Another early morning start to a race weekend.
After decades of designing and manufacturing his own products in the lighting industry, and finally being able to afford to go racing, Ivan Hayward went about it from a slightly different direction. Inspired by the racing and cars of the 1950s and ’60s, he built ‘DPN 83C’, an Appendix K FIA MGB from scratch – in the process spending far too much time and money restoring and correcting a 50-year-old chassis – Ivan started redesigning and manufacturing his own parts, starting with 3D printing brackets and mounts, making bolt-on wire wheel conversion hubs, and briefly becoming the European distributor for Watanabe magnesium wheels from Japan in the process.
Ivan respecting track limits at Castle Combe in 2014
After being overtaken on-track by a TVR Grantura (with the same power and running gear as the MGB but a whopping 200kg lighter), the potential of the TVR was obvious and Ivan took some time out from racing, and exchanged the MGB for a TVR
Grantura MkIII road car. A year later and after stripping the car, fitting a roll cage, race engine, diff, uprated springs and all the safety equipment and so on needed to go racing, and fitting a set of Watanabe wheels, Ivan’s first race in 2018 saw him finish in the top 10.
With his background in product design, digital prototyping and manufacturing bespoke lighting pieces and a workshop (already containing a lot of the necessary engineering equipment?) it wasn’t long before Ivan was thinking about ways to
Ivan and co-driver Jack Rawles at Brands Hatch in 2015
improve the car. By the end of the 2018 season he’d been offered the factory body moulds – the opportunity to make his own chassis and bodies was too impossible to resist – for the Griffith 400 from 1965 and a corresponding chassis jig, which was adapted to produce the chassis for the Grantura MkIII. Originally the Griffith and Grantura fibreglass bodyshells were bonded to the chassis, resulting in trapped moisture and hidden parts of the chassis rotting from the inside, requiring the body to be cut away from the chassis for either to be replaced or repaired. In designing a new floor mould Ivan allowed his new chassis and bodies to be bolted together without bonding. He also set about making a new set of moulds for the outer bodywork and front bulkhead for the Grantura MkIII.
Ivan in 76 PRT at Snetterton in 2017, with the car still on its original chassis.
Development of new parts for Grantura MkIII and Griffith continues, Ivan’s ethos being if parts aren’t available, he’ll make them, in enough quantity to enable him to continue racing and to build new race and road cars and offer parts packages to customers.
Please call Ivan on 01420 562 179 or email him at [email protected] to discuss your classic TVR race car requirements.
