New Zealand Historic Saloon Cars Under HRC

[Howard Wood]

The ability to manipulate a clever interpretation of the rules (or legal resources to defend it) of a few notable individuals has always been part of Motorsport.

The Falcon Sprint is a perfect example and by the time the race guys had latched onto the somewhat dubious weight homolgation, Ford had already moved on to promoting and developing the Mustang. I bet there are a heap more historic Falcon Sprint race cars than ever existed in period!

I was visiting the workshop with the Broadspeed Escorts as a guest and given I was inside the "secret project" area, I thought whipping my camera out might not have been advised, so unfortunately, no photos.

Of course some of these mods/ cheats which were done in period can be redundant in a replica historic car anyway. For example those wheel arch modifications were done to the Escorts (and the Capris too) to allow the super wide tyres in use at the time to fit inside the homologated bodywork. Current race tyres are not as wide and many historic series mandate tyre size anyway. These guys were more concerned with presenting the car exactly as raced in period. Even down to having newly CNC machined parts having a period finish complete with machining flaws!