Wire Wheels Magazine - Issue1

Classics, creations and restorations
P-A’s Swedish TR3
The Lagonda Club
Vancouver’s ABFM event
Best country for gearheads
Silver Cloud two-door chop
Issue 1
Roadtrip… in a motor
yacht
RR Silver Wraith
Art Deco Speedster
Lord Montagu’s