1979 March Super Vee – Vee for Victory

If I asked you to pick a brand associated with high performance and motorsport, chances are good the name Volkswagen would not be one of the first names to pop into your head. Known as the “People’s car”—and forever linked to the bulbous but iconic “Bug” nee Beetle—by the 1960s, Volkswagen had built a worldwide reputation for affordable cars, but not necessarily performance.

This lack of breadth was not lost on U.S. Volkswagen dealers, including Jacksonville, Florida-based Hubert Brundage of Brumos fame, who had been experimenting with various Volkswagen-based racing specials. Fortuitously, Brundage made a trip to Italy in 1959 and while there toured the workshops of Enrico Nardi. Impressed with Nardi’s ability to build small, nimble racecars around Fiat’s more pedestrian components, Brundage commissioned Nardi to build him two Volkswagen-powered, open-wheeled prototypes.

Once back in the United States, Brundage’s new little racecars garnered interest everywhere they went. Soon others began building similar machines and the vestiges of a new class of racing was born. By 1963, the SCCA sanctioned its first race for what became known as Formula Vee, and by 1965 SCCA made Formula Vee a fully fledged class. Constrained to using the stock VW 1200-cc, air-cooled engine and gearbox, as well as the suspension, steering, brakes, wheels and tires from the Beetle, Formula Vee became the most inexpensive entry into the formula racing ladder. By 1963, Porsche AG and its racing boss, Huschke von Hanstein, saw the merit of this new class of racing, and soon Formula Vees and racing series began sprouting up all over Europe.

Super-Sized

Like all forms of racing, Formula Vee was not impervious to the constant quest for more power. By 1970, Volkswagen was equipping Beetles with a larger 1600-cc, air-cooled engine and, in keeping with the search for more speed, a new category, Formula Super Vee, was created. In this new category, constructors were allowed more free rein in the design and sourcing of the suspension and steering, thus making Super Vees much more like other formula cars of the period.

Capable of 140 mph, with nimble handing, Formula Super Vee caught on and soon became a key rung on the formula car ladder between Formula Ford and FVee at the bottom and Formula Atlantic and F2 higher up.

Cooling Waters

In 1967, Volkswagen hired Jo Hoppen to oversee the racing and high-performance side of Porsche, Audi and Volkswagen in the U.S. As such, Hoppen was the driving force behind the creation and growth of Super Vee. With Super Vee fields becoming ever more competitive throughout the ’70s, in 1977 Hoppen elected to step it up even further.

First Hoppen met with USAC, with the idea of creating a Super Vee oval series that could serve as both the undercard for Indycar events and a development series for drivers wanting to make it into Indycars. The result was the USAC “Mini-Indy” series, which launched with five races in 1977 and quickly stepped up to a full slate of 10 races in 1978.

Hoppen’s other move was more radical. Despite being founded on Volkswagen’s ubiquitous air-cooled, flat-4 Beetle engine, Hoppen declared that starting with the 1978 season, Formula Super Vee would now be powered by the water-cooled, 1.6-liter, inline-4, powering Volkswagen’s latest generation of cars, including the Golf/Rabbit and Scirroco. This switch served several purposes in that, from a marketing standpoint, it gave a high performance/racing connection to Volkswagen’s latest generation of road cars, as well as improving the credibility of the Super Vee series as the cars would now be much more akin to what was being raced in Formula Atlantic and F2.

Relentless March

Prior to 1978, if you raced in Super Vee you essentially only had a few chassis options, but the bulk of the available chassis were from either Zink or Lola. Part of this lack of choice stemmed from the fact that the air-cooled, flat-4, was such a different engine to package in a racecar that it really required a chassis expressly built for Super Vee and Super Vee alone. And with Super Vee being such a relatively small market, few manufacturers were willing to take on the tooling and commitment, to only sell one or two dozen cars. However, when Hoppen announced the new rules for 1978—which in addition to the water-cooled, inline-4, also included the removal of the requirement that VW spindles and bolt patterns be used in the suspension—now manufacturers of F3, F2 and Atlantic cars could easily create a Super Vee variant, with a minimum of investment. Now Super Vee made financial sense because it essentially enabled manufacturers to sell existing designs to a broader market.

The 1978 season saw the introduction of two new, major manufacturers to the series—Ralt and March. Due to the close similarities between F3 and Super Vee’s new specifications, many chassis that raced that first year were, in fact, converted F3 cars. For Ralt, the Ron Tauranac-designed RT1 F3 car was converted to accommodate the new VW mill, while Southern California-based Wilbur Bunce Engineering obtained several March 783 F3 chassis to convert to Super Vee specification.

