READER’S BUILD
80 September 2019 http://www.completekitcar.co.ukDRAG DUTTON
We take a look at the build story of a Dutton Phaeton that’s
designed to both embarrass supercars on the drag strip and be
enjoyable on a winding stretch of country road.
D
ue to their often lightweight,
normally cheap and usually
repeatable construction, for years
kit cars have made the perfect basis
for amateur race cars and series
from both a competitive and financial standpoint.
From the heady early days of Austin Seven specials
buzzing around disused post-war air bases to the
superbike powered mini-LM-esque racers that storm
Donington today, British grassroots motorsport and
kit cars have never been too far apart.
But there’s still one form of accessible motorsport
that couldn’t appear to be further from the
featherweight, plucky and low capacity ideals shared
by most self-build racers today, and that is drag
racing. To me the drag strip appears to be all about
insane, jet-powered, impossibly stretched muscle cars
that sit on bicycle thin front tyres and haven’t sniffed
a whiff of real tarmac in years. So when I first heard
about Russ Pursley’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it road
legal drag racing Dutton Phaeton, I just had to find
out more.
Admittedly there are similarities shared between
competitive circuit cars and drag racers. For one,
both tend to be as light as physically possible but,
even this is relative. Whereas usually a racing kit car
can make use of intricate componentry, the stressesmost, and Russ struggled to find anyone willing to
work on it. The final straw came when he returned
to an untouched car, that the garage had for over a
month. It was impetus enough for him to rebuild it
himself. In the process of uprating the transmission
he replaced the valve body with a manual one,
which in essence converted the automatic shift
into a manual 2-speed that offered a more consistent
gearchange on the strip. The finishing touch to the
box would be its bombproof Reid Racing case,
which made it much longer-lived and caught the
eye of Russ’s fellow competitors. The success of the
upgrade led to him building transmissions for
racers up and down the country, often on a quid
pro quo basis that helped him improve his own car.
The Dutton continued with the Corvette
engine for a while but, years of abuse one
quarter-mile at a time did eventually take its
toll on the block. “It began to run like a diesel,
and you couldn’t see behind the car for smoke,”
explains Russ. It was clear that the engine was now
burning both oil and water, which necessitated its
retirement after 20 years of service. Its replacement
would be the mildly detuned Shafiroff 7.1-litre
Chevrolet small-block engine that sits in the car
today, which without nitrous is good for a not
inconsiderable 610bhp. But with the laughing gasWords: Jack Wood Pictures: Russ Pursley and Jack WoodThe finished Phaeton is just as at home on the road as it is on the drag strip.and strains caused by repeated nitrous infused full
throttle starts means that outright strength and
durability must always come first in a drag car. So
while the Phaeton is extremely light for a strip
racer, at just under a ton it’s over double the weight
of your typical sevenesque track car. This is heavy-
duty and often experimental engineering, all neatly
fitted into a tiny fire-breathing fibreglass package
that’s unlike any other. This means that over its
20-year rolling build story, it hasn’t had a typical or
easy to follow narrative. So for the sake of better
understanding its construction, instead of breaking
the restomodded classic down chronologically, we’ll
take a look at Russ’s Dutton rebuild on a component
by component basis. Where better to start than its
monstrous engine and gearbox?
When Russ first bought the car over 20 years ago
from a mate it was in a slightly sorry state, having
spent a couple of years on the scrapheap. But there
was one big thing going for it, and that was its
5.7-litre American V8. The engine first saw service
in a Corvette, where it was pretty quick, but in the
flyweight Dutton it was genuinely blistering. Once
recommissioned the car more than held its own in
the National Street Car Challenge (NSCC) but it
wasn’t without mechanical expense. The tortured
gearbox could only last a couple of meetings at theDUTTON
PHAETONENGINE: 7.1-litre Shafiroff-
Chevrolet V8.
GEARBOX: Powerglide
2-speed drag racing gearbox.
BRAKES: Ford Sierra
Cosworth discs and calipers
all round.
INTERIOR: Custom
aluminium floor and
transmission tunnel,
Autometer gauges, Luso
Motor RCC seats, Nos nitrous
computer.
EXTERIOR: Modified yellow
Dutton Phaeton shell with
custom black roll-over cage.080 Readers build.indd 80 01/08/2019 12:49 pm