In a career spanning more than 50 years, Sonny Howard has had an immeasurable influence on national motorsport. But, despite a list of non-racing clients including Top Gear, the Fast & Furious franchise, Jaguar and the king of Jordan, he does not seek the limelight. Instead, he has nurtured others while prioritising the show.
“We’ve altered people’s lives, without a doubt,” he admits. “But it’s not about Sonny Howard.”
From hot rods to rallying, junior T Cars to crowd-pleasing Eurocars, Howard’s CV is as innovative as it is varied. Stunt cars for films, live shows and manufacturer launches – and even producing the Desert Iris military vehicle – have also been major parts of SHP Engineering’s business.
But providing opportunities for drivers from grassroots disciplines is his real passion. The likes of Le Mans racer and British GT champion Ian McKellar Jr and touring car ace Carl Boardley are among many to have made that transition with Howard’s help. The 78-year-old, still hands-on at the helm of his Cambridgeshire-based firm, doesn’t dwell on the past.
“I’m not into history,” he states. “The only reason I say you have to look at history is to make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.”
He began racing stock cars in the 1960s before employer Geoff Glover, Ely’s Datsun dealer, offered a chance to go rallying and build his first hot rod. As he quickly earned a reputation for his engineering, Howard worked on other drivers’ cars in his spare time.
“We ended up doing limited-slip diffs,” he recalls. “I was starting to get more and more of them and, in the end, there was hardly time to go racing.”
Through hot rods he met four-time world champion Barry Lee, beginning a long association with the cult hero. It led to spells in rallying with Dealer Team Opel and Blydenstein where he acted as a chase-car driver to the likes of Russell Brookes and soon-to-be world champion Timo Salonen across Europe. But it was while at Glovers, after importing an ex-Shekhar Mehta Datsun Sunny, that Howard experienced one of his most memorable rallies, when Lee contested the 1975 RAC.
“He blew a head gasket in the middle of the forest,” remembers Howard. “And we actually changed the head gasket on his car in between the two stages. We got it through, got it to York – which was where it was based – with no water in it, and then overnight we sent somebody back to take the cylinder head off my little hot rod, because it was exactly the same engine. I think we were two stages from the end of the RAC Rally, we’d been leading the class, and he put it in a ditch!”
In the meantime, Howard pioneered spaceframe chassis construction in National Hot Rods. Phil White took SHP-built cars to the first of more than a dozen world titles, scooping Super Rod and National Hot Rod crowns on consecutive weekends in 1988.
"They were all off-the-shelf parts. It just was a massive stepping stone for all of those that ended up having the opportunity to do it"
Sonny Howard
SHP’s maiden foray into circuit racing came the following year via the short-lived Intersaloons category at Lydden Hill. “They were a National Hot Rod where they put the front windows in,” Howard explains.
The series offered a first taste of circuits to drivers including future aces Neil Facey (Thundersaloons) and Steve Dance (Eurocar and Pickups), and more followed into Thundersaloons, where SHP became a leading constructor. Following BDG/BDX-engined Ford Fiestas for White and Tony Paxman, fellow ex-hot rodder Paul McMillan’s Cosworth turbo-powered Peugeot 309 was SHP’s ultimate weapon for the steel-shelled category.
But Howard remained frustrated by the ‘them-and-us’ separation between the (as then) Motor Sports Association-controlled circuits and his short-oval roots, regularly hearing the refrain: “‘That’s banger racing’. It isn’t banger racing – a National Hot Rod now, it’s £55k plus VAT,” he reveals.
Undeterred, he teamed up with oval promoter Philip Bond to launch a category that bridged the divide like no other: Eurocar. From 1994, Ford Cologne V6-powered rear-wheel-drive spaceframe chassis, clothed in GRP Mondeo-lookalike bodywork, raced on quarter-mile short ovals and at traditional circuit racing venues in a single championship. Alongside Birmingham, Hednesford and Ipswich, the cars took to half-mile ‘oval’ configurations of Donington Park, Silverstone and Pembrey, ran anti-clockwise around the Mallory Park mile, and made trips to Ireland and the Netherlands.
“We used Cosworth front brakes; the front uprights were off a Sierra but we made them into double wishbones,” says Howard. “So they were all off-the-shelf parts. It just was a massive stepping stone for all of those that ended up having the opportunity to do it.”
Dagenham Motors-backed duo Lee and midget racing champion Alf Boarer set the early pace among a field packed with short-circuit talent. Led by the flamboyance of ‘Leapy’ Lee, they brought American-style razzmatazz, earning a legion of new fans with an end-of-year contest at Brands Hatch over the Formula Ford Festival weekend.
Drawn grids, big-name guest drivers – including Paul Radisich, Win Percy, Roger Clark and Tiff Needell – and the lightweight cars’ spectacular style all contributed to a buzz that had been lacking from the national racing scene. Adding a Roush V8-powered sister series, with future British GT champion and touring car ace Mike Jordan twice claiming the crown, was another step towards emulating NASCAR.
