THE ROB WALKER / GEOFF THOMAS
GTS MINI~SPRINT RACER
by John Worzencraft, PPJ  RACING, & Wilf Ashman

Stirling Moss, Geoff Thomas & Neville Trickett
with the Mini-Sprint Racer in 1966

INTRODUCTION & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a history and time-line for the classic, one-off Mini-Sprint racer that was the brain-child of Geoff Thomas & Neville Trickett.

With the help of the many people I have acknowledged, particularly Lee [Minibitz NZ], and Mark Forster [mk1-performance-conversions] , and with apologies to anyone I have omitted, I decided to try to put-together this article after meeting-up with Wilf Ashman, nearly 40 years after he had acquired the car and had raced it successfully in the GT Class (see PAGE 2 - The Wilf Ashman Era).

In fact, in October 2006, it will be the 40th Birthday of the Mini Sprint Racer.

Of course my major thanks go to Geoff Thomas (left) and Neville Trickett (right, with friend) for permission to use their photos, extracts from websites, and their personal recollections.

40th Anniversary
At this stage I must emphasise that the focus of this 40th Anniversary article is the Mini Sprint raced by Neville and later by Wilf Ashman, to whom I also owe a debt of thanks for his input of a wealth of information and for allowing me access to his private photo-albums of his Racing Years.

I also acknowledge all the other copyright owners of their photographs that I have used to illustrate this article.

With Geoff's financial backing, many other Mini Sprints, mainly road-going ones, were built, latterly at the Rob Walker Corsley garage in Wiltshire, but that is another story! (see here )

I should also add that I have another connection with Neville, albeit a remote one, in that my good friend David Smith is the son of Pete Smith of Smith & Cave of Blandford, vehicle spraying experts par excellence — now living in France, Neville knew Pete Smith for 30 years when they both lived in that area of Dorset — small world, isn't it ? !

THE INCEPTION & BIRTH OF THE MINI SPRINT RACER
With the main objective of this article being historical accuracy, I can do no better than to quote directly from Geoff's & Neville's memories of those days in the mid-1960s, when Saloon and GT racing were all the rage at Castle Coombe and other race circuits, viz.

Neville: "To my recollection, the Mini Sprint story began with a chance meeting, …. a few words before or after a race, at, I believe, the Castle Coombe circuit during the summer of 1965. The driver of a navy-blue-with-white-bits 1300 Mini Cooper S, introduced himself as Geoff Thomas, and while we were talking about things as one did, he came out (of the blue) with the suggestion that we section a Mini……I didn’t even understand the term, but was told that it related to body-shell modifications for American Hot-Rod racing."

So the project came about through the common interest Geoff and I had in motor racing which led us to build the Mini Sprint racer. In those days, both Saloon and GT racing were ultra competitive. There was nothing wrong with the car, but from a position whereby, previously, if my car had stayed in one piece, I expected to win, we found ourselves in the GT class, competing against, for example, cars produced by the exceptionally talented Paul Emery. We were outclassed! "

Geoff: "In 1965 I decided to go racing in a Mini Cooper and bought a brand new 1070 Cooper S from David Jolliffe at Corsley Garage in Wiltshire. I had a reasonably successful first season and during this time I met Neville Trickett who was based in Blandford.

Neville had the idea of cutting the Mini body both through the windscreen pillars and also through the waistline of the body itself, in order to reduce wind resistance for racing.  I decided to finance the operation and we set up in a workshop in Wallisdown, Bournemouth, which belonged to a young chap called Surtees. We had two further great blokes, Haggis and Nick Jenke and we all got stuck in to produce a Racer and a Road version.

I cannot possibly tell you how difficult things were, with the preparation of the Mini Sprint Racer and even more so with the production of the road-going versions! It was aggravation, aggravation, aggravation! Neville did a marvellous job with the "cut and shutting", but the problems of door apertures and windows were always with us. We used specially cut-down laminated windscreens which I recall cost £85 each and I ended-up fitting them all with a 75% success rate. 25% of them cracked and split during the fitting process!  At least having paid for them, I could not blame the others for breaking them!

The winter of 1965-1966 was particularly cold and conditions in the Wallisdown workshop were freezing all the time. Neville, Haggis and Nick worked like trojans producing the things and I was in charge of sales which were going reasonably well. I particularly remember Nick because he used to refer to a car seat as a "chair"! He used to say to me "Shall I fit the driver's chair now"?

Early in 1966, and quite separately from the MiniSprint project, I became interested in Corsley Garage which belonged to Rob Walker [right] of the the Johnny Walker Whisky family. Rob Walker sponsored Stirling Moss and was a most successful F1 Private Entrant. I took a controlling interest in the Corsley Garage company which was an Austin and Jaguar Dealership. In May 1966, the MiniSprint project moved from Wallisdown to Corsley Garage.

With the much better facilities at Corsley production improved and so did the standards of finish! Several cars went abroad including a brand-new one to Copenhagen and the one shown left which went to a happy owner in France.All in all, we produced some 85 MiniSprints before the project was sold to Stewart and Arden, the London British Leyland distributors.

I think we were all pleased to be out of it by then. It was hard work and didn't quite make the money we had hoped for. However, it was an experience and possibly "character building". Neville went on to further design and success; when I last heard of him he and his lovely wife were in France. Haggis went on to be "Haggispeed" and , no doubt Nick, who was very laid back, is happily engaged in something interesting. Young Surtees did not come to Corsley with us. So, where are you all now?

I, together with my brother Graham, went on to build up the "Rob Walker" business to the stage where we had fourteen garages and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1972. An enjoyable moment was when our Rob Walker Racing Team won the F1 British Grand Prix in 1968 with a Lotus driven by Jo Siffert. But that is another story!   "

YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT ROB WALKER's INVOLVEMENT IN F1
and the Mini Sprints
HERE

So, there you have it, the birth of the Mini Sprint Racer and the road-going versions..... and you can see and read more about the latter on Geoff's website here, along with details of his many other exploits and interests.

Here I should add, to the credit of Nev and Geoff, but often not to their satisfaction, that their concept of a chopped-down Mini sprint was copied by many others (see here), but there was only one original Mini Sprint racer!

Check-out the original technical details of the car HERE

PRECURSOR POSTSCRIPT
For completeness & for the avoidance of any confusion, I should add that Neville's precursor to the Mini-Sprint Racer was a racing-car that I remember very well, and was, in fact, the car on which the subsequent 1966 Mini Sprint Racer was based: I am talking about Neville's 1965 cut-down and lightened-in-every-possible-way Mini 999 cc Cooper S, an over-bored 970 S, very over-square and very high revving due to this characteristic plus a couple of other cunning tweeks. This car was subsequently sold to Ian McDougal who drove for Broadspeed.

Could this be it ????

" The car in the background is also a Sprint;
I have been told it is thought to be an original
built by Neville Trickett and Geoff Thomas.
Sadly this car was written-off several years ago."

John Worzencraft, PPJ  RACING & Wilf Ashman