The U.K.’s Alan Mann Racing today specializes in maintaining classic cars and developing restomods, but it was once a mainstay of the racing scene, as this video explains.
Alan Mann Racing, or AMR for short, was founded in 1964 by racing enthusiast Alan Mann, who’d gotten his start running a garage that prepared race cars for competition. Mann soon negotiated a deal with Ford to run Lotus Cortinas. It was the start of a close partnership between AMR and the Blue Oval that would define the team.
This was the era of Ford’s Total Performance push, when the automaker sought to win in as many categories of racing as possible in order to market its road cars. AMR took full advantage of Ford’s largesse, racing not only Lotus Cortinas, but also Mustangs, Falcons, and, perhaps most famously, the Mk1 Escort with which AMR won the 1968 British Saloon Car Championship. All were decked out in the team’s signature red and gold livery.
2022 Ford GT Alan Mann Heritage Edition
The livery wasn’t the only thing that set AMR apart. Drivers and mechanics from the era still recall Alan Mann’s gentlemanly persona and the impeccable preparation of the car. While not exactly a fan of the Lotus Cortina, which he considered difficult to drive, racing legend Jackie Stewart acknowledged that the AMR cars were the “crème de la crème” compared to other teams’ Cortinas.
Stewart—who went on to become a three-time F1 champion—was just one of many famous names to race for AMR. Others included Graham Hill, Jacky Ickx, Jack Brabham, Bruce McLaren, and Mario Andretti. During that same period, AMR also did some movie work, including helping with car-chase scenes in “Goldfinger” and building cars for “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
AMR also ran the Cobra Daytona coupe which, like the standard Cobra roadster, was developed in the U.S. by Shelby American, before leveling up to the GT40. It even helped develop a lightweight body for the Ferrari-fighting GT40, with two examples built and raced in the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. Both ended up retiring, but Ford celebrated the partnership in 2022 with a special version of its modern GT supercar.
Apparently not discouraged, AMR began work on a clean-sheet sports-racing prototype for Ford called the F3L, powered by the Cosworth DFV V-8 from F1. The goal was to achieve 200 mph with 400 hp, which the car did, but it was tricky to drive and never finished a race. By that time Ford was also curtailing its racing efforts, effectively ending AMR’s time as a front-line race team. Alan Mann shifted focus to the aviation industry.
The company would then return to racing in 2004 by preparing historic race cars, gradually expanding into other projects, including an electric conversion of a 1960s Mustang. More recently, AMR signed on to become the high-performance division of Boreham Motorworks, a fellow U.K. company working on a modern iteration of the Ford Escort Mk1 that AMR famously raced in its heyday.