13 minute read
Classic Comp 90 One of the best known racers from the Hillrally’s heyday
Kicking up DUS5T
In the late 1990s, one of the most familiar sights on the off-road racing scene was DUS5T – a superbly presented Land Rover 90 whose supercharged 5.0-litre TVR V8 made it a match for the very best. By the time Total Off Road caught up with it, its identity had changed, and so had its engine – but it was still one of the tidiest comp trucks around
Words: Gary Noskill Pictures: Phil Masters
The 1995 ARC National was an event that very nearly didn’t happen, after the land on which it was going to run was withdrawn at the last minute. But thanks to the efforts of the Lincolnshire LRC, it went ahead more or less as planned – and, apart from the fact that the site was a little more spread out than normal, no-one seemed any the wiser.
Had it not happened, the public would have been denied their first glimpse of a Land Rover that went on to become one of the most famous sights on the off-road racing scene. Exhibited by the now-departed ADI Engineering, it was an open-top 90 with a 4.5-litre V8 engine and a number plate that stood out from the crowd: DUS5T.
Originally a truck-cab, the 90 was fitted with a roll cage that looked the business but certainly wasn’t going to pass scrutineering for any sort of motorsport event. Even so, you could see where ADI was going with it – twin Bilsteins at each corner, four-pin diffs and cross-drilled discs, front and rear anti-roll bars and a four-speed ZF auto box… not the stuff of a standard 90, by any stretch, but just what you want for comp safari and Hillrally use.
No surprise, then, that DUS5T was to spend the next few years snapping at the heels of TMCs and Simmbugghinis in the British Off-Road and Hillrally championships. But by the time the vehicle reached the peak of its powers, just about the only thing you’d recognise was its number plate – because by the time Hugh Haines drove it to the highest placing ever achieved by a production vehicle in a hillrally, it was a white hard-top with some very different bits and pieces under its skin.
Chief among these was a supercharged 5.0-litre TVR engine, with twin exhausts venting just in front of the rear arches through exit pipes so wide you could get your fist in them. The drivetrain had been rebuilt, the brakes had been uprated, the cage was now very much to FIA spec – and with its spectacular chequered flag livery, DUS5T was the best looking Land Rover on the circuit. Not only that, it was the fastest.
But supercharging an engine that’s already been opened out to more than 140% of the capacity with which it was originally designed is never the way to achieve long-lasting reliability, and service areas at events around the country were soon buzzing with talk of this Land Rover that moved faster than any other – for as long as it kept moving at all. Time passed, and so did the 90, through the hands of first Jonathan Smith and then Peter Brown – the former fitted it with a diesel engine, of all things, which was then replaced by a 4.6-litre V8 which propelled the latter around a few AWDC and Midland ORC safaris over a brief period of time. Then it came up for sale again, and started attracting the attention of Tony Walmsley.
At this point, Tony and his son Chris has been competing for about five years in a 3.5-litre Allard. ‘It was back in 2000,’ he remembers. ‘It was our second full Hillrally. The first season we had the car, we did the Clubmans Hillrally, and it bit us, we had to do more. We did 1997 and then had a couple of years off, and then we did 2000.
‘We were sat on one of the stages in Eppynt on the Saturday, and the rain was coming in horizontally. I looked down at my lap, and I watched it slowly filling up with a pool of water. And I said to Chris, “I’m getting too old for this. We’re going to have to get something with doors.”’
And Chris, who most certainly wasn’t getting too old for it, agreed.
When they first went to see the 90, the team knew it had some sort of pedigree. Even so, however, they were pleasantly surprised by what they found. ‘I don’t think we realised how well known it was, if truth be told. We knew of it, we’d been looking at it in magazines for a while, and to be honest when we went to have a look at it, once we started to see what the modifications were, we were quite impressed.’
One of the mods Tony wasn’t bothered about was that eye-catching number plate. The 90 was for sale with an £8500 price tag, or a rather steeper £10,500 if you wanted the right to keep on calling it DUS5T – suffice to say that among the things Tony had to do as part of the process was organise its transfer on to an age-related plate.
So now DUS5T was just an H-reg Land Rover – except, of course, that’s exactly what it was not. From the bottom to the top, this remains a 90 that’s bristling with modifications. Even its chassis, which is basically standard without any overt strengthening (but for the small matter of an FIA-spec roll cage), bears a belly plate which has saved the vehicle’s more vulnerable bits on many an occasion. Said chassis was replaced in 1998, after the original started getting tired of the constant abuse it had to take.
Sitting beneath that are a standard front axle case, containing a pegged four-pin diff and strengthened halfshafts, and a Wolf back axle with a pegged limited-slip diff and competition halfshafts by Quaife. Each rides on twin Bilstein shocks, attached to standard Land Rover top and bottom mounts, and boasts heavily modified brakes – cross-drilled discs at the back, while at the front are vented discs with Wilwood calipers. These run a 70:30 front-to-back bias, to add more stopping power where the weight is: ‘It’s fairly new to us,’ says Tony, ‘and we’ve adjusted it a couple of times. But we’ve found this to be about right to suit our driving style.’
Ahead of it all is that 4.6-litre engine – not as hairily powerful as the old 5.0-litre TVR lump, but it’s proving significantly more reliable. And it’s no slouch, either, with a cross-bolted block and John Eales heads and cam. Getting fuel to it was proving to be a bit of a problem, however, with starvation setting in on particularly quick or sharp corners. The remedy was a half-litre swirl pot, fed by a low-pressure pump from the foam-filled tank and feeding the engine through a filter and high-pressure pump. The return from the engine also feeds the swirl pot, from which another return goes back to the tank, the idea being that whatever the situation, the pumps should always have access to fuel.
