The V8 Viva that's turning heads on the rally stages

Back in the late 1960s, the Vauxhall Viva HB was best known for Gerry Marshall’s success in Special Saloon racing, but the cars were never particularly renowned for rallying. Now, over five decades later, Sean Jones is bucking that trend with an intriguing self-built device and showed its potential with fifth place on the Showground Stages at Builth Wells in January.

Jones, a 26-year-old who lives at Burry Port, within sight of Pembrey circuit, has always had a passion for the unusual. He even competed in a Volvo 340 in his younger years. More recently, he’s run a Vauxhall Astra, which was his uncle Phil’s former autograss car converted back into a rally machine.

The Viva project is his most ambitious so far, although he’s actually owned the car for 10 years. “Just before I turned 17, I bought an HB out of my first couple of weeks’ wages as an apprentice,” he relates. “My intention was to build my first Viva into a rally car.” He ended up putting so much effort into it that it became too nice to rally, and now it just goes out to classic car shows.

“Then I was told there was an HB sitting in a shed locally,” Jones continues. “I thought I’d buy it as a spare-parts car just to finish off my other one. It was a shed of a Viva left out in the rain, but the guy wanted £800 for it. I didn’t think it was worth that much. I told him I couldn’t go more than £200. Three weeks later, he rang me and said, ‘Would you still give me that £200?’ So I rushed up to his house with a trailer as quick as I could.”

Jones then neglected the Viva for about three years and left it sitting in the rain, just robbing the bits he needed for his other car. “It was an SL Viva, but it was an automatic, so it was a bit useless for me,” he explains. “I eventually chucked it into the shed, and thought the most I would ever do would be to cut panels out of it.”

It was on the Manx Rally in 2022 when he resolved that he wanted to rally a Viva rather than an Astra: “I thought I’d start the Viva project. I dragged it out of the shed, stripped it apart, put it on a rollover jig, and started mocking up some Mazda MX-5 and BMW suspension.

Lots of long evenings and weekends working on the car have turned the unloved Viva into a machine fit for the stages

Photo by: Sean Jones

“It did look a bit tired, but the exterior wasn’t super-rotten. It’s not like an Escort where you can just buy panels. You can’t buy a single panel for a Viva. You can’t even get a sill.”

It took two years of evenings and weekends to get it to the point where it was ready to rally. The initial plan was to use an ex-race Rover V8 engine. “It sounded pretty impressive but, on the rolling road, it broke a piston and put a rod through the side of the block,” Jones recalls. “So that was the end of that.”

Instead, he found a Rover Vitesse engine in a scrapyard for £200 and fitted his race cam and Range Rover heads to give it more compression. Its smoky progress at Builth Wells points to the fact that it needs some new piston rings. Jones has used a Sierra six-speed dog ’box and made his own gear linkage. “I haven’t got much money, so everything I do ends up as cheap as possible and I engineer everything myself,” he reveals.

“I’m not very good at fabrication – I get my dad and my uncle to do that because I’m definitely no fabricator, but I’m quite good at anything mechanical and machining all the other bits” Sean Jones

Jones took the car out at Pembrey over Christmas for a first run and then went to Builth Wells and surprised everyone, including himself, by finishing fifth. “It’s the best finish I’ve ever had on a rally,” he smiles. “It’s obviously got a lot of teething problems, and I need to put some tidy shocks on the front.”

The next planned outing will be the Kath Curzon Memorial Rally at Pembrey at the end of March. But Jones’s ambition is to contest a bigger event and the 2026 Manx Rally is the target.

“I’m not very good at fabrication – I get my dad and my uncle to do that because I’m definitely no fabricator, but I’m quite good at anything mechanical and machining all the other bits,” concludes the British Aerospace engineer, who has created a remarkable, rare and competitive club-level rally car for under £10,000. And turned a few heads in the process.

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

Further developments are now planned to improve the Viva's performance

Photo by: Ben Lawrence