Amateur motor racing is peppered with unsung heroes, weekend warriors who put their heart and soul into competing for the fun of it.

While some never tire of the fanfare of hollow victories in cars of wildly disproportionate performance to those of their rivals, the concept of pot hunting is anathema to Mick Harris, whose success has always been crafted in sheds, then on level playing fields.

Perhaps British club motorsport’s quietest achiever, Harris, 70, started racing in the 750 Formula championship 50 years ago and has won it a phenomenal 10 times. As an inestimable bonus he met his fellow adrenaline-junkie racer wife Sue along the way, teaming up to become Im ‘n’ Er Racing after she crashed her Darvi 597 heavily at Snetterton in 2001.

Having racked up 100 wins in cars of his own construction, Mick’s appetite for racing is undimmed, as manifested in one last project.

Staple of the 750 Motor Club, founded in 1939, the 750 Formula was originated in 1949 around the affordable and omnipresent Austin 7, facilitating racing for impecunious enthusiasts in the austere post-Second World War years.

First run as a championship in 1950, it served as a proving ground for the sport’s future legends Colin Chapman (Lotus), Derek Bennett (Chevron), Eric Broadley (Lola), Arthur Mallock (U2), Mike Pilbeam, Tony Southgate and countless others. In South Africa it even inspired the brilliant young Gordon Murray to build his IGM.

Harris and wife Sue, a fellow enthusiast, aka Im ‘n’ Er Racing

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

While Harris has not gone on to found a world-famous brand, or design Le Mans winners, his name is spotlit among 750F alumni as creator and driver of the sensational Darvi 877, which – in the formula’s subsequent 750cc/850cc Reliant and 1108cc Fiat Fire engined eras – carried him to eight championships between 1988 and 2005, the last two with Fiat motivation.

Replacing the Mk4/5 in which he’d landed back-to-back titles in 1982 and 1983 and the fruit of three years’ toil, the rear-engined design was not raced every season, yet the combo also finished second six times and third twice.

The tubular steel chassis’ British and Italian engines were initially mounted longitudinally, a short propshaft taking the drive from the four-speed Reliant gearbox to a Morris Minor axle located by trailing arms, to which Mick pioneered a wishbone mounting system for additional solidarity.

“I’d previously wanted to develop it with a transverse engine, but Sue wouldn’t let me cut up an iconic car” Mick Harris

The strength of the car was proven when he spun at Mallory Park’s Esses in September 2015. One competitor jinked to miss him but Roger Rowe’s Centaur Mk20 T-boned the Darvi’s rear wheel, its strong point attached to the hefty iron live axle. The impact broke Rowe’s legs, and sapped Harris’s desire to continue racing.

Urged on by Sue, an outing in her front-engined Darvi 597 back at Mallory in 2019 started to rebuild his confidence and reignited the old passion. The decision was taken to reconfigure the trusty 877, the chassis of which had protected him well but was extensively damaged.

“I’d previously wanted to develop it with a transverse engine, but Sue wouldn’t let me cut up an iconic car,” smiles Mick.

Colour scheme is a mix of Porsche blue and Petronas turquoise

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

Eight years after the conversion work started, the defibrillated warhorse – now dubbed 877T, for trasversale in Ferrari parlance, with its engine and gearbox across the car, canted forwards 30 degrees from vertical – was rolled out of the trailer at Brands Hatch in an eyecatching Porsche blue/Petronas turquoise battledress for a shakedown in late August.

In remaking the chassis from just aft of the dashhoop, Harris’s driving position is now 14 inches further back within its wheelbase. This brings his feet behind the front wheel centre line per current Motorsport UK regulations and enables the bodywork to remain unchanged.

The five-speed Fiat gearbox – with top gear interchangeable in situ thanks to Mick’s pragmatic design – sits to the left of the engine, actuated by a rod and cable system with a Toyota MR2 shift mechanism.

As this placement precludes radius arm location, the suspension, which incorporates inverted Panda hubs, is braced rearwards onto a removable subframe that also allows quick engine changes. Coilover dampers are GAZ single-adjustable all round. Not yet weighed, the 877T should be close to the mandated 480kg minimum with driver.

On its second installation lap on a wet track there was high drama when a driver Mick had waved past spun across his bows out of Druids, savaging the Darvi’s nose, before pirouetting down the grass. Mortified, the assailant apologised, but damage was localised and Autosport’s ace photographer Gary Hawkins had captured the immaculate 877T on its out-lap.

