Nice couple of Thruxton pics there Slammer! Interesting to note the rear spolier adorning the car, an eventual homologated part for the Grp A Vitesse but was just an add on for the 3500 I believe.
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Originally Posted by Jesper OH
Another welcome to Dave from me too.
The Snetterton race must have been a close one with the top-3 covered by 1.5 second. Mike O'Brien winning in the Docking-Commodore and Pete Hall third in a Sierra RS Cosworth.
At Silverstone Hall won in the updated RS500, but Carvell finished ahead of fellow Rover driver and class A top scorer Tim Harvey.
(I only have top-3 finishes and only for the latter half of 1987)
Chassis numbers is also a very welcome addition to the general understanding of what happened when. If 014 was used during Brno '86 I would suggest that at least less than 20 TWR Rovers were build. Jesper
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Yes that would appear to be the case Jesper and David's input has certainly helped us narrow things down a little. I suspect therefore, that the latter cars are more likely to be new ones as the development really kicked off once the Ovlov's started to push on and TWR needed to extract everything possible out of the Vitesse.
I wasn't there but I remember thinking the Snett round must've been a blinder. Mike Newman was in amongst it at some point in the venerable 635. This event also had the ex TWR cars of Chatfield and Griffin (that I referred to earlier) in it as well IIRC?
Certainly David was a defacto front runner by the end of the season and in hindsight although Sierra RS Cosworth/500's and M3's were spectacular, they ultimately did for Group A IMO.
We now know that David's car (004) was a 1984 Sanyo BTCC car which later went to Bathurst. It will also be interesting to determine who pedalled it in the first half of '84 (and if it was actually built in '83 come to think of it?)
For '84, Tony Pond drove one of the cars and the other was driven initially by Peter Lovett and then latterly by 'Schles'. I think that Schles' car was actually a brand new one as I'm sure he stacked one early in the season? Perhaps somebody else may confirm this?
For the real anorak stuff we also know this: The Sanyo cars began the season with black plastic bumpers (as did the ETC Fleet entries) but these were later colour coded by the time of their last race at Silverstone in June.
Similarly Andy Rouse and CS-H's cars also began the year with black bumpers and they too were painted. In the case of Rouse this was because he had a brand new car after Lovett 'inadvertently' tipped him into the pit wall at the start of the International Trophy meeting triggering immense carnage!