For motor racing fans with long memories the Supershell building was also home to the Image racing team, a manufacturer of Formula Ford cars in which many an aspiring driver earned his stripes. Engineer Alan Langridge established his little team at Tangmere airfield in 1974, building simple but effective cars for young hopefuls determined to get their feet on the first rung of the ladder to fame and fortune. Two years later, with some good results on the board, he moved the team to the Supershell building where he could not only build the cars but test them on the circuit.
For those who wanted to race an Image finding the money was, as ever, the perennial problem, many of them working on the cars for free in exchange for a chance to compete. A young Scot called Anthony Reid was one of many ambitious, but impoverished, kids who graduated from the Image ‘academy’, somehow emerging unscathed to make his name on the world stage. The Supershell was, literally, his home.
“I’d won a scholarship at the Jim Russell racing school which gave me a free season in the Esso Formula Ford championship in 1978. I thought that was it, I’d made it, was on my way,” says Reid. “But it wasn’t a success, although just getting to the final was an achievement. So now I had to start again, but I needed a job, and I’d heard about Image at Goodwood.”
By this time the cars that came out of the Supershell building had gained a reputation for affordability and quality despite the might of Ralph Firman’s Van Diemens, and in 1974 Emerson Fittipaldi had become the first F1 World Champion to graduate from those ultra-competitive Formula Ford championships.