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Originally Posted by racer69
I was of the impression that Vic Lee Motorsport morphed into Team Dynamics for the 1993 season (after Vic was sentenced to prison in late-92).
Steve Neal & Ray Bellm kept the team going in late 1992, and i assumed as they were/are Team Dynamics from 1993, that the VLM cars would have stayed (then again, didn't they run 3 cars at some point in 1993, if one went to Australia, they'd have had to have sourced another 3rd car from somewhere)
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That's the odd thing about it...
According to the Touring Car Year Yearbooks for 92/3, that's exactly what happened- Neal and Bellm reached an agreement to keep the team in operation until the end of 92, and then bought the assets to set up Team Dynamics for 93, taking on personnel from the defunct Euroracing sports car team. The strange thing is, the book clearly describes the cars as being ex-Prodrive, not ex-VLM.... Bearing in mind, as you said, they ran 3 cars for a fair part of 93, with one car going to Longhurst in Australia would have to have sourced an additional car.
In fact, they already had one, the ex-Prodrive Coupe (the 3rd car run for Colin McRae at Knockhill I think) that Matt Neal had used at the last 1992 round, replacing his black E30 M3.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe the deal on the Longhurst car had already been done when Neal & Bellm took over, and with a Prodrive car already within the team, for some reason it made sense to buy the remaining Prodrive cars rather than running a mixture of the two.
There were apparently some technical differences between the two versions, although the main ones (apparently each team ran their own engine development programmes and used different gearboxes- VLR using Hollinger while Prodrive used Hewlands) should have been easy enough to overcome.....