Hillclimbing has always been a hotbed of design innovation, and a whole industry has grown around the construction of low-volume single-seater racing cars. Current British Hillclimb Championship contender Alex Summers has now joined the select band of drivers who have built their own car and it has taken seven years of effort, frustration and tears. Yet the P4t is not currently destined to be a BHC challenger.
Seven years after the initial sketches, the car ran for the first time at Loton Park in late March. Those years were an emotional rollercoaster for 2015 British Hillclimb champion Summers and his family, but the result is sensational. Sleek, low, purposeful and superbly engineered, the P4t is a triumph of tenacity, determination and engineering ability.
The P4t uses the 2.5-litre Cosworth engine previously fitted to the DJ Firestorm that Summers runs in the BHC, now with a Cosworth Indycar motor. The founding concept behind the P4t was a car that would better suit and fit the women in Summers’s life: his wife Debbie and his mum Lindsay. Both are fiercely competitive hillclimbers but can struggle to get an optimum driving position.
“It’s a car for them,” explains Summers, who wants to use the project to promote women in motorsport. “It’s very different in a number of ways. Its influence is the GWR Predator and I make no apologies for that. Graeme Wight is a god to me and I hope he sees it as a compliment. Anyone who has designed, built and raced their own car, like Ray Rowan, Steve Owen, and Sean and David Gould, is a hero and they’ve been the influence and the motivation.”
With massive hands-on support from his parents Richard and Lindsay, they built the chassis from the ground up. “The donor Van Diemen was a set of brakes, a set of pedals, steering column, steering rack and stuff like that,” recounts Summers Jr. “The first iteration is steel tubing with a resin-infused carbon skin bonded together, and it’s bolted to the front and rear bulkheads on the floor. So the chassis and the body is all down to us.”
The P4t is extremely low so that smaller drivers such as the Summers women can sit on the floor of the car, without any foam or padding, and see out of the front. “When you see my mum sit in the Firestorm it highlights a very serious problem,” continues Summers, whose day job is in the automotive industry, working for the likes of Aston Martin and as a test driver for McMurtry.
"Ergonomically, if you’re smaller, you are at a disadvantage in these racing cars, because you end up sitting too high, and therefore you’re too close to the steering wheel because the pedals are too far away.
“My mum genuinely is the best composite laminator in the family. She’s made one of the nosecones, which is a structural component, entirely on her own and a lot of composites like radiator ducts and wing brackets.
“The process was so intense and I hope it inspires someone somewhere to get the spanners out and have a go, whether it’s a Mini, a Caterham, a kart or whatever it is, just have a go. That’s how engineers are created and that’s what club motorsport should be.
“We started it up on the Thursday night before its first run, and I cried for about 20 minutes” Alex Summers
“When I started it, I didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into and it was a massive emotional rollercoaster. I’ve done things like the Festival of Speed at Goodwood, I’ve won run-offs and championships, but nothing prepared me for the significance of seeing a car that we’d created sitting there in the paddock looking good.
“Painting it was the most stressful part of it for me. I’m quite happy with the mechanical engineering. The carbon is very satisfying when you get it right, which is about half the time.”
Summers set himself a target of having the car running before the start of the new British Hillclimb season. If not, it would have been another year because chasing the title is intense and time-consuming and leaves no time for a project like the P4t. The support of a number of companies and individuals, including BHC rival Trevor Willis, helped make it all come together.
“We started it up on the Thursday night before its first run, and I cried for about 20 minutes,” Summers admits. “I couldn’t quite believe it. What people don’t necessarily understand is that you’ve got an engine and you’ve made your own oil tank, which we did.
"Well, Trevor Morris made the tank but I designed it all and we made our own pipes and fabricated everything in the garage. Any tiny little bit of swarf left in a pipe, the tank or a line and that’s it, the engine is dead. And we’re talking about a 1990s race engine that is almost impossible to replace.
“When we started the engine, it held its oil and it held its fuel and started beautifully. We stood there for 20 minutes afterwards with a fire extinguisher checking for drips and there were no drips and no leaks. Nothing. Wow, Christ!”
Now that the P4t is up and running, the natural question is what comes next. But Summers says it’s unlikely there will be any more of the cars made, at least in the near future. “God knows – no idea,” he says. “There’s no plan. We’ve got the tooling and we’ve got the moulds so we could make another one. But I don’t necessarily plan on doing that in the immediate future because I’m just very tired from the last one!”
The P4t is likely to be back out in the mid-season and will be primarily driven by Debbie and Lindsay.
“The name is a bit of a joke really,” adds Summers. “It started as a P40, which was a sort of target budget, and the joke was then, when we exceeded that by some margin, that it was a P45. But the name stuck.”
