How Andrew Jordan realised his teenage rallycross dream

He is perhaps best known as the 2013 British Touring Car champion, but Andrew Jordan’s first love was rallycross. He had a dream to follow in the footsteps of 14-time European Rallycross conqueror Kenneth Hansen.

Earlier this year, at the Lydden Legend Festival, Jordan came the closest yet to feeling what it was like to be Hansen. After starting a motorsport career in rallycross as a teenager, Jordan returned to his roots driving a Citroen C4 T16 Supercar that Hansen piloted to victories in Portugal and Austria in the 2006 European championship. They say don’t meet your heroes but, in this case, the machine lived up to expectations. 

“You don’t get the buzz anywhere else, it is as simple as that,” Jordan enthuses. “The buzz from driving, forget the actual racing, just the driving is something else. It has been really good to feel that again.”

To make this moment even more special, the car is now owned by the Jordan family, with its return to the track coming after being lovingly restored by his racing driver father Mike and the gang at the Jordan Racing Team. But the road to owning and restoring a piece of rallycross history took several unexpected turns for the Jordans.

“Both Andrew and I have always had a huge passion to try and do some more rallycross, but frankly we don’t have the funding or the time to do modern rallycross at a European level,” Jordan Sr explains. “So we’d always said it would be such fun to have a car that we could do Loheac Legends and then Lydden Legends, and then maybe I’ll do other things.

“We drew up a list of cars that were of interest and Andrew spoke to his good mate Hal Ridge, who’s Mr Rallycross in the UK. And he messaged Andrew and said, ‘I think I’ve found a C4 in Finland and it’s an ex-Hansen car. I am not completely sure of its history.’

Mike Jordan admits that 850 hours of painstaking work have gone into the C4

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

“I think the car had been doing the Finnish rallycross championship, driven by a guy who literally, when he sent us a video, lived in the woods in Finland. We committed. When it arrived here, we knew it was going to be beaten up, but we didn’t think it was going to be quite that beaten up.”

However, upon further inspection of photos by journalist Ridge, he was able to confirm that the car the Jordans had bought was Hansen’s first C4 that powered him to second in the 2006 standings. But there was another extraordinary family connection to the car. 

“So the ironic twist is that when Andrew was first doing rallycross as a child, I wanted him to do a bit more than the British Championship stuff,” Jordan Sr recalls. “So I got him to do a couple of rounds of the French Junior Championship, which was a one-make thing in Citroen C2 rallycross cars and the one round he went to do was in Mayenne in 2006.

“The story that we didn’t realise what we were buying into ended up way better than we could have ever dreamed” Mike Jordan

“I couldn’t take him as I was racing that weekend. Will Gollop took him for me and walked him around the paddock and introduced him to Kenneth Hansen, who showed him all around his car. It’s that car. I’ve got photographs of Andrew at 16 sat in what ended up being our car. The story that we didn’t realise what we were buying into ended up way better than we could have ever dreamed.”

Having struck gold by owning a piece of Hansen rallycross history, work began on a painstaking restoration process at JRT’s Midlands headquarters. The car arrived in the country in July last year, and the goal was to prepare it for a debut at Lydden Hill, with Andrew behind the wheel in June this year. 

“If it didn’t have the history that it had, you’d have just gone and bought an old C4 road car and used the shell and redone it because the shell was so beaten up,” adds Jordan Sr. “But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep its heritage there, so there was an awful lot of putting it on the body jig and then just checking if everything’s OK.

Wheel stud woes threatened Jordan’s Lydden Legend outing

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

“I knew it wasn’t because I could see that one front chassis leg was about three inches out of line compared to the other side. But you can’t get parts for those cars; they’re very rare.

“Every single part on it is the original. The engine was a bit of a mare when he took it apart, but Julian Godfrey [rallycross legend] has done a great job on the engine. We didn’t get the engine in that car until four weeks before Lydden.

“There was about 850 hours of labour on the whole car. If you think, as a comparison, if we build a Ford Cortina or if we build a Lotus Elan FIA historic car from new, they’re usually 350 to 400 hours. And I would think in fabrication there was probably another 350 hours.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the project was not without its dramas. The car was almost reduced to being a display piece at Lydden after shearing the wheel studs from the left rear in shakedown, three days before the event. But, after finding a rapid solution, it ran faultlessly come show time. Andrew returned to his motorsport roots, slipped into the driver’s seat, and wowed the crowds, as he completed a career full-circle moment. 

“You go from, ‘Oh is it going to run? Will it be alright?’ to, ‘It’s alright so we best crack on with it,’” says Jordan Sr. “Andrew and I are bloody awful like that. It changed the whole thing from just get it there and have it on show, to sod this, let’s see how fast we can go.”

And Jordan Jr certainly relished that task, but adds: “It has taken a huge amount of work. When I started doing rallycross, I wanted to be the next Kenneth Hansen but back then the sport wasn’t in a position where I could make a career out of it and it changed after that. To have one of his cars and one that he won some European events with is very special.”

Restoration of the car involved keeping all parts original

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

Doran’s plan to create a legendary Lydden event

Andrew Jordan’s return to his rallycross roots was one of many highlights of this year’s Lydden Legend Festival, and circuit bosses have ambitions to turn its celebration of the golden era of rallycross and rallying into an annual fixture.

The Kent circuit hosted its second edition of the event in June, welcoming thousands of rallycross and rally fans to indulge in a trip down memory lane. It attracted a stunning entry list of classic rallycross Supercars and rally machinery, driven by stars from yesteryear in a series of races and demonstration runs. 

Alongside Jordan’s surprise return to the discipline, among the other names in attendance were 1992 European Rallycross champion Will Gollop and five-time British Rally champion Jimmy McRae.

Following a successful second running at Lydden, Doran believes there is scope to make the event an annual feature of the calendar

The event is the creation of Lydden circuit owner Pat Doran, and Patrick Germain and Philippe Tollemer, who are both involved in the running of French rallycross venue Loheac. Lydden hosted the first event in 2024, with the festival alternating with Loheac, which hosted last year’s edition.

“Philippe Tollemer and myself decided we would do this event, whatever happens, and make this work by supporting each other, so it’s a real joint force between Loheac and us – probably the two most iconic rallycross circuits in the world,” says Doran. “The idea of this really is to bring rallycross and rallying into the same event.” 

Following a successful second running at Lydden, Doran believes there is scope to make the event an annual feature of the calendar. “It’s now grown into this thing where the rally world and the rallycross world comes together,” he adds.

Lydden owner Doran has bold ambitions for his Legend festival event

Photo by: Gary Hawkins

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s a big hole there. You’ve got the Silverstone Classic, you’ve got the Goodwood Festival of Speed, you’ve got Race Retro, but in all those rallying and rallycross takes a backseat. This fills that gap because there’s a huge population of supporters that support rally and rallycross.

“I’d like it to be a thing that everyone knows about, and we fill this place up and we make it bigger and make a show. This is only the beginning.”

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

Lydden Legend was developed in partnership with Loheac, another fabled rallycross venue

Photo by: Gary Hawkins