The Dorset Horn - Still sharp after four decades
Racers often form a genuine affinity for a car that they’ve built themselves, but in the case of Dick Sharp, who has been campaigning his Austin A35 ‘Dorset Horn’ in wildly varying formats on the UK’s drag strips, it has been a love affair that has lasted for some 40 years.
Sharp entered his first race at Santa Pod in 1973, and since then, he has developed the once diminutive Austin into a glass-fibre bodied powerhouse that can cover the quarter mile in a shade over 9 seconds. The car has enjoyed many incarnations over the years, but the story started in the late ‘60s with Sharp and his brother creating one of the first fibreglass-bodied, tube-framed saloons that the UK had ever seen – if not the first. The lightweight set-up was suitably augmented with a 421 Pontiac engine and Turbo-Hydro 400 gearbox, which was also considered to be pretty radical at the time, bucking the trend for manual transmissions on the quarter mile.
Three years of hard graft later, and Dorset Horn broke cover at Santa Pod Raceway in Bedfordshire, where a tentative first run netted a wholly respectable mid-14 second timing slip, and the second dipping well into the 12s. By the end of the first season, Sharp and his team had managed to bring the rapidly improving Austin down to an 11.08 second pass at some 120mph! As the man himself puts it, ‘Not bad for a bunch of amateurs with no real guidance!’
Suitably hooked, the car evolved each season, getting faster and more sophisticated as the team’s knowledge and confidence grew. The body sprouted air dams, lost its doors and gained a roof chop, morphing through a series of differing liveries, but always with the same name. Under the constantly changing bodyshell, engines were tweaked, and chassis’ were re-designed, ending in a ‘Trigger’s Broom’ evolution of the original, that was true to the ethos and spirit of the original car, but that had few of its parts.
Over the next few decades, successes ebbed and flowed, with Dick and his team admirably as focussed on pitlane camaraderie and partying as they were on outright results. Crashes and repairs came and went, ultimately leaving Dick on a sabbatical, out of the sport and left with just a rolling chassis and engine. The rediscovery of the old body mould soon reinvigorated yet another build and the car was back in business, with a longer wheelbase, tricker suspension and consistent 9 second passes. Subsequent crashes and mishaps tested Dick’s enthusiasm – and bank balance – to the limit, but each time, he always came back to the same conclusion.. Dick and Dorset Horn were two inseparable halves of a seemingly endless nitro-fuelled partnership.
Fast forward to the present day, and Dorset Horn is enjoying its SEVENTH incarnation, and Dick will by plying his trade – and trading his plies – at the Dragstalgia event at Santa Pod on the 13th and 14th July. As an unashamed celebration of drag machinery from a bygone era, Dorset Horn fits in beautifully, although few other protagonists can match its amazing history and provenance. One thing’s for sure, with 40 years of Austin-hustling experience in the driver’s seat, you can expect Dick to be on his usual crowd-pleasing form. Here’s to the next 40 years of this amazingly tenacious little car!
For more information on the Dragstalgia event, visit santapod.com.