But, amid politics for which Howard had no time, Eurocar’s star waned. In some respects, it was a victim of its own success. Once they’d experienced the circuits, short-oval graduates wanted more, and the quarter-mile tracks were dropped. “They did put on a show, without a doubt,” reflects Howard. “The crowd absolutely loved them to death. But the drivers just wanted to go that next step further.”
SHP’s Pickups category launched in 1997, initially as a Eurocar support series. But Howard was determined to retain control and keep it grounded. He’d been building cars for Mark Gent, father of reigning Pickups champion Dale, to contest a largely unrestricted series on Dutch ovals. Inspiration struck while watching with his wife.
“Somebody turned up with a [NASCAR-style] pickup truck,” Howard recalls. “It was big, chunky, and I said to Barbara, ‘That is it. We’ll do a European one, and we’ll see how many people that have got a National Hot Rod make the transition.’
“We got hold of an old [Ford] P100 from the breakers, and ended up cutting and hacking it about. We created a chassis, and the idea was, initially, that all the bits from a National Hot Rod would have gone into it.”
Ultimately, NHR axles and suspension required beefing up, but the concept was so well received Howard that immediately secured 10 sales from which he could fund the builds.
“The drivers already wanted something else,” he reckons. “They were getting frustrated, and it was aimed at trying to keep them. It ended up happening through frustration, because of [the politics] and what happened with Eurocar.”
As Eurocar faded, Pickups gathered momentum. Rockingham Motor Speedway’s 2001 opening provided a natural home. The trucks were swiftly adapted to be left-hand drive and run a fixed spoiler, allowing them to race anti-clockwise on the 1.5-mile oval. SHP also provided engineering and operational support to Rockingham’s own ASCAR series after it had endured a difficult birth.
But, as with Eurocar, the Pickups outlasted the headline act. When ASCAR folded, Pickups offered the only competitive action on the oval for its last decade.
Intended as a more relevant and cost-effective alternative to karting, T Cars ran from 1999-2007 and provided a springboard for future Formula 1 drivers Jolyon Palmer and Max Chilton
“It was too big really – they got it wrong because they built it for Indycars, didn’t they?” rues Howard, who reckons a half-mile oval would have fared better. With his input, such facilities were planned on numerous occasions. A 2006 proposal for Silverstone, on the site of its rallysprint circuit where a Porsche Experience Centre now stands, came closest to fruition. “So much work had been done,” says Howard. “We’ve still got the drawings.”
But it wasn’t just established oval racers he nurtured. SHP also designed and built the cars for Britain’s first racing series for under 16s. Intended as a more relevant and cost-effective alternative to karting, T Cars ran from 1999-2007 and provided a springboard for future Formula 1 drivers Jolyon Palmer and Max Chilton.
Howard, alongside the British Racing & Sports Car Club’s Bob Armstrong, convinced the MSA to endorse the spaceframe route. “I got so much grief,” he remembers, “but I justified it. We made them rear-wheel drive, so that they ended up having to drive them by their backside.” The same chassis would be used in the Irish RT2000 (later Supercars) and Dutch VEGE series too, with nearly 70 built in total.
Fast approaching that count is the car that SHP is perhaps best known for currently: its outlandish RSR, a Mk1 Escort clone of which nearly 50 examples have been built to date. The extended build-run was key to the gestation of a project that helped Howard’s firm through the pandemic without furloughing staff.
He explains: “Everything we’ve done, you’d get past, like, 10, then somebody wants something different, or ‘have you got another idea?’ So, it got ‘evolutioned’. It keeps costing more and more money before you’ve got a chance to amortise the first lot back. So I said, ‘The next thing we do, I’ll make sure that it’ll never get evolutioned.’”
Adopting the familiar blueprint of a lightweight spaceframe chassis draped in GRP bodywork from BOSS Mouldings – Mark Skitmore’s concern founded by his late father Steve of National Hot Rod fame – SHP describes the result as the Escort’s “classic style with a modern engineering performance”. Basing the car around a model that ceased production in the 1970s was poo-pooed by some.
“Everybody thought I was mad,” laughs Howard. “‘You’ve lost it this time. This is going to be the one thing on your CV that you’ve failed at.’ But they [Ford] didn’t really develop one as a race car.”
With the Blue Oval’s blessing, Howard pressed on. Offering bespoke engine choice – “That’s why there’s never been a championship for them” – from humble Duratec to Millington Diamond and beyond, the result is a car that can get within a couple of seconds of British Touring Car lap record pace in amateur racers’ hands. In Modified Fords alone, four different examples took race wins last year.
More importantly to Howard, they are spectacular to watch. “People in the crowd haven’t got a stopwatch. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re putting on a show.” So says the quietly spoken master showman.
