When Dennis Hays nearly crashed his
beautiful Escort Cosworth at Snetterton one day, he knew it was time to find a
replacement track car. The solution? A Mondeo ST of course.
Imagine this scenario. You’re at the wheel
of your pristine Escort Cosworth, a car that you’ve spent a small fortune and
countless hours getting exactly how you want, and all of a sudden the rear
brakes catch fire. Now, this would be cause for concern if you’d just pulled up
at a set of traffic lights or were simply cruising down a B road at 45mph, but
for Dennis Hays it happened while he was doing approximately 163mph on the back
straight at Snetterton.
“The
trackday trophy seemed like the perfect choice as the races are long enough to
allow driver changes, so my mates could join in”
“I was flat out and the car went completely
sideways,” he recalled. “Somehow I managed to gather it all together without
hitting anything and ended up driving down the escape road and straight back
into the pits. I told myself that I would never do another track day again!”
The Escort Cosworth in question was
actually featured in Performance Ford a couple of years back and as those that
can remember will no doubt agree, it really was a work of art. Part of the
reason for this is that Dennis works for Torque Developments International, a
company that specialises in building and preparing top flight motorsport cars
and when you spend your day tinkering with the kind of expensive cars that
Dennis does for a living, then the attention to detail that’s required starts
to become second nature.
One of the highlights of his Escort, for
example, was its advanced individual coil on plug set-up and Syvecs engine
management system – which is the kind of equipment you’d expect on six-figure
GT and Touring cars!
After spending so much time and money on
the Escort, it was perhaps understandable that Dennis effectively retired it
from track duty after the Snetterton incident. However, being away from the
track made him realise how much he missed the buzz of circuit driving.
“A couple of months after the Escort
incident, I was working away at the Nurburgring and started chatting with my
mate about getting into racing,” he said. “It’s something that I’m involved
with quite a bit through my job, and as I’ve always preferred endurance events
over sprints, we decided that the Trackday Trophy would be an ideal place to
start.”
The Ford Mondeo is a large family car manufactured by the Ford
Motor Company from 1992 onwards. The name comes from Latin mundus, meaning
"world".
For those that don’t know, the Trackday
Trophy, which is organised by the same company that runs Brands Hatch,
Snetterton, Cadwell and Oulton Park, is aimed at the kind of people who are
looking to take a step up from regular trackdays into a race series that’s
designed for novices. The idea is that newcomers to the sport aren’t going to
get intimidated by drivers who have been doing it for years, and the rules are
as simple as possible to keep costs down and make the playing field as level as
possible.
“The Trackday Trophy seemed like the
perfect choice,” said Dennis. “The races are long enough to allow driver
changes, so my mates could join in, and as the rules state that you can have
any car as long it produces 175bhp/tonne or less, we started to look at what
would be the best one to take racing.”
After looking at the machines that
typically compete (think Renault Clios, MINIs, Vauxhall VXRs), Dennis initially
had a shortlist of six or seven cars, and while he came close to choosing a
Fiesta ST, he eventually decided on the Mondeo ST you see before you.
A
Mondeo might not be everyone's first choice of track day car, but Dennis has
turned this one into an absolute weapon
“The Mondeo might not seem like the obvious
choice considering most of the other cars on the grid are Clios, but when I
thought about it, the ST really did make sense,” he said. “For starters, the
3-litre V6 comes with a decent amount of power and torque as standard, so in
order to get to the 175bhp/tonne limit, it was going to be a case of losing
weight, rather than modifying the engine which would have added extra cost.
It’s also a naturally great handling car, so it just seemed like the perfect
platform to start with.