Bunce built two of these cars for local team owner Dave Rogers a waterbed manufacturer in Laguna Beach, California, who was putting together a program for up-and-coming driver Dennis Firestone, who had just wrapped up two dominating national Formula Ford championships in 1976 and 1977. For 1978, Firestone would get to step up to the Mini-Indy series, with the hope of using it as a springboard to the Indianapolis 500. While Firestone and the converted March F3 car showed great speed—winning races at Milwaukee and Ontario Motor Speedway and claiming Rookie of the Year honors—a frustrating string of mechanical problems led team owner Rogers to look a different direction for the 1979 season.

Rogers elected to bring back together what had worked so well in Firestone’s back-to-back Formula Ford championships, i.e. Firestone and crew chief Bob Morris and his RPM Racing outfit. As for the chassis, by this time March had come around to the idea of creating a factory Super Vee version of its new F3 car the 793, so Rogers decided to go with what the team already had experience with and ordered a new 79V for the start of the 1979 season.

New Version, of an Old Car

March’s new 793 F3 car and 79V Super Vee were more or less a development of the 783 car. While the 783 was a solid racecar, it lacked the dominating performance associated with earlier March F3 machines. Part of the 783’s lackluster performance was attributed to the fact the March engineer Mike Foxon had a debilitating road accident in 1977, which may have adversely inhibited the 783’s testing and development.

For 1979, March used the basic 783 monocoque as a starting point, but then narrowed the track and elongated the wheelbase. Despite outboard suspension, a full-width nose and front-mounted radiator, the 79V strangely featured fixed “ground-effect” skirts on its sidepods, as was the growing rage in motorsport at the time. According to crew chief Morris: “Due to the cost, to rent an oval track to develop the chassis, the team chose to put all their effort and time into the development of the engine.”

Morris notes that the water-cooled engine was in its infancy at that time and no one had yet gotten a good handle on making it fast or reliable. “It was kind of a level playing field,” says Morris, “you had lots of engine developers working on that engine, companies like Drake, Schrick, Brabham and Bertils were all developing their own parts and systems to make the water-cooled work.”

Starting in December of 1978, the RPM team devoted the next four months to testing and building six race engines for the season. “At that point in time,” Morris remembers, “we couldn’t make one lap at Willow Springs without a component failure. But over those four months we logged over a season and half’s worth of dyno time at Shankle Automotive Engineering in Van Nuys.” Early in 1979, RPM took delivery of March 79V, chassis 01, officially the very first purpose-built Super Vee to leave the March factory. With new-found sponsorship from electric fuel pump manufacturer Facet, Morris and his crew set about prepping the car for the season, including the adaptation of swirl pots and return lines for the use of Facet’s electric pumps (according to Morris, this was one of the first uses of Facet’s now ubiquitous racing product in a racecar.)

By March the team was ready for a shakedown race. Rogers entered Firestone and the new March in the Formula Continental class at an SCCA regional race at Willow Springs Raceway. Firestone and the March performed flawlessly, easily taking the win. The question then became: how would they do on an oval?

Turn Left

The 1979 USAC Mini Indy season started on April 8, at Texas World Speedway, in conjunction with the Champ car event. Having not driven the new car on an oval yet, Firestone and team had precious little time to try and set the March up. Morris remembers, “Dennis was phenomenal at getting the car set up. I mean, we’d pull the car off the trailer and within three laps he would be explaining what it was doing and we’d start moving stuff around.”

One of the first things Firestone noticed at Texas World was that he was going flat out, the whole way around the circuit. So Morris and the crew dialed the wing back. Firestone then reported he was still flat. So they removed one of the rear wing elements. Still flat, according to Firestone. So next they moved the wing lower on its mounts to get it out of the airflow. If nothing else, the March was proving to be stable and slippery on the oval.

Firestone qualified 3rd, but right from the start he and a pack of cars that included the Ralt RT1 of Michael Chandler (son of L.A. Times publisher Otis Chandler) and the Lola of Rich Vogler began swapping the lead, lap after lap. With the same power plant in each racecar, the top ten cars could easily run together in a pack, drafting and sling-shooting each other, several times a lap. Firestone, running in his super low-drag configuration was able to capitalize on his car’s slipperiness and ultimately claimed the season’s inaugural win. However, after the race, USAC officials decreed that for all subsequent races, teams were not allowed to change the location of the wing from its factory specifications!