Happily, the day was completed on Michelin wet and later Yokohama slick tyres on 13x7-inch Revolution wheels as conditions improved. Fibreglass wizard Phil Curley will have a new nosecone ready by the time you read this.

Transverse engine’s 90bhp means progress is all about momentum

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

With wholesale mechanical changes behind him, and around 90bhp on tap from the engine, which breathes through a Dellorto carburettor with one choke blanked off, momentum is everything as it has always been in the 750 Formula.

Initial dynamic impressions were promising: “The chassis didn’t feel that much different. Having the gearchange on the right-hand side, not the left as before, was a bigger surprise. A couple of times in the pits I instinctively reached for it and found fresh air.”

With autumn now upon us, the plan is for Mick to give the 877T its race debut next spring. “Logistically, Sue and I can’t run two cars together any more, towing a trailer behind a small van we live in at meetings. Without a truck we’ll look at doing a mix of championship rounds and MSVR Challenge races, picking and choosing as we go.”

“Where else can you design, build and race quick cars on a tight budget with such a great bunch of people?” Mick Harris

After half a century in the 750 Formula scene was Mick ever vaguely tempted to compete anywhere else?

“Never,” is the immediate response. “Where else can you design, build and race quick cars on a tight budget with such a great bunch of people? I love it and owe everything to Dick Harvey who, following that chance introduction, got me hooked.”

Had his abilities been focused down a more conventional racing route with Motor Racing Enterprises, one can’t imagine him having had so much fun.

877 prior to its life-changing shunt, with Sue’s long-serving front-engined 597 in the foreground

Photo by: Harris Archive

How Harris became a 750 Formula legend

On leaving school at 16, Wooburn Green-born Mick Harris asked for a job with Jim Gleave’s Motor Racing Enterprises concern, which dealt in, ran and ultimately built its own cars, but was turned down as it did not take on apprentices.

Instead, he started as a trainee mechanic in the workshop of Ford dealer Norman Reeves, which supported Escort racer Dave Brodie’s ‘Run Baby Run’ car. When his boss Alan Kitchen introduced Mick to a racer building a car in High Wycombe, the course of his life changed.

Industrial chemist Dick Harvey was one of those clever men in sheds who, with brother Jon, fabricated chassis, created fibreglass bodies and built engines and gearboxes in a domestic lock-up garage, and garden outbuildings.

“Dick taught me how to weld, to braze and everything else I needed to know,” says Harris, who spent virtually every evening and weekend advancing his skillset. 

Although professionally he stayed in the motor trade, Mick worked initially on Darvi Mk2 [now with Roger Saretzki in Alsace; Mk1 was a modified Jeffrey chassis] as “a full spare-time hobby”.

When Harvey was made redundant by Dunlopillo, the Darvi ‘business’ morphed into a full-time occupation for its founder.

Harris “yonks ago” with 750 Formula trophies; Harvey is in the background

Photo by: Harris Archive

Nicknamed ‘Spanners’, Harris was an integral part of Team Darvi at events, and in April 1975 – a month before his 20th birthday – was rewarded with his first drive in Mk2, in a ‘consolation’ race at Lydden. Despite a spin he finished third.

“There were often two races, so sharing cars was possible with Dick doing the championship rounds. I got to race more often in the subsequent Darvi Mk3 [scoring a first win at Lydden in 1977] and Mk4.”

Harris demonstrated similar pace to Dick, and a Mk5 was built for Harvey and its predecessor updated for Harris as the Mk4/5. Pristine in matching blue and red liveries, the double act were frontrunners, battling with the likes of Bob Simpson (SS-Reliant) – who followed his father into the 750 Formula, and now runs grandson Jake Doherty in his SS/F – Chris Hague and Roly Nix (Wessex CH767) and Iain Sclanders (DNC Mk5). 

Mick scored his first points race win in 1979, then won coveted championship titles in the long-serving car in 1982 and 1983. Nobody was more delighted than Harris when he spannered mentor Harvey to his own crown in 1977.

Dick suffered a stroke in 2003, which left him wheelchair bound, but did not blunt his fiercely competitive mind and spirit. He died in 2012 and, as father of an extraordinary little marque whose cars all survive, is widely missed by the 750 Formula fraternity.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the October 2025 issue and subscribe today. 

First race for Harris at Lydden in 1975 – he spun but still finished third

Photo by: Harris Archive