The title was beginning to slip away, but help was at hand in the form of a shiny new Dallara. Par for the course for Formula 3? Not in 1993, when a belated switch rescued Kelvin Burt’s season. “Yeah, I would say 100%,” he reflects when asked whether the arrival of the Italian machine 30 years ago was his salvation. “From that point forward we would have struggled to get any more wins.”
The Dallara revolution in British F3 was one of the biggest hammerblows to the UK’s racing car industry. For all its success in Europe, Dallara’s products were untried (save for a brave, and brief, effort from Tech-Speed in 1989), and the conservative – some might say complacent – British scene was reluctant to take a punt. Former Bowman Racing staffers Trevor Carlin and Anthony ‘Boyo’ Hieatt, who half a decade later would combine to make the former’s new team the dominant force in British F3, had tried to put a deal together to form a squad to run a Dallara in 1993. But they were short of money and backing, and it was the unfancied Richard Arnold Developments team that finally took the plunge.
This was via engineer Chris Weller, who had been working with Alan Docking Racing. Weller was convinced the Dallara was the way to go, and had befriended Arnold, whose team was set up to run son Steven. Docking’s deal to be the de facto works Ralt team sent Weller to the Arnolds, and the revolution started…
By the time Burt switched to a Dallara F393, immediately after finishing a distant fourth in the British Grand Prix support race at Silverstone in July, the championship had boiled down to a fight between
