That Kelvin Burt never finished lower than second aboard the Dallara F393 on his way to the 1993 British Formula 3 title makes his pick of the Italian-built machine as his favourite car somewhat self-explanatory. Responding to its vast superiority over the Reynard 933 in which he’d started the season, Burt’s Paul Stewart Racing team jumped ship for the tenth round of the championship at Donington and never looked back.
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He duly won first time out, which set something of a trend for the remainder of the year. In fact, the only occasion Burt didn’t win across the six British F3 races he contested with the Dallara was at Pembrey, where he struggled with tyre wear and dropped behind Edenbridge Dallara man Oliver Gavin. Perhaps even more impressively, he was only beaten to pole once.
“It became obvious by the summer that that was the car and we weren’t going to be able to compete with what we’d got,” remembers Burt, who had seen Gavin surge into contention with four wins on the trot after making his own leap from Reynard to Dallara. The move was widely copied, to the extent that Reynard had disappeared from the grid in 1994.
“It just felt tighter,” Burt explains of the difference between the Reynard and Dallara. “Torsionally, the car was much better in terms of the gearbox [the Reynard had suffered from flexing]. The car felt like it was on top of the road, instead of in the road, that’s how I described it.
“The Reynard felt more planted because it was basically softer and it was gripping the road more. The Dallara was more on top of the road because it was tighter. It felt like a car on its toes, more nimble let’s say.
“But it won twice because Neil Brown could turn the [Mugen] engines up more without them detonating because they didn’t ‘bog’ the engine so much. So not only was it actually quicker through the air, it had more power as well with like-for-like the same engine, so it was quicker in both ways.”
Source: Autosport