Throwback To The Time Rally God Ari Vatanen Raided A Spectator’s Car For Parts

Apart from Sauber and Williams in F1, motorsports teams typically show up prepared for anything. Rally teams, especially so, given their cars take such a beating. Back in the 1976 Scottish Rally, though, Ari Vatanen found himself with a broken car and no appropriate spares on hand. In true rally spirit, however, the team found a creative way to get the car back in the running.

Rallying was different back in the 1970s. The cars weren’t all specialist race builds from the ground up, and were instead very much still based on real road cars. This extended to a commonality in parts to some degree, which would prove crucial for Vatanen on that storied weekend.

The trouble started when Vatanen’s Escort saw its differential fail while he was leading the rally. He was able to limp the car downhill to the end of the course but had no way to continue. “It’s a component which has never broken before on a British rally, so we don’t carry them as spares,” explained co-driver Peter Bryant. We next see a desperate mechanic sprint in chase of a solution. “The caps broke on the middle of the diff, it’s let the bearing go and it’s fucked the pinion up, and the crown wheel,” he says. “Don’t know anyone who’s got one, do you?”

With spares nowhere to be found, Bryant came up with an altogether cheekier solution. “We’ll find a parked car and ask the owner if we can take the axle out of it!” he says.

Cameras captured the hunt. Thankfully, Bryant was able to quickly flag down a passing Ford Capri with the 3-liter engine. The owner, Ken Brown of Nottingham, was a good sport and pulled over with a smile on his face, letting the Ford crew pull his car apart for the good of the competition. Vatanen explained to an amused Brown that his was the first 3.0-liter Capri they’d seen pass by – even having enlisted the rally’s helicopter for help.

It was by no means an easy fix, as the team was under immense time pressure due to the rally’s service rules. A full swap including the diff housing was out of the question; instead, the diff’s components were pulled from the road-going Capri and slapped into the waiting rally car’s housing. The footage shows frantic scenes as the team wrestles with spanners and bearings on the bare ground before dumping a jerry can’s worth of fuel into the tank to get the car back on the road.

The differential wasn’t the same ratio as the race car’s, but it was enough to get the car back in the fight. As Vatanen and Bryant roared away with the Escort’s engine wailing a beautiful tune, Ford Competition Manager Peter Ashcroft encouraged Brown to have the local Ford dealer replace his Capri’s differential and send the bill to the team.

The events were chronicled in a film called Scotch and Dry, sponsored by Esso and now stored in the National Library of Scotland. We don’t know what happened to Brown and his Ford Capri, but one suspects the rally team made good on their promise to cover the repairs. As for Vatanen and the race, he sadly had to retire when transmission issues sidelined the car. Vatanen came back to win it the following year.

It’s a fun story that could never happen today. Modern WRC cars are bespoke beasts with few if any parts shared with their roadgoing brethren, and a certain magic has been lost from the days when factory motorsports machines weren’t so far from their production-car counterparts. It was an era like that we are unlikely to ever see again.

Image credits: via YouTube screenshot