A solitary policeman was training his dog about half a mile away but Boreham Airfield seemed deserted; it was still and calm, a weak autumn sun relieving the slight chill. Simon Childs set himself up with his camera on the apex of a fast third-gear corner. We waited a few seconds; then, across a field and partially obscured by a slight rise in the land, we saw the roof of a car moving fast along a distant straight. The driver braked, changed down and turned back towards us; back in top gear, the car was thrown flat out through a sweeping lefthander, some diagonal pitching indicating that it was really moving.

Suddenly the engine note was carried to us across the ploughed field, the unmistakable howl of a high performance Ford Twin Cam at high revs in top. The red and gold Lotus Cortina, which one all eight of its championship outings in its short career in 1965, was bearing down on us; its driver then and now was none other than Sir John Whitmore. He braked, blipping the throttle to change down, and threw the car into the corner. I'd swear he was grinning as the car charged towards the apex on opposite lock. Whitmore flashed through the corner a few feet from us, correcting the slide and opening the throttles to power up the straight away from us.

Here was the real thing, for this car is the authentic original driven with impressive gusto by its original driver, a moment in time captured through Simon Child's lens for this month's cover.

After winning the European Touring Car Championship, KPU 392C was retired at the end of the 1965 season. Standard seats were fitted and it went on the road for some months, visiting Ford dealerships on a promotional tour. What happened next is not quite clear but Sir John recalls that he acquired it some time during 1967 and has owned it ever since.

On January 19, 1972, it arrived at Beaulieu to go on display at the National Motor Museum. I am not sure the people at Beaulieu were exactly thrilled to receive it: in those days not many people did get excited about Cortinas, even if they had won the European Championships. Quite how long the car was on public view is not known; for much of its time there it was simply stored out of sight. The records show it was run only once at Beaulieu, when Sir John paid a visit and a photo-session took place as the car was run around the display arena outside the museum. It was removed to East Anglia on January 30, 1978. Nobody seemed particularly interested in it apart from Sir John Whitmore, but some time later his former co-driver in the two-driver races that season, Jack Sears - who understands these things - volunteered to give it garage space alongside his Ferrari GTO ("I thought perhaps some of the Classic car value would rub off on it," jokes Whitmore). There it stayed until 1987 when it was brought out of retirement for a track demonstration at the launch of Peter Bryant's Historic racing 'replica' (which we track tested for Classic Cars, January issue, 1988). The grand old original let the side down that day by blowing a head gasket immediately, so this exclusive Boreham test was probably its first proper airing since 1965.

Alarmingly original
It appeared almost alarmingly original: even the 1965 racing tyres had not been changed. The experts at Boreham, accustomed these days to fantastically quick and sophisticated Sierras, took a reverent look over this winning Ford from a quarter century back, and declared almost apologetically that it would not pass an MoT test today!

Recently, the car had been fitted with a simple rollover bar - which it did not have when it was racing - but that concession to safety seemed totally unreassuring; especially since, although the car was equipped with a full harness in the 1965 season, there were now no seat belts of any kind fitted! But this was a special occasion, a chance that would not come up again, and I was unable to fight the tempatation: I asked Sir John Whitmore to drive me round the circuit in his car. Well, wouldn't you?

This provided five minutes of fascinating terror: with no belts, and a backrestr that stopped halfway up my back, I can't say that I felt very happy - but it was an experience impossible to resist. The car felt light and as we accelerated up the straight it was very firm, while the old tyres and suspension reacted very noticeably to any imperfections in the road surface.

The first corner at Boreham is a fairly fast righthander with a slight adverse camber, and the car was immediately thrown onto a bit of opposite lock as we entered it. I clung onto the base of the seat just to stay in place; it occurred to me that if I moved about too much it would upset the car's stability. The second corner, a fast right taken in top, did even less for my confidence as I would swear the car rose up on two wheels as we went through it, but I put aside my desire to live and listened to the past master of Touring Car racing: "After driving modern cars it feels awful at low speed and it would be easy to think it was all wrong and could not work on the limit. But the more you load it up the better it is, and it handles really well. We built in a little bit of rear end steer to make it controllable, but in spite of its strange antics you can change the line accurately: in a race you could dodge around in a corner quite well to get past some unexpected incident without losing too much speed." Well, that was the gist of what he said, I was not, you will understand, taking notes at the time. In fact I felt fairly convinced that the car was about to turn over at any moment in all the corners, but it never did.

If something broke
Next it was my turn and I set off on my own, a little unhappy at the responsibility of it all, for whatever had happened to this car in the last 25 years, a major accident does not figure in the story: nor for that matter does a recent service. If something broke and I rolled it into a ball, it really would be very disappointing. Apart from that, the lack of seat belts was still getting to me. I resolved to go for a couple of laps, enough to get a proper impression, and then call it a day. The driving position is just standard Cortina, the rigid glassfibre bucket seat having disappeared before the end of 1965, and the first impression is one of excellent all-round visibility.