In its 5.0-litre days, the vehicle used to run a front-mounted radiator for the engine and another in the rear for its automatic gearbox. Tony, of course, inherited it with the latter still in place but not plumbed in, and what’ll happen to it is yet to be decided. ‘This year’s to get to know the vehicle, this winter’s to really think about what bits we do and don’t want on it. So we’ve left them in at
With Hugh Haines at the wheel, DUS5T finished seventh overall at the 1997 Southern Hillrally (left) and won Class G at the Scottish (below)
Above: Suspension is by twin Bilsteins all round. Wilwood calipers date from ADI days Below: interior says it all about what this vehicle was built to do
the moment, simply because they don’t add that much weight, and we may well fit a different box anyway. If not, they’ll come out. The other thing is that we might run the top of the heads to it, and use it to cool them.’
As it stands, the current radiator is a 200Tdi unit that so far seems to be up to the job. ‘The way we’ve got the front fans positioned, they force a lot of air through. Yes, front-mounted radiators do get clogged up on Hillrallies. But we had a rear-mounted radiator on the Allard, and we kept getting all sorts of cooling problems – we put one in the front in the end. We found, actually, that if you put a baffle for the mud to stick to, you can protect your radiator and the air can still get round, and to an extent we think we may be able to do that with this.’
Taking care of the engine’s output are a Discovery R380 box and 1:1.66 transfer case, the latter operated by separate high-low and diff-lock levers as it wasn’t possible to locate a single-function transfer lever on the vehicle’s enormous transmission tunnel. This is an indication of what it’s like inside the 90 – much of what’s shoe-horned into the cabin is a throwback from its 5.0-litre days, and doesn’t do a lot anymore, but the overall effect is enormously impressive.
About all that’s the same as a standard 90 is the pressing lack of space inside the cabin. The Sparco bucket seats and Sabelt four-point harnesses take up a fair bit of what there is, and between them are controls allowing the navigator to operate the washers and horn. ‘That’s a modification we’re going to make,’ says Tony. ‘We found in the Allard that if Chris has them on a remote on his lap, it’s much easier, and he’s less likely to hit the wrong button. Besides, at the moment they’re too close to the kill switch!’
Another change that’s going to be made reflects an obstacle on which a lot of first-time vehicle builders come a cropper. All too often, people design fantastic looking vehicles that are going to conquer the world… only to find that they’ve not left enough room for anyone to actually sit in them. You can sit in the 90 comfortably enough, of course – it wouldn’t have posted all those blistering stage times in the past without being able to accommodate a driver – but seating positions are very personal things, and Tony plans to move the driver’s seat at the end of the season,
Above left: The engine cover may say 3.9, but it’s actually a 4.6 under there. Prior to this, the vehicle was fitted with a diesel engine for a mercifully short spell. During the DUS5T era, it ran a supercharged 5.0-litre TVR lump which was every bit as staggeringly quick as it sounds. Before being turned into a comper, the 90 was built by ADI Engineering as a soft-top lifestyle wagon with a 4.5-litre V8 Above right: Fuel starvation was proving a problem in corners, so the engine is now fed via a system using a half-litre swirl pot. The rear-mounted radiator was fitted by a previous owner; having had a lot of problems with a similar set-up in a previous race motor, Tony was considering moving it back to the front when we took these pictures
as at present he’s not totally square-on to the steering wheel.
Said wheel is a 12-inch number, operating a quick-ratio box with two turns lock-to-lock. Nearby, right in the driver’s eye line, is a rev counter, something Tony added as he couldn’t see the old one. ‘The rev limiter is set to about 5800,’ he says, ‘and we do pull that at times. It can be set all the way to 10,000, but I think we’d have a problem if we tried that…’
Also helping him keep his eyes on the road are ancillary screenwash nozzles mounted on the wings and fed from a tank in the back. This is the sort of modification you only really notice when you don’t have it – which is what happened in an early outing at Seven Sisters, when the pump went on strike.
Despite this, and a few other minor problems, Tony and Chris went on to finish second in class at the Seven Sisters event. Not a bad result at all for what was just their second comp in the vehicle, especially in a class that boasts some seriously talented motors.
Having jousted with giants in the Allard, which ran in the Prototype class, the team’s new vehicle means they’re now in the altogether saner, if still extremely quick, Modified Production category. ‘I looked around, and people like Simon Dowdeswell and Richard Hopkins were there with their Defender and Discovery, and it seemed to me that anybody could build a 90, and spec it out – okay, at cost – and compete. There’s just something about it… ‘I think recognised silhouettes are going to be the way for the future. There’s still going to be a place for specialist vehicles, the likes of Trevor Milner and the Simmonites and Bowlers and Tomcats and so forth, but I like the idea of driving a vehicle with a recognised silhouette and getting it places that these vehicles can also get. And we’re getting competitive. Seven Sisters was a good result for us, and we’re getting quicker.’
Looking ahead, Tony and Chris aim to take stock at the end of the season and start getting the 90 they way they want it. Not that a great deal will change: ‘Basically, we’re just going to try and build on what we’ve got. We knew we were buying a vehicle of some pedigree, just from the specification, and it’s a proven vehicle. All we want to do now is take it from here and if we can improve it, improve it… and have some fun!’
Which means DUS5T is going to live on, in character if not in appearance. Having been valued at the sort of money many teams budget for an entire season’s racing, the 90’s identity is sure to crop up before long on another vehicle. It’ll keep on turning heads, no doubt… but without this enduringly familiar Land Rover attached, it’ll never be quite the same again.
