Built to perform rather than look good, this rough and ready, Mitsubishi Evo-powered BMW E30 rally car is the real deal.

Feature taken from Performance BMW. Words & Photos: Robb Pritchard

It’s not the prettiest-looking BMW as not many of its body panels haven’t been attended to with a panel beater’s hammer or been subjected to the attentions of an angle grinder. It started out life as a 325i but is currently powered by a Mitsubishi Evo engine so it packs a bit of a punch. This battered little Beemer is worth a lot more than its rather second-hand parts though. Not only has it managed to survive 30 years in Tanzania which, with its bad roads, even worse drivers and poor quality fuel, is a pretty notable achievement in itself, it’s a rally car… And not just any rally car either. This is the 2016 national Tanzanian two-wheel-drive rally championship winning car and is well worth the trip up from Zanzibar to the foothills of Kilimanjaro to check out.

The dirt road got rougher so the taxi driver had to be careful to straddle the ruts so that the car’s bumper didn’t crunch on the central ridge. Over some bridges that were just half sunk concrete pipes laid across the road and then we turned off onto an even smaller track. We pulled up at an enclosure with a huge metal gate and the sounds of baying dogs coming from the other side… But fortunately the Alsatian pups were all soppy and Monica Lyimo’s wide smile was most welcoming.

My arrival was what prompted Monica to tell the mechanic to stop fiddling with the tractor and go and get the BMW started. The first couple of batteries were dead but with the third one it fired and, with the Evo engine, sounded unlike any BMW I’d ever experienced. The Tanzanian rally championship doesn’t have a big enough pool of entrants to have a class system so there is no real distinction made between homologated cars and classics, or even hybrids. Basically, if you can cobble it together and it passes a rudimentary safety check then you can compete with it.

The E30 wasn’t Monica’s and driver Issack Taylor’s first choice of car, but a terrifying accident at 110mph when a sheared ball joint pitched their Evo IV off the road into a barrel roll that ended the other side of some spectators’ cars left them without a functioning rally car. Luckily they weren’t seriously hurt and, despite it being only being Monica’s third rally and her first major crash, it didn’t dim her desire to pound cars at speed through the African countryside.

Ready-to-race rally cars are rather hard to come across in Tanzania but they did find the shell of a 325i that was going to be a drift car before being abandoned after being stripped and having a sturdy cage fitted. It wasn’t quite what they had in mind but, with their options limited, bought it and went around a few workshops finding all the parts that had been stripped off and stored in different places and spent the next few weeks rebuilding it. The first test drive revealed that everything worked as it should, so they began to get the car ready for their first event.

If the Tanzania rally championship might not be too well-known on the international scene the tracks it uses certainly are. For many years the area around the Serengeti and the Kilimanjaro basin was used as part of the legendary Safari Rally, an event famed from its earliest days to its last for its car-destroying brutality. No sliding around on graded gravel roads for this BMW, it was about to have a very hard life indeed. Obviously standard road car suspension couldn’t hope to cope with the rough stages so a set of Prolinx coilovers were fitted, two surviving ones from the Evo and for the front a pair of second-hand ones that hadn’t been through a barrel roll. Extra bracketing was added to the turrets, although it is not quite precision engineering. A rough shape was cut out of 3mm plate which was then tack-welded on, hammered into shape and welded in.

The chassis was seam welded and extra engine cooling added, with an additional pipe leading straight to the intake of the straight-six engine, as for the first few rallies they ran with the original M20B25. With the car standing 5” higher than normal, a set of 205/65 Dunlop Motorsport Direzza 87R tyres mounted on steelies could be fitted but the rears stuck out past the bodywork, so the arches had to be extended to accommodate them. Cue tin snips, a big hammer and lots of body filler. To funnel air into the cabin an Impreza bonnet scoop covers a roughly-cut hole in the roof… Yet, surprisingly, everything else is stock 1987 BMW. The interior too is purely functional. Loose wires hang out of the dashboard and, because of the new engine, the only things in the dashboard that work are the speedo extracted from the Evo, wedged into the air vent, and the oil pressure light. Meanwhile, a makeshift switchboard is housed in the lower dash valence.

