RE: Identify this car
>As I recall you and Walter ran a 16 valve Celica on the 1974
>POR.
Paul:
If only that were the case!
The car shown in the photo is the same Toyota Celica that we used on the 1974 POR. The week before the 1974 POR, Walter finished third overall on the Rideau Lakes in this car. The Rideau Lakes engine was, in fact, the 1588cc pushrod engine from our 1973 POR winning Toyota Corolla. We had campaigned that Toyota Corolla very hard during 1974 to win our fifth consecutive Canadian Rally Championship. The Corolla was basically dead by the end of the year. The Celica was built out of spares and parts from the Corolla. The pushrod engine had no more that 140 bhp and it is an indication of Walter's driving ability that he was able to finish third at the Rideau Lakes.
Anyway, the engine was on its last legs at the finish of the Rideau Lakes and we had to compete in the POR the next weekend. We had done absolutely nothing to prepare for the POR. As Rallymaster of the Rideau Lakes, I had spend almost every free minute for a year organizing the event. So we set off for the POR, with a very tired rally car and our service van full of spare engine parts. While everyone else was out doing a recce and making pacenotes, our plan was to get to the rally headquarters in Marquette, rebuild the engine and start the rally. We telephoned ahead to the local Toyota dealer in Marquette to let him know we were coming and to arrange garage space. We arrived the day before the rally, went to the dealer, and in the space of about 6 hours our crew pulled the old engine out of the car, stripped it down to a bare block, put in new bits, assemled the engine, reinstalled it in the car and fired it up on the first crank!
We started the rally the next day with no recce and an engine that had not yet been broken in. Unfortunately, there was no fairy tale ending. We ended up stuck off the edge of the road in deep sand part way through the rally. At that point in time, we had been slowly catching Guy Chasseuil, in his ex-works Renault Alpine, who eventually finished fourth overall.
We never did have a 16 valve engine in the Celica. You have to remember that the Toyota 16 valve engine was still very rare then. The 16 valve rally engines were developed for Toyota by Yamaha and only the works rally team had them from 1974 through about 1976. Walter used the same pushrod engine in early 1975 and then was sent an 8-valve twin cam engine from Japan. This engine was originally still 1588cc and we increased its capacity to 1800cc for 1976. In 1977, Taisto Heinonen used this same Celica shown in the photo (when Walter drove the works Triumph TR7 in Canada) with a 2200cc engine that we had developed near the end of 1976. Taisto later put this engine in another Celica body for the remaineder of 1977. Then, Taisto was able to obtain the ex-works 2000cc, 16 valve engines from Ove Andersson at TTE and used these in his Celicas and Corollas from 1978 through the early 1980s.
Sorry, for the Toyota history lesson. I hope you find it interesting.
Doug Woods