The next round of Mini-Indy moved to Indianapolis Raceway Park, May 27th, the night before the Indianapolis 500. Despite their previous win, the team was worried. IRP was a 5/8-mile oval and with over 20 cars running the night before the 500, the team was concerned that there would be a lot of carnage that might jeopardize their one and only new car. As a result, the team decided to dust off the previous year’s 78 (which they brought to races as a spare), to paint it in Facet colors and put their race motor into it for the race. At least then, if it was written off, it wouldn’t destroy their entire season.

As luck would have it, the race was relatively crash-free, and despite running the older, Bunce-built F3 car with their hot race motor, Firestone was able to finish 2nd to Ken Nichols in an Autoresearch, with the Ralt RT1s of Geoff Brabham and Michael Chandler close behind.

From Indianapolis, the Mini Indy circus packed up its motor homes and moved on to Milwaukee. Morris recalls that, by and large, many of the front-running teams spent the entire season on the road, living in motor homes, and migrating from track to track, with eight races in the Mini-Indy championship and another eight races in the SCCA’s Gold Cup championship, it really wasn’t practical for teams to go back to home base, so cars were rebuilt and maintained on the road, throughout the summer.

At the Milwaukee Mile, on June 10, Firestone gave the Mini- Indy field a glimpse of what the rest of the season would look like when he easily claimed the pole and went on to dominate the race posting a convincing win, beating Gary Bettenhausen and Geoff Brabham to the checkered flag with a 100.581 mph average. Had he been in the Indycar race that weekend, Firestone and his little March would have run solidly mid-field!

From Milwaukee the series moved to Pocono, where Firestone put the March on the outside of the front row in qualifying. The race itself proved a slipstreaming Battle Royale, with the lead changing every single lap. Firestone led on the next to last lap—but as veteran Indycar drivers will tell you—on a big speedway that is the one lap you don’t want to lead! Sure enough, coming off the last turn Ronn Gregg, in a Ralt, got a run on Firestone and just pipped him at the finish line, with Bettenhausen coming in a close 3rd.

On July 29, back at Texas World Speedway, Firestone qualified the March fourth fastest, but fell victim to another slipstreaming battle that saw the Ralt of Michael Chandler shoot across the line first, with Firestone 2nd and Dave McMillan 3rd. However, several weeks later, at Milwaukee on August 12, Firestone again dominated with both the pole position and victory over the Ralts of Brabham (2nd) and Chandler (3rd).

The final race of the Mini-Indy season was in fact a pair of 100-km races held on August 25 and 27 at the St. Paul, Minnesota Fairgrounds. In the first race, Firestone qualified 5th on the short oval, but shot into the lead on the opening lap and never gave it up, claiming victory over 2nd place Michael Chandler and Dale Whittington. Two days later, Firestone lined up 6th on the grid, yet again he led the opening lap and every lap thereafter to take an uncontested win over the Bertils-run March 79V of Pete Halsmer and the Ralt of Ken Nichols. With the pair of victories, Firestone easily wrapped up the USAC Mini-Indy championship with a whopping 1,480 points to 2nd place Chandler’s 903 points. In the final analysis, Firestone was the only driver to complete all 564 race laps in the season, of which he led 379, and through it all, never once spun or damaged the car! In fact, according to Morris, the team never even had to repaint the nose of the car, all year!

A Long Sleep

After such a successful season in 1979, the plan was for Firestone to move up to an Indycar drive. While the team was given a chance to run a Roger Penske-owned car at the end of the 1979 season at Ontario, a downturn in team owner Dave Roger’s waterbed business meant that the funds were not available to put together an Indycar effort for 1980. As a result, Firestone went one direction (eventually landing a full-time Indycar ride), while Morris and Rogers went their separate ways. Sadly, the end of the 1979 season would also mark the end of the USAC Mini-Indy championship, as the renegade CART organization was formed to break away from USAC, leaving the Mini-Indy as essentially a series with nowhere to run. As a byproduct of both the ending of the season and Rogers’ financial troubles, March 79V-1 was sold and quickly disappeared off the landscape.

Flash forward some 30 years and Bob Morris takes a position with Vince Tjelmeland’s Sabina Precision Preparation shop in Anaheim, California. With literally no cars to work on his first day, Morris idly typed the words “Firestone” and “March” into Google at his desktop computer, only to discover an ad on racecars.com for Chassis #1, now living in Quebec, Canada! The car was promptly purchased and shipped to California, where it sat for nearly eight years while Morris painstakingly restored it, in between other work. Soon Morris and Firestone were reunited with Firestone returning to the track, in both the March and a Sabina-prepared Formula Ford similar to the one he notched back-to-back championships with.