The fourth round of the championship was held up in the highlands around the misty foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, around coffee plantation access roads. It was very slow compared to most rallies and rewarded good handling and nimble cars… which is how Issack and Monica managed a creditable 11th overall, but more importantly netted the 2WD class win. In doing so Monica became the first-ever female winner in the 50 year history of the Tanzanian rally championship. But that’s only part of the story.

For the next event a rival turned up in a Tuthill-prepared Porsche 911 and on the fast, sweeping roads of rounds five and six he was absolutely untouchable. He even finished fourth overall in one event, in a field of Imprezas and Evos. Issack and Monica finished second in class both times but a long way back, but on the seventh and penultimate round the Porsche got stuck in a ditch for a DNF, letting the BMW team through to their second class win, which set up the final round as a showdown. A stock 325i against a professionally-prepared Safari-spec 911 was a very uneven fight, but Issack had an idea of how to level the playing field slightly. The only undamaged part from the Evo was the engine so out came the stock straight-six and in went the Mitsubishi motor with plumbing that would make any Scrapheap Challenge competitor proud. With both hands and a grimace from the effort to show the glorious sight, the mechanic unhooked the industrial grade bonnet clips for us to see the swap for ourselves. It’s not pretty, with bits of random pipe starting to rust and corner tubing clamped with jubilee clips filling the engine compartment, but it’s exactly what the team needed. In testing it made a huge difference but was so powerful mid-corner that they had to weld the diff up to give it more control. Scoops were cut into the bonnet, both to enable it to fit and for extra cooling, and in the newly named B-Evo they entered the last rally.

With the extra power they were much closer to the Porsche but although not outclassed by it were still out-driven, and for the first few fast and flowing stages the lead slipped away. But in the days leading up to the rally it had rained so heavily that the plain was temporarily flooded. It was still muddy but passable, although the original track had been decimated under the locals’ wheel tracks as they found ways around the mud pits. In the middle of it all was a junction, which now didn’t look anything like it did on the recce. Many crews missed it, including the Porsche. But Monica didn’t. A five-minute deficit suddenly turned into a five-minute lead and, with just a few stages to go, Issack drove flat out, Monica kept calm and they won both their class and more importantly the 2016 rear wheel drive championship with Monica becoming the only woman champion in the more than 50 year history of the Tanzanian Rally Championship.

Growing up in Wales I used to stand in the forests of North Wales with freezing feet watching the RAC Rally. It was the Safari Rally that passed through Monica’s town of Arusha in the heartland of Tanzania and she remembers Mehta, Mikkola, Waldergaard, Kankunnen and other greats covering her in dust, and she always had the mantra in her head of “One day that will be me.” Her dream was to just be speeding through the landscape in a rally car but the championship-winning reality turned out to be far beyond anything she could ever have imagined. As for the team’s trusty E30, it just goes to show that looks aren’t everything and having the right tool for the job is far more important. It might be far from the prettiest machine we’ve ever featured but it was built with a pure purpose and it’s damn good at what it does, as are Monica and Issack and, with one win under their belts, they’ve got a taste for victory and are hungry for more.

Tech Spec: BMW E30 Rally Car

Engine & Transmission:

2.0-litre four cylinder single-turbo 4G63T, custom straight-through exhaust system. Getrag 260 five-speed manual, welded diff

Chassis:

15” steel wheels with 205/65 (front and rear) Dunlop Motorsport Direzza 87R rally tyres, Prolinx coilovers (front and rear), 5” lift, reinforced suspension turrets

Exterior:

Modified bonnet with scoop, industrial bonnet clips, protective radiator mesh, extended wheel arches, roof-mounted Subaru Impreza bonnet scoop for cabin ventilation

Interior:

Sparco Evo carbon fibre seats with five-point harnesses, master cut-off switch, oil temp warning light and Mitsubishi Evo speedo, full custom roll-cage

American blood, British heart, Japanese muscle – the Ford Probe is completely alien to most traditional Ford fans. But as Dean Flowers’ modified Ford Probe proves, we need to have a bit of a rethink…

Feature taken from Fast Ford magazine. Words: Dan Bevis. Photos: Ade Brannan

Well, here it is: a Ford Probe in Fast Ford magazine. Did you ever think you’d see the day? Possibly not, but in fact this moment has been a long time coming. The Probe may have had an unfortunate reputation in period – particularly at the hands of the loathsome Steve Coogan character Gareth Cheeseman – and the initial plan to market it as the fourth-generation Mustang in the States was met with widespread anger by marque aficionados: with front-wheel-drive, Japanese engineering and the absence of a V8, there’s really nothing Mustang about it.

