COVER STORY
whippersnapper turned up called Emerson Fittipaldi! I won various Clubmans Championships too, always in a Mallock, but it never occurred to me that it was anything about me. I was just trying to prove how good the car was.”
Richard’ s first job was not in the family business, it was at Aston Martin as a test driver at the age of 17. In his first week, he travelled to Pinewood Studios in James Bond’ s DB6 – taking a route through Hyde Park to“ have a bit of fun messing with the machine guns!” – and later he was challenged to blow up the Borg Warner gearbox – but failed in that task!
The chance to play 007 was a little lost on the young wannabe racing driver. Motorsport had far more appeal than movies, and he and his brother Ray both pursued their dreams on the race track and enjoyed some notable successes – Richard leading an international Formula Ford race in Rouen and Ray out-qualifying James Hunt once in an F3 Mallock at Thruxton.
It was inevitable that this involvement on track would eventually lead them into the family business and they got together to form‘ Rays Developments’ selling parts for Mallock cars. Over time, Ray went off to set up RML, while Richard joined Arthur on the Clubmans circuit with Mallock Sports and has been helping to maintain the family legacy ever since.
“ Luckily my father was retired from the Diplomatic Wireless Service, and that is really what got the business going – he did not need to earn any money out of it,” says Richard.“ He definitely over-engineered things and he always said a weak chassis is like an uncontrolled spring – in a corner, it will twist and just coil up all that energy.
“ He developed a solid axle, which you might think is like something off a horse and cart, but the Mumford location system he created with Michael Mumford is very, very clever at eliminating spurious loads, and he did the same with the trailing arms, with a solution he called TAM – Trailing Arm Magic – that really holds the back axle down.
“ The funny thing is that nobody is currently clever enough to work out what dad was thinking about! I met Adrian Newey at Silverstone, and I thought, if he wants to get his brain going, he should try to work out why TAM works, because nobody else can! Dad’ s handwriting was notoriously bad, so it’ s like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The secret remains!
“ Years ago, one of the Mallock owners who sponsored Kelvin Burt in F3 asked him to test his car, but he was not keen on driving a solid axle, front-engine machine. When he did test it, he beat the Brands Hatch record by about a quarter of a second after only 10 laps – but he was totally perplexed about how good the handling was and how the car put the power down!
“ When dad passed away, we had so many nice letters and so much support that I don’ t think I really worried about taking over the business, with Sue alongside. I did some design work, but I would not say I ever came up with any brilliant ideas that made the cars go much faster. Fortunately, though, we had Mike McDermott, who was very much like-minded to Arthur.
“ He was just as down to earth and keen to apply clever engineering, especially with his finite element spaceframe chassis. There is a good saying –‘ as time goes by, the fundamental things apply’ – which means that really, if you simply make a car lighter, more powerful and smaller, it will go quicker, never mind about preloads, static deflection and so on.”
The innovative but simple approach the company always applied to engineering made Mallock cars a success in whatever category were in. They even drew praise from Formula 1 World Champion Sir Jackie Stewart, who advised his neighbour to eschew a Caterham and compete in Clubmans in a Mallock, because of the deformable side structure protection.
Richard, of course, used a Mallock MK24 as his wedding car when he married his future paddock partner Sue – although with so many customers at the event, he worried the car would not start! Sue knew nothing about racing when they first got together, but after a lifetime spent supporting Mallock owners, she got to know all about the cars too.
“ I did all the ordering and invoicing, so I got very familiar with all the parts, even though I never really got to know quite where they all went,” she says.“ I did a little bit of Sprinting in my early days, which I enjoyed, but running the business we were always there in the paddock ready to help and I spent lots of time making teas and coffees and looking after customers.
Richard Mallock congratulates Spencer McCarthy on his Classic Clubmans win at Oulton Park in 2012
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“ I took over organising the annual Clubmans skiing holiday from Arthur, which continued for a further 26 years, and I also organised a couple of test days for Clubmans cars at Mallory Park and a few end-of-season Sprints at North Weald for the ladies.
Revolution- April 2025