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A BRIEF HISTORY……….

Raindance racing was started in 1995 by Raindance driver and team owner Terry Wareham but the history starts much earlier than 1995.

The story is one which is a familiar one to many racers with its beginnings in the late 1970’s. Terry’s first contact with drag racing was due to a best friend’s father who was not opposed to the occasional visit to the hallowed grounds of Santa Pod, Long Marston and the long since defunct Blackbushe Raceway. On these trips from the Poole, Dorset home of Terry, his friend’s father would take the two lads and whoever else wanted to tag along up to watch the racing. These early experiences of the likes of Gene Snow, Dennis Priddle, the late Sammy Miller, Tom Hoover and Harlan Thompson made their mark as when the transport for these occasions was put up for sale in the early 1980’s, Terry was quick to put in an offer of a dirt bike as an exchange. Terry was now in possession of his first car –a few years before being of the legal driving age !!!

This was just as well as the car needed some fairly extensive repair work. The car –a late 1960’s Australian Chrysler Hardtop Coupe complete with healthy 318ci powerplant- was eventually returned to road going status about a year after Terry gained his driver’s licence. The Chrysler made numerous trips to Santa Pod, mostly just to spectate but the Chrysler did make a few Run What Ya Brung passes at Santa Pod clicking off passes in the mid 16 second bracket. This is not especially fast by Santa Pod standards but not bad for a first car.

This was just enough to whet Terry’s appetite for Drag racing and a late 70’s Chevrolet Caprice Coupe was procured for bargain money with a dead engine. The engine on this car was rebuilt and upgraded with the usual Chevy small block speed equipment of the era. The result was a 355ci powered Yank with proportions to shame an aircraft carrier. This car was good enough for low 15-second Elapsed Times at the 90MPH mark.

A succession of modified Yanks followed the Caprice but the ETs did not improve significantly so in the late 1980’s a new plan was formulated. This started with the purchase of a 500ci Cadillac motor/ transmission/ Ford axle combination. The powertrain originally left Detroit fitted to a 1976 Coupe De Ville but by the time Terry had got to it, he had to rescue it from the confines of a Mk2 Cortina. This car was built by a TV engineer in Norfolk and was featured in the now extinct Street Machine magazine in 1986. The car was sold on and subsequently written off by its new owner.

The remains of this car were dragged home to sunny Dorset and the Ford was parted from its powertrain and dispatched to the scrapman. A suitable bodyshell was now required for the start of the new racecar and one was spotted during a lunchtime sortie with some workmates of the time. Terry was looking for a small American vehicle at the time as these cars were deemed the most suitable for the project –both from an aesthetic and an ease of build point of view. What was the car spotted? A Vega perhaps ? A Mustang II ? Nope. Not even close. What the lunchtime party had spotted was a Porsche 944. This car was initially rejected as being too small and impractical but a five pound bet between Terry and one of his workmates soon saw Terry take possession of one Porsche. The Porsche was soon dismantled and any unwanted parts sold off to contribute towards the finances of the build. A chassis was designed and constructed from RHS steel in a perimeter style and to this a CDS roll cage was added. This resulted in what was to all intents a spaceframe chassis –albeit not a full tube chassis. The Porsche bodyshell was relieved of its floorpan and mated to the spaceframe giving an extremely rigid base onto which the powertrain could then be mounted.

At this time the now defunct performance car specialist South Coast Performance stepped in with a raft of new parts which sped the build along considerably. The car was eventually completed in 1992 after some 2 ½ years of hard labour which consumed much of Terry’s spare time –not to mention that of quite a few friends. The Porsche was finished in straight black paint and was christened the Omen in the best drag racing tradition. The Omen was featured in Street Machine magazine in 1993 appearing as the cover car of the Feb 93 issue as well as adorning the centre pages. The Omen was also the subject of a three-page (not page 3) feature in Porsche World magazine, again in 1993.

After completing several RWYB events without incident and covering countless road miles, the Porsche was entered into the Super ET championships of 1993. The car was capable of running low 12 second ETs on a very consistant basis and things were looking very good for the team as a whole. Unfortunately, fate stepped in at this point as the car was destroyed at the European Finals meeting at Santa Pod in August of that year in a shutdown area crash. The car was completely beyond salvage but fortunately the spaceframe maintained its integrity and Terry walked away from what looked like a very nasty crash. The Omen rolled several times corkscrewing through the air before laying around 20 yards of the Santa Pod armco flat before coming to rest nose first in the large grass banking on the left hand side of the shut down area –narrowly missing a couple of racecars being towed up the return road after completing their passes without incident up to that point.

The remains of the Omen racecar were once more dragged homeward and the once beautiful Porsche was stripped of anything useful -the rest being turned over to the scrapman. The search was on to find a replacement body upon which to base a new project. After a few false starts and hiccups the solution turned up with a motor trader friend who took in the MkV Cortina which became Raindance. The car was quickly purchased and driven home as it was still road legal. As the old cliché goes, Terry had removed the engine –1.6 litres of pure fury- before it had even cooled down and the Raindance project was born.