But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the 1990s, and it’s high time the Probe underwent a re-evaluation. Indeed, the more you consider the nature of it, the cooler it seems – and when modified to the fastidious standards of Dean Flowers’ example, you can see why it’s rightfully earned a place in these pages. This modified Ford Probe is, in short, sublime.

“I have no idea why these cars failed to attract sales and were so unpopular,” Dean muses. “The name probably didn’t help! And I guess they were very expensive new – not too far off Escort Cosworth money, I believe. They’re pretty rare now, with fewer than 400 24-valves on the road.”

It’s certainly an unusual model, with these second-gen Ford Probes being around 60% Mazda and 40% Ford – Mazda took care of the engine, transmission and chassis (it’s essentially an MX-6 underneath), while Ford did the interior and body. The perfect fusion for the Ford fan who’s watched a lot of Fast & Furious movies, perhaps? It’s definitely an interesting addition to Dean’s motoring history; he’s had over a hundred cars over the years, all modified, and among the near-endless list he reels off we count 14 BMWs, 7 Mercs, a bunch of VWs and Audis, and – most relevant to our interests – oodles of Fords, including various XR2s, XR2is and XR3is. Most significantly, Dean clearly has a penchant for V6-engined Fords; he’s had a Capri 2.8i, Mondeo Ghia V6, even a Granada Dorchester stretch limo with a 2.9… along with quite a few Probes.

So how did he come to be so interested in this relatively obscure model? Sure, its fans are pretty vocal about its merits, but it’s not your classic go-to fast Ford, is it? “When I was about 15 or 16 my father bought a black 24v Probe,” Dean explains. “The car was probably only three or four years old at the time. And when I was 19 I bought the car off him and did a few mods to it, lowering it and fitting 18s… but I blew the engine up at Ford Fair about a year later on the Silverstone track! So I changed the engine to a Japanese-spec KL-ZE from an import MX-6 – the UK engine being the KL-DE. That dyno’d at 196bhp at the wheels on more than one occasion, and was a very fun car with good usable power on the road.”

You can see why the enthusiasm is so ingrained then, and why Dean’s keen to espouse the merits of this hidden gem. Having been a member of the UK’s first Probe club, the FPOC, from a young age, he kept the black Probe until he was 21 before moving onto the world of trouble that is the Mazda RX-7. Many cars and moons passed, until eight years later Dean spotted his old Probe for sale; it had been off the road for a while but he bought it back as a fixer-upper, acquiring a bunch of parts including the wheels and USDM rear bumper you see here. But that car is not this car… no, the one you’re looking at here was at the time owned by a club member by the name of Brian O’Keefe, a mechanical engineer who’d heavily modified the car with all manner of custom parts, although by late-2017 he’d started to lose interest in the project; it changed hands a couple of times, and then Dean found himself buying it for a decent price. It just seemed too good an opportunity to pass up – his original Probe still needed lots of work whereas this one was already complete, as well as being more powerful, having lower mileage, and wearing much nicer paint.

“I was in Thailand working at the time, so I arranged to collect it from Southend on my way home to Wales without even viewing it. I flew into Heathrow, caught the train to Southend, and drove the car home with my suitcase in the back.

“The Probe had many modifications, but was a little too stuck in the ’90s for my taste,” he continues. “It had blue lights, a vented carbon bonnet, 18in TSW Monzas, lots of red and blue detailing under the bonnet, stickers, blue floor mats, but I could see past this when I bought it and knew there was a clean, low mileage car underneath. I managed to sell almost everything I removed from the car for good money, so I actually got almost half my initial purchase price for it back!”

