The Anti Climax

It had an F1 engine and big-dollar sponsors behind it, master race engineer John Sheppard turning the spanners and star speedway ace Johnny Stewart behind the wheel - and still it failed. This is the story of Ron Hodgson's ill-fated Coventry-Climax Speedcar.

Story: James Cockington

In summary

Road-racing car dealer Ron Hodgson teamed up with speedcar champion Johnny Stewart, fitting a Coventry-Climax twin-cam from Jim Clark's F1 Lotus into a speedway midget.
The car proved too powerful for speedway, blowing its engine on debut and terrifying Stewart before they decided to reinstall the original Offfenhauser engine.
John Sheppard insists the machine, nicknamed the Anti-Climax by fans, wasn't a failure and could have won had they persevered with development.

“This is really the first time I have had a chance to tell you all of my recent link with Ron Hodgson, the most 100mph sponsor speedway has seen from a competitor’s point of view” wrote Australian speedcar champion Johnny Stewart in his February 1968 column in National Speed Sport.

The news came as a surprise.

Ron Hodgson was a classic road-racing man – one of the ‘champers and cravats crowd’ as Stewart used to call them – remembered for his exploits in an Appendix J Jaguar MK 2 in the early sixties, then for racing Australia’s first Mini Cooper S.