With just the driver on board the car handles much better, but you can still tell that it has a high centre of gravity. The inside wheels feel very lightly laden in the corners and I am sure it was up on two wheels for fairly long distances on some corners. It is very easy to get the tail moving about, and you don't feel that such entertaining tricks are as wrong as they would be in a modern car: the narrow wheels don't generate much grip and you can get surprising amounts of opposite lock on without the feeling that the car's forward progress is being killed.

Another fast corner and the car comes up on the inside just so much, the tail flicks out just so far; in this 'getting to know you' phase with the racing Lotus Cortina it is still a surprise that it doesn't roll right over, and it is equally surprising that the tail doesn't fly right out. In fact it is very easily checked and it is necessary to concentrate to avoid over-correcting with opposite lock. As is is, the car wants to go through corners in a series of oversteer - neutral - oversteer - neutral slides, but I have a suspicion that if it had just come out of Alan Mann's workshop, freshly prepared for a race, it would be a bit sharper in its responses.

Even so, the brakes were fantastic and I had a feeling of driving a car that was a bit special in its day and which refuses to let that sense of glory slip away to easily. I charged round for my two laps, still thinking about the old unserviced mechanical components, and thinking a lot about the lack of seat belts which somehow, illogically, seems worse in a saloon car than it does in an open car, and then I stopped.

Never that simple
I would like to be able to say that here is the definitive example of a 'leaf-spring suspension' racing Mk I Lotus Cortina, on which anyone wanting to race in Historic events could base a rebuild, but life is never that simple. Even with this car there are confusing patches in its history and there is no written specification for it.

At the end of the 1965 season the car was prepared once again to full race-ready spec. Sir John Whitmore (who doesn't actually bother to get himself called "Sir John", in fact) remembers that it was also sent off for a full respray so that it would look perfect at the Motor Show. Real gold leaf was used in this paint process, I am told! Myth has it that all the Alan Mann red and gold cars had real gold leaf in the paint. For the benefit of future historians, during the painting the identifying stripes under the front air intake were altered slightly from the design used during the season.

Trying to piece together its history is not at all easy. Between its stay at Beaulieu and its storage at Jack Sears' garage it was returned to Alan Mann, who by then had established his aviation business at Fairoaks, near Chobham. Some of the former mechanics were still available and they set about a fairly major service job to make the car reasonable to drive, though they were not briefed to return it to the full race condition in which it had left them all those years before. They were fairly dismayed to see its condition, dirty and rather forlorn; they suspected the full-race engine had been swapped for a slightly less powerful version, though the evidence is against that now. When raced, the car was said to have a 'trick gearbox' (with special beefed-up parts and modified ratios?). Had this also disappeared? At any rate, the gearbox in the car was in poor condition and it was rebuilt. In fact, the gearbox still retains its special alloy tailshaft housing, which proves beyond reasonable doubt that it is the genuine article. As for the engine, careful inspection suggests that it is the BRM-built original.

To await posterity
The back axle, which according to Patrick McNally's track test in Autosport, December 24/31 1965, should have had a Hewland limited-slip differential, which was just a standard unit with a free differential.

Sir John Whitmore is sure that the limited-slip differential was removed after the 1965 Motor Show to make the car suitable for normal road use during its tour round the dealers. Whatever did happen in those 'dark ages', and that includes a rumour that the bonnet flew up at speed one day and had to be repaired, Alan Mann's people took it back and cleaned the car up, made it serviceable, and eventually, after it had sat taking up space in a hangar for two or three years, Jack Sears made his noble offer and it was trailered away to sit in his garage and await posterity.

What nobody doubts is that this is the actual car that won the 1965 Touring Car Championship, and bar the seats and back axle, research leads me to believe that it is true to its 1965 Motor Show specification. Look in the boot and all seems well: the special fuel tank is right and the bootlid itself is correctly cut out by about half an inch under the centre of the back window so as to clear the racing filler cap. I had imagined that the boot, bonnet and doors would be made of aluminium but a magnet reveals that, though the doors and bonnet are aluminium, the bootlid is of steel. After some weeks we discovered that the car was fitted with a specially prepared steel bootlid for the 1965 Motor Show! I defy anybody to come up with an accurate specification for the car as it was in its final race at Zandvoort on August 29, 1965. If you can, or if you can fill out the history of the car in any way, there are plenty of people around who would be interested to hear from you!

Despite McNally's track test, for example, which Sir John Whitmore says was technically correct, Alan Mann personnel tell me that their Lotus Cortinas could be fitted with either Salisbury or No-Slip differentials and they don't seem to remember the Hewland type at all! Perhaps it was something that was tried briefly and abandoned: McNally said they "have a life of approximately 12 racing hours".