One Hot Day

My opportunity to test drive Firestone’s championship-winning car came this past August—right in the middle of a scorching California heat wave. The Sabina team had brought the March out to Central California’s Buttonwillow Raceway for an open test day. Pulling into the paddock in the late morning, heat waves were already starting to emanate from the pavement, as I spied the Facet-livered open-wheeler sitting in front of its trailer.

Stationary in the paddock, the first things that catch my attention are the wide nose and the relatively skinny tires. Super Vees always look a little funny to me because in every other respect they look identical to their F2 and Atlantic brethren, except for the use of significantly narrower wheels and tires. This disconnect is not unlike, say seeing Jimmy Durante, after he has had a nose job. Something looks a little out of proportion!

Our day starts off with Firestone taking the car out first to give it an initial shakedown. After a dozen or so laps, he comes in and tells the crew that the water temperature gauge is erratically jumping around, occasionally reading as much as 210-degrees, but then just as quickly dropping back down to normal. After conferring with Morris, the decision is made that it is most likely an air pocket in the system and that after topping off the header tank, I’ll take my first session in the car.

Sliding down into the cockpit, the March is a snug but comfortable fit. The fiberglass cockpit surround is relatively low compared to many contemporary cars—like the Ralt RT1, which I have raced in the past—and so provides very good visibility. While cinching up the belts, Morris pokes his head into the cockpit to give me some last minute instructions, “Keep your eye on the temperature gauge. We don’t want the engine to run for any period of time over 210-220-degrees. The clutch is really, really stiff, so you’ll have to slip it to get away. Also, the car won’t start without a battery booster, so if it dies out there, don’t even bother trying to re-start it, we’ll have to come get you.”

With the battery plugged in, I’m given the thumbs-up to flick on the ignition, turn on the Facet fuel pumps and give the starter button a shove. With a “grrr” the starter motor whirls around and the engine fires to life with a throaty drone, not dissimilar to that of a Cosworth BDA or a hot Lotus Twin-Cam. Dipping the heavy clutch, I push the stubby gear lever forward and to the left to select first gear in the 4-speed Hewland gearbox, give it a little squeeze of gas and gently let the clutch out…clunk. Then silence. Crap!  I stalled it. Morris plugs the battery back in and we repeat the procedure, this time with more accelerator added… clunk…silence. Crap!! This is a tight clutch. We repeat the dance again…clunk…silence. @%#$$^!!! On the fourth try, I wind the VW mill up to about 2700 rpm and squeeze the accelerator up from there as I let the clutch out…finally the March pulls away smoothly and toddles down the paddock. Whew, that’s a lot of clutch for a 175-hp engine!!

Out on course the March feels really lively and nimble as I use the first lap to warm up the tires and get a feel for the brakes and handling. Once back on to the front straight I give my right calf some exercise as I accelerate the March hard up through third and into fourth gear. Response from the mechanically fuel-injected VW 4-banger is great as the engine howls its way up through the gears. Approaching Buttonwillow’s Turn 1 “Sunrise” it’s hard on the brakes and down two gears to second for the 90-degree left-hander, before back on the gas for a brief squirt into the quick left-right approach to the uphill, increasing radius “Off-ramp.” The March has good rotation as it powers out of the turn and sets up for the short straight before the right-left chicane known as “Cotton Corners.” After snatching third gear and getting back on the gas, I have a moment to scan the gauges before I have to brake. Looking at the 2-in-1 gauge that shows both fuel pressure and water temperature I see I’ve got plenty of fuel pressure and also see the temperature gauge briefly flick up to 200 degrees and then just as quickly flick back down to 190. I also notice, since I’m driving into the morning sun, little pieces of something occasionally flying out from behind the dash. My snap judgment is that it is probably some dried grass from when Firestone drove the car earlier.

After powering through “Cottons” and going up and down the little manmade hill after it, I get a fun little run through the right dogleg called “Grapevine” and then down the long back straight. Flying down the straight in fourth gear the March is exceedingly quick, and I notice, the faster it goes the more lively it gets. In fact, so much so that by the end of the straight, just before I need to let off for the long right-hand “Riverside” sweeper, I get a little nervous as the car feels very nervous and flighty at high-speed. Any subtle change in either surface contour or steering input, seems to incite the car to want to dart around just enough to give me the willies.