The car came with two full-to-bursting lever arch files of history, containing every single receipt right down to little things like wiper blades, as well as engineering diagrams for every custom modification carried out by the fastidious former owner. “People in the owners’ club thought I was mental for changing a very well-known car in the community,” Dean laughs. “However, I think a lot of them forgave me once they saw the finished item. To me it always felt like I was driving somebody else’s car until I changed it up.” Among the changes carried out in Dean’s tenure are the full black leather interior swap including dash, headlining and carpets, staggered Eta Beta wheels, Mustang splitter, stock replacement bonnet and front end repaint, flushed front bumper, USDM rear bumper, smoothed tail, USDM taillights (the number plate lives where the removable red rectangle in the middle is), removal of all the ’90s-style blue stuff, and a full detail and paint correction. “Some of these aftermarket parts I stole off my original car,” he explains, “and I also bought a black donor car for the interior and bonnet.”

All of this complements the unique engine, in situ when Dean purchased the car. The UK-spec KL-DE has been treated to the cams, pistons and port-matched inlet manifold from the JDM-spec Mazda KL-ZE, along with ported and polished heads, custom fuelling, bespoke exhaust, one-off throttle body and MSD ignition, which raises the power from its stock 165bhp to an impressive (and dyno-proven) 226bhp. More than enough to give it the go to match the show provided by those impeccably-finished Knight Rider-meets-GTO curves.

“Earlier this year I decided I needed to downsize the amount of vehicles I had, and business was doing well so thought it was time for my dream car; I always wanted a black-on-black 1964 Lincoln Continental, so at least three cars needed to go,” he says. And we can’t begrudge him that – after all, Lincoln is the luxury arm of the Ford Motor Company in the US, so perhaps Probe-to-Continental is a natural evolution? “This Probe was lined up as one of the ones to go, and I was very surprised that of the three cars I advertised, this was the first one to sell. It went for full asking price too, very quickly – the price was £3,500 which is a lot of car for the money, but also a lot more than any Probe has sold for in many years. Maybe this is a sign of the times, and people are ready to accept this Japanese-based Ford with American styling?”

We’d agree that this is almost certainly the case. These weird little global-mashup Fords have been left to languish in the shadows for too long; they may have been overlooked or even sneered at in the nineties, but the hardcore owners remained faithful and now, as numbers dwindle, people are recognising the Probe for the little sweetheart it really is. “I’ve taken the car to mostly non-Ford shows like Gravity and the Players Classic, and the response has been great – with some people finding it hard to admit to themselves that they actually think it’s cool!” laughs Dean. And that pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it? We’ve been sidelining these cars for too long. As this sleek 24v proves, Probes can be made to look stunning, with reliable performance to match. It’s not a Mustang, it’s not a Capri revival, it just is what it is – a Probe. And we like Probes. There, we said it.

Tech Spec: Modified Ford Probe

Engine:

KL-DE 2.5-litre 24v V6, ported and polished heads, Aeromotive fuel pressure regulator, custom-made twin fuel rails, 68mm throttle body (custom-machined from 60mm), port-matched KL-ZE inlet manifold (from JDM import Mazda MX-6), KL-ZE cams and pistons (from JDM import Mazda MX-6), oil breather and polished catch can, Hotshot cold air intake with custom tubing, Hotshot ceramic-coated 6-branch manifold, high-flow catalytic converter, custom stainless steel exhaust system, lightened flywheel, Magnecor KV85 leads, MSD ignition system with external coil conversion, battery relocated to boot, MSD window switches (used to control switching points of VRIS), anodised rocker covers, custom oil cap, water caps, radiator shroud and stainless cover plates, Samco hoses

Power:

226bhp

Transmission:

5-speed manual, Stage 2 clutch

Suspension:

Tokico 5-way shocks with 40mm Aktiv springs, Addco 20mm rear anti-roll bar

Brakes:

Raffi big brake kit, Goodridge braided lines

Wheels & Tyres:

8×18” (front) and 9×18” (rear) Eta Beta Avior – with bronze lips and black centres, refinished by Dan Taylor at Wheel Unique

Exterior:

Smoothed USDM rear bumper, USDM rear lights, wing mirrors and headlight covers, OEM rear spoiler, smoked side repeaters, Mustang front splitter, rubstrips removed, rolled rear arches, rear wiper arm and washer jet removed and smoothed

Interior:

Full black leather interior swap (including dash, headlining and carpets), custom-made short-throw gearstick, Momo steering wheel with stock cruise control modified to fit