CANON BLAST

It started in the pub with Richard Lloyd stating an interest in racing a customer Porsche 956. With the assistance of the original RLR team, Adam Towler tells the giant-killing tale of the modified '106B2'

- Adam Towler

There’s a cheery “Good morning” from over our shoulders and Ian Sanders, the original chief mechanic of the Richard Lloyd Racing Group C team – or GTi Engineering as it was known in 1983 – walks into the Dawn Treader workshop. A smile breaks out across his face as he paces slowly around Porsche 956 chassis number 106B2, his inquisitive eyes flicking from one detail to the next, mechanic’s fingers caressing the instantly recognisable contours of arguably the greatest sports racing car ever built. It’s been more than 35 years since Ian last saw this car in the Silverstone workshops of Richard Lloyd Racing.

The emotive scene is broken by a dose of reality from another former mechanic that’s just wandered in. Wayne Greedy joined Ian at RLR for 1986: “There’s no orange peel, no [paint] flaking off, the white is white,” he shouts. “I remember scraping 14 layers of paint off the engine cover when we used it as a mould [for the 962 engine cover in 1987] – that’s how many times it had been repaired and painted…” Nothing could say more about the reality of a little team battling the factory squads in the world championship, and if there’s one thing you can say about Lloyd’s Group C exploits, it’s that they did exactly that.

Soon, the rest of our ensemble arrive: renowned designers Peter Stevens and Nigel Stroud, the former a long-standing collaborator of Richard Lloyd and the team’s aerodynamicist in the ’80s, the latter the man behind the unique tub and suspension of the Lloyd Porsches. And Grahame White, Richard’s friend and de facto team principal, in later years CEO of the Historic Sports Car Club. There could have been even more famous names with illustrious CVs, of course, and some who are no longer with us. So just what was it about Richard Lloyd that brought so many extraordinary people together?

Group C racing was quite a step for Richard Lloyd’s GTi Engineering team in 1983.