One mystery, which we can clear up once and for all, is more than intriguing. The first round of the 1965 Championship was held at Monza on March 19, but the 1965 cars were not ready. The Alan Mann team therefore ran the 1964 cars with A-frame suspension, at that race. Round 2 was a Mont Ventoux and the new cars were ready but were still painted in the standard white with green side flash. Sir John Whitmore drove KPU 392C at Mont Ventoux, scoring an incredible outright win on the tricky French hillclimb. However, the car carried the old 1964, B-registered, number plate at that round for some reason. A week later Whitmore and Sears paired up to score a remarkable outright win at Round 3, the Nürburgring. Before Round 4, at Zolder a fortnight after that, it was painted red and gold and given its proper registration number: just another example of the mysterious past of this car! Pure fact, though, is the record book of that season which shows that the car won its class in every event it tackled that season: Austrian and Swiss hillclimbs, in Sweden at Karlskoga, and with further outright race wins at Snetterton and Zolder included. The Alan Mann team, by the way, tended to rush back home for complete rebuilds even if the Continental events were only a week apart.

It was fascinating to meet Alan Mann at his Fairoaks headquarters and speak to him about the car and how he managed his successful team in the Sixties. Appointed by Ford to run the Lotus Cortina, Alan Mann had a free hand in many ways: "I could select my own drivers, and I tended to pick the kind of driver who would be quick and reliable; perhaps that's why we only wrote off one car in six years. I would have loved to have had Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx driving for me, but they would have a gained a bit more in their learning curve and then they would have gone. There's not a lot of point in educating people for someone else. John was easy to pick, though he probably wasn't aware of his own qualities. He looked spectacular but he was quick to set a time, and then consistent: a natural driver."

Every detail considered
As for the cars, they arrived as complete production models in those days, and not as bare shells as they would today. This car would have been stripped for considerable attention to be given to the shell. Torsional rigidity was improved by the careful design and installation of a firewall behind the rear seat, and by improving the location of such items as the roof stiffening ribs. No doubt they were also able to check that enough welds had gone into the seam joints at the factory too! Seam welding was not strictly permitted under the regulations. At any rate, Alan was happy that the bodyshells were sufficiently stiff without roll cages, especially as he did not want to add weight high up in the car: the centre of gravity was always high and it would have been all too easy to have altered the car so that it would roll instead of slide when at the limit of adhesion.

Every detail was considered. As Alan Mann says: "When you sit in your bath and just think about each component on the car, and how it could be improved just a little bit, the end result can be pretty effective." That's why they built their own front cross-members to critical tolerances, allowing a subtle change in front wheel geometry. Obviously, it was better to have the engine an inch or so lower in the car, and this was achieved without falling foul of the eligiblity scrutineers.

Though they could make the A-frame cars reliable by adding stiffening ribs to the 'banjo' ("The failures were nothing to do with the aluminium used in the castings", says Alan Mann), the team considered that the A-frame cars never felt as good to drive as those fitted with conventional leaf springs. They also forced a bit of toe-in into the live back axle - as much as 1/16in could be achieved without adversely affecting the reliability.

Big row with Colin
Normally, all the development work was done in winter in those days, and stopped in March. Great efforts went into this, with testing at Goodwood completed before the season, during which the team would simply run the cars, with a full rebuild planned before every race. After each event an amazing number of items were thrown away and replaced with new parts, including front hubs, fuel pumps and halfshafts. It was more than a quick engine rebuild; in fact, it would be fair to say that the cars were effectively new for each race in all but the bodyshell.

Alan Mann's team operated quite independently; for example, they had no relationship with Lotus at the time: "but Jimmy (Clark) tried one of our cars at Goodwood one day... and had a big row with Colin (Chapman) about his own car afterwards!" Alan Mann laughed when recalling this incident. Graham Hill tried it as well, perhaps on the same day, but was not so impressed. In fact he deliberately steered it off the track and stopped, saying the steering felt so odd that something must have broken. A wager ensued: nothing had broken, so Graham had to buy lunch!

In my own mind I have a picture of racing Lotus Cortinas of the mid-Sixties waving their inside front wheels high in the air as Clark and Ickx belted them round Brands Hatch. They were the Team Lotus cars, raced mainly in Britain. Team Lotus persevered with the problematical A-frame rear suspension long after others had dropped it. If you see pictures of Sir John Whitmore in this Alan Mann car, it did not lift its front wheels in that way, though it could rise up momentarily on two wheels.

It is the same today. Remarkably, it has survived and though a few of the special parts it once had have been replaced with standard items, it is unquestionably the genuine article at heart. A day out with the car and its original driver a quarter century after its glorious 1965 season was a very special experience.

One last teaser: Sir John Whitmore was looking at Patrick McNally's 1965 track test article and said: "Was that really the race car he was driving? Is the paintwork right?" I asked Alan Mann about that when I visited him and he laughed: "No, that must be it all right. We would not have made up a special car for him to test."