Yes, I know this car very well, or what’s left of it. It looks in remarkably good condition for its journey!
During 2012-13-14 (the best-selling years for numbers of Radical cars) we built 162, 168 and 172 total cars of all model types in those respective years which contained some months where 17, 18 and even 19 cars were produced and delivered in one month, produced mainly by teenage guys who were on a fast-track of learning how to “just do it” at Radical at 16-17 years old!
Many of these young guys moved on and progressed through motorsport – some to McLaren, some to LMP2 and some to Mercedes Benz F1! All of them went through the school of hard work and focused on achieving – it was a great time. Those are the days I miss the most, mentoring enthusiastic youngsters to achieve great things – happy times!
I was also very happy at that time to have a very good relationship with Ford R&D at Dunton through an encouraging two-way exchange where James my son was racing in the EcoBoost era of Formula Ford and members of Dunton staff were involved in the championship, including Head of Emissions Roger Ratley – a long-time Formula Ford racer, as scrutineer, and Gerard Quinn of Ford Europe Racing.
I worked with Gerard in a small way to help grow the FF grid, bringing in Argentinian driver Juan Angel Rosso to run in our team. Juan’s father Victor had raced with Ayrton Senna in FF2000 and Andy Wallace in F3 – you can see with Revolution, we still are associated with AW for his advice on driving, feel etc.
Those were also the years we were developing the RXC with Ford EcoBoost V6 twin-turbo power. In 2014 my son James put the RXC on pole at Monza in European GT Open Championship in front of the works McLaren with Alvaro Parente driving, also ahead of the works Aston Martin and many other notable teams – with a motor out of a Ford USA pickup truck! (Running on slick tyres in semi-wet conditions assisted, while others needed wets!) James led the big guns for a good few laps, with the Ford matching the straight-line speed needed, until his rear quarter got used by someone as a brake point!
So, the RXC gained a good pedigree, which was noticed by Ford. During this purple patch in Radical history, Multimatic were developing the top secret supercar for Ford, using the same V6 turbo.
From my original club racing time I had also raced in same event as Multimatic technical head George Chappell. Whilst he was then at Lotus, talks between all contacts produced an interest in some rolling chassis parts to produce a ‘show car’ for Ford.
Delays in progress (as always happens in big projects where technology, production and sales have to agree on a launch date) left the need for a rolling/driving chassis with a twin-turbo V6, and the need for some “Radical action”.
Although I had quoted on several rolling running chassis with electrics (and I only knew 10% of the facts of what was needed, it was so secret) our Ford-powered RXC was still very new, and I was concerned by our ability to provide a box of parts that could be turned into a runner in days. I switched the offer to supply a complete running ex-demo car, for the same cost, shipped instantly so the decision needed less layers of agreement.
Within 24 hours of leaving our premises, the RXC was being driven on a private test track on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then came the quicker job of removing what was not needed (which was a lot!). As you can see that included the whole body, roll cage, the engine switched to a faster and so on.
So the short answer is that this is the RXC body parts that were left over from that Ford GT project mule.
We did not know what it was really for, until it drove onto turntable in January 2015 at the Detroit Motor Show, but we could hear in videos afterwards, the air compressor running to operate the gearshift – unmistakably Radical! Soon it was all Ford, but it was nice to be part of the gestation.
At the Geneva show later that year, we had the RXC on show just 100 yards from the same Ford ‘mule’ and I think it was Bill Ford most disarmingly, when I was introduced to him said, “Oh great! That’s your car under there!”
A nice time!
(The holes in front were the first attempt at charge-cooling. This provided (very badly) air flow to the radiators to cool the charge cooling.
I think there were at least two more incarnations of the front duct, before we eventually went to air-to-air coolers at the rear, in place of the water-cooled charge-coolers)