Heard the one about the Northern Irishman rallying a Russian Lada?

Northern Irishman Shane McGirr knows all the old jokes about Ladas. In fact, he’s got a lot of them printed out and stuck on his rally car. But McGirr’s Lada Riva rally machine is far from a joke. It’s a 320bhp Honda-engined rocketship that can scare the very best of the modified Ford Escorts in gravel rallying on both sides of the Irish Sea.

The story starts more than 30 years ago when the young McGirr was working in a Lada garage near his home in Fivemiletown in Northern Ireland. The mechanics in the garage were big into their Ladas and knew the rugged but rather agricultural Russian cars inside out. That enthusiasm rubbed off on the impressionable youngster.

“I got fascinated by how ugly they were, but how cool they were once you put the body kits and all on them,” McGirr recalls. “They just looked so cool in my mind – I’m probably a weirdo!”

The Russian-built Riva was a reworked update on the base Fiat 124 from 1970, built under licence. At its peak in the mid-to-late 1980s, around 20,000 Rivas were being sold into the UK and the Lada Challenge of the era offered a cheap way into special stage rallying. Faced with major problems meeting emission standards, Lada finally withdrew from the UK market in 1997.

Meanwhile, around the same time 30 years ago, McGirr started rallying when he was in his early twenties. “I bought a wee cheap Fiat 131 for £1200 and went to Birmingham and looked at it,” he says. “It was the only rally car I think we ever made money on. We sold it for £1500 after rallying it for three years.”

Next he graduated to Toyota Starlets, progressing through 1300cc and 1600cc models before switching to two litres in a car he bought from Scotland and which he rallied with success on gravel. Though many Starlets in Ireland are asphalt weapons, McGirr has always preferred gravel and has only competed rarely on asphalt. On gravel, he contested the Northern Ireland Forest Championship for several seasons and won the two-wheel-drive category.

Despite the success in the Starlet, the Lada fascination remained in the back of his mind. “We just always wanted to build one,” McGirr laughs. “As the years went on, I just said, ‘Right, we have to take this on the chin.’ I’d bought a shell probably 20 years ago that used to be an old Lada Challenge car [built in 1983]. The car was £800 at the time I bought it and it stood for probably 15 years in the garage. Eventually we rebuilt it and got it sorted out and got it up and running. That was about three years ago.”

He originally opted for a two-litre Honda engine, which was a lovely sounding motor that screamed like a BDA and revved to 10,000rpm. “But we blew it up into a million pieces,” McGirr continues. “So we then took the decision that, to try and get a bit more reliability, we needed to cut the revs back a wee bit.”

McGirr was initially unconvinced by move to 2.4-litre Honda K24 engine

Photo by: Paul & Ben Lawrence

The obvious choice was the 2.4-litre Honda engine, which is what is in the car now. The K24 is widely regarded as one of the best four-cylinder powerplants ever produced. “It’s a completely different engine altogether,” McGirr explains. “Still four cylinder and around 320bhp so a lovely engine that you could drive like an automatic. But I do miss the revving and the noise of the two-litre.”

For their first proper rally in the Lada, McGirr decided to cross the water and contest the Grizedale Stages in December 2022. They reasoned that they could run under the radar and that no one would notice them.

They were wrong on both fronts. The original two-litre Honda engine wailed its way around the Lake District and grabbed a lot of attention when they started as car 55 and finished seventh overall, defeating Matthew Robinson in his historic Escort Mk2 by a minute to be the best two-wheel-drive car.

“We ended up having a cracking run in Grizedale,” says McGirr. “We were seeded way back, and we were happy with that. It was just a test. But we ended up doing what we didn’t expect at that rally and then people got a bit of a fascination for it after that.”

“We were seeded way back, and we were happy with that. It was just a test. But we ended up doing what we didn’t expect at that rally and then people got a bit of a fascination for it after that” Shane McGirr

The man central to the build of the Lada was Bobby Sharkey, who is based in Donegal. “He’s a genius with that sort of stuff,” nods McGirr. “I always said that, if I was ever going to get a Lada to work, it had to be Bobby to build it.”

With McGirr’s base Riva now 43 years old, he reckons that they do it for the craic and don’t take it too seriously: “We go out and do some events. We don’t bother much with championships anymore, due to the commitment and time needed. So, we just come and do one or two rallies and enjoy it.”

In its latest trim, apart from the Honda K24 engine, the Riva is running a sequential gearbox and suspension both supplied by Martyn Samsonas. The Lithuanian has been another central part of the project and McGirr reckons that the suspension is “unbelievable”.

It has a six-speed sequential gearbox and an Atlas back axle, so basically Ford Escort running gear. Of course, they had to engineer the gearbox to make it fit to the Honda engine.

McGirr’s (inset) Lada has been turning heads ever since impressive Grizedale debut

Photo by: Paul & Ben Lawrence

“It needed some work,” recounts McGirr. “There was nothing easy in the build of it. There was nothing you could buy off the shelf. But that was not a problem to Bobby. He’d just scratch his head for a few minutes and come up with a solution.

“It works well but it’s also about the availability of parts. When we were out in Lithuania with Martyn Samsonas we looked at the Ladas out there, and they were all still using wishbone suspension. That’s really the reason why we went mostly Escort running gear, due to the easy availability of stuff back here.”

The Honda engines for the project are built in Cork by Dr Keith McMullen. “He’s another genius, too, and if it wasn’t for him I probably couldn’t be rallying,” proclaims McGirr. “He’s an engineer at the college in Cork; he knows his stuff and he knows his Hondas.”

The switch to the 2.4-litre unit has delivered 320bhp with a bag of torque and it only needs to be revved to a relatively modest 8200rpm, unlike the 10,000rpm of the original two-litre engine.

“As Keith said at the time, when we went that route, for that extra 2000 revs you just double your rebuilds,” McGill explains. “So that was a major factor in going the 2.4 route, because that engine isn’t too stressed. But, at the time, I put it in half-heartedly. I really did think I wasn’t going to like it, but it’s just so nice today.”

McGirr says he is proud to have the Lada running competitively on gravel rallies in both Northern Ireland and Wales and likes the fact it’s something different. “We’re just winging it one event at a time,” he concludes.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the Summer 2026 issue and subscribe today.