Vauxhall Firenza Droopsnoot
by David Finlay (29 December 2011)
You may think that this is a quirky-looking car, perhaps even an ugly one. I respect your opinion but do not share it. To me, the Vauxhall Firenza Droopsnoot evokes a strong emotion that it is part excitement and part nostalgia.
This is not because we have any shared history, the Droopsnoot and I. In fact, to demonstrate how much this is not the case, I should point out that I had never even sat in one until shortly after Vauxhall gave me the keys to its Heritage Centre example.
But the Droopsnoot was the basis for some of the finest cars of the wonderful Special Saloon motor racing era. The most famous of all was Baby Bertha, the works-supported Dealer Team Vauxhall machine devised by Bill Blydenstein and raced by Gerry Marshall, but I never saw it in action. I did, however, see the last of Bill Dryden's SMT cars, which was so exciting that it became my favourite racer - and Dryden my favourite race driver - of my pre-teen years.
Although it used a modified version of the standard Droopsnoot's 2.3-litre four-cylinder engine, rather than Baby Bertha's five-litre Holden V8, the SMT car was technically adventurous, not least in the fact that it had two gearboxes. Special Saloon regulations gave a lot of scope for invention, but they did insist that the gearbox was mounted in the standard position, which in the case of the Firenza was immediately behind the engine.
So the SMT team put one there, but it was left in top gear. The gearbox Dryden actually used (except on the single occasion when he went for the wrong lever, causing an epic spin during a race at the now disused Ingliston circuit near Edinburgh) was an F1-style transaxle mounted at the back.
(SMT later had an even more radical idea. The Firenza eventually became uncompetitive as people started putting fibreglass saloon-like bodies on mid-engined sports racing cars and single-seaters. You could do this only if the basic car were rear-engined, so there were a lot of replica Skodas around, as well as the occasional Volkswagen or Hillman Imp. Vauxhall had no rear-engined car, but I was once told that SMT pondered getting round this by fitting a body backwards on a sports racer and claiming that Dryden was simply facing the wrong way. I believe plans for this were actually drawn up, but in the end SMT simply turbocharged the Firenza, without much success.)
Absolutely none of this was in my mind the first time I saw the car, though. All that happened was that it made me think, "Wow!" It was the first ever to do that, and when I see pictures of it, it still does.
And so, by extension, does the standard Droopsnoot. That's not its real name - it was officially known as the HP, for "High Performance" - but it's what most people have called it since the day it first appeared. The fibreglass front extension, which turned out to be quite the trend-setter, is all that distinguishes this car bodily from other Firenzas, but it led to Vauxhall restricting the name (previously used for models with engines as small as 1.2 litres) to the HP; the others were renamed Magnum, and trivia fans might like to know that it was in a Magnum that Colin McRae's father Jim began his rallying career.
Two things strike me within the first minute of climbing into the Heritage Droopsnoot. To begin with, the large gearknob reminds me that the five-speed gearbox has a dog-leg layout. You therefore have to move the lever forwards, rather than back, to engage second and fourth, while first is where you expect second to be and reverse is where you expect first to be. It is of no little importance to remember this.
Then, once I've started the engine, I notice that a red light on the centre console hasn't gone out. Warning signals hadn't yet been standardised in the Firenza's day, and I'm not sure what this one means, but since it clearly represents a foot pressing a pedal I assume that there is a brake problem.
Well, I don't want to drive anywhere if the brakes aren't working, so I refuse to move while various Vauxhall people around me do a fine job of pretending not to go into cardiac arrest. Then someone realises that the light is actually telling me that the handbrake is still on. The Vauxhall people now do a fine job of pretending that I'm not a total idiot, and the test begins.
It's quite short, and it all takes place on damp country roads in a valuable car with no electronic safety aids whatever and, indeed, really not much in the way of safety anything. So I'm not going to push hard. I understand that the Droopsnoot can reach 120mph and accelerate from 0-60mph in eight seconds, but it's not going to do either with me at the wheel.
I can say, though, that this large and, at 130bhp or so, relatively unstressed engine is fantastically flexible, to the extent that when I lose count of what gear I'm in and turn very slowly into a side road in third at hardly more than tickover revs, the car still pulls away strongly. And it eventually becomes apparent that you can use the throttle to tighten your line through corners in a very satisfying manner - which, I suppose, is how sporting-minded drivers tended to do it in the days of narrow, low-grip tyres.
The best thing of all, however, is that, having never dreamed I would, I am actually driving a Droopsnoot. And while I'm concentrating on ensuring that this example goes back to Vauxhall exactly the way it left, I'm aware that my much younger self is looking on in a state of slightly confused happiness.
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