Despite the straight-line flightiness at high speed, the March is surprisingly stable once I commit to turn into “Riverside” and then power up and over “Phil Hill” and back down Buttonwillow’s drag strip to the right-hand “Sweeper.” Here it’s hard on the brakes, blip the throttle and down to third, blip the throttle and down to second, before squeezing the gas back on to start an acceleration run into the esses. Not unlike the esses at Infineon (where last year I got to sample one of the forefathers of this car, Villeneuve’s March 76B Atlantic car), Buttonwillow’s esses require a good sense of rhythm and timing to build the acceleration all the way through without falling off the track at the far side! The Super Vee, like its Atlantic brethren, performed beautifully as it powered from apex to apex to apex. Throughout the complex, the handling felt neutral and predictable, without any sense of being tailhappy, which quite frankly surprised me considering how reactive it was on the straights at high-speed!

With the following laps, I was able to settle into more of a rhythm where I was soon able to take certain turns in third rather than second gear and resultantly wring more speed out the other side. However, with the following laps I also noticed that in a number of places the water temperature gauge was starting to work like a tachometer, running up to 210-degree under hard acceleration, while backing down under partial throttle. Additionally, I was still seeing bits of something flying up in the air, when I was driving into the sun and a faint smell of fuel that I had detected in the opening lap and chocked up to the tank being topped off, but now wasn’t going away.

Finally, as I ran down the back straight all the disparate pieces of information coalesced. I snatched a look at the gauge and saw that there was fluid rolling around in the bottom of the water temperature/fuel pressure gauge. Just as I noticed that, I also saw even more bits of fluff flying over my head and got a much stronger whiff of gas…Oh, Shit! That’s not water sloshing around in the bottom of the gauge, that’s fuel! The gauge is leaking fuel into the cockpit! I’ve never been in a racecar that caught on fire and today’s test drive in 100-plus degree heat did not seem like a good time to start. I immediately backed out of the gas and fortunately was right at the pit entrance, so quickly dove in and shut it off.

Stepping out of the cockpit in the paddock, the legs of my suit were soaked with fuel, but otherwise the car and I were completely fine. Crew Chief Morris looked at the gauge in disgust and commented that he had just had it rebuilt and that it looked like the internal diaphragm must have popped. Fortunately, Morris was able to block off the fuel line, which enabled both Firestone and I to get another session in the car. However, the water temperature issue did not improve, so by the early afternoon we all agreed it was too hot and that we should call it a day.

Due to its long wheelbase and narrow track, the March 79V was ideally suited for oval track racing where a premium was paid to cars that were aerodynamically slippery and could run and evade the draft. While the team ran a handful of road course events that year, Morris says they were never able to get the March to put the power down in the corners like the Ralts. Despite this, in the hands of Dennis Firestone, the March 79V was the weapon to have in Super Vee’s second and sadly final season of oval-only competition.

SPECIFICATIONS

Chassis: Aluminum monocoque with cast magnesium (middle) and pressed TI Superform (front) bulkheads.

Wheelbase: 94 inches

Track: Front: 51 inches; Rear: 47 inches

Suspension: Front: Independent by unequal length wishbones with coil-over shocks. Rear: Independent by top links, lower wishbone and radius arms with coil-over shocks.

Weight: 1200 pounds

Engine: Volkswagen inline-4, watercooled, overhead cam.

Displacement: 1588-cc

Bore/stroke: 79.5-mm / 80.0-mm

Compression: 12.6:1

Induction: Bosch or Lucas mechanical fuel injection, with 30-mm restrictors.

Horsepower: 176-hp @ 7500-8000 rpm

Transmission: Hewland Mk9 4-speed

Brakes: VW twin-pot disc brakes with VW iron discs

Wheels: Front: 6×13 Rear: 8×13

Tires: Front: 20.5/6/13 Rear: 22/8/13

Acknowledgements/Resources

The author is indebted to Bob Morris and Vince Tjelmeland of Sabina Precision Preparation for their help and support, as well as Buttonwillow Raceway (www.buttonwillowraceway.com) for their hospitality and support of this test drive. Finally, many thanks go to Dennis Firestone for allowing us such generous access to his significant racecar.

1979 Season Yearbook

United States Auto Club (USAC)

Speedway, IN

Lawrence, Mike

March: The rise and fall of a motor racing legend.

MRP, Ltd., 1989

ISBN: 1899870547

Hodges, David

A-Z of Formula Racing Cars

Bay View Books, Ltd., 1990

ISBN: 1 870979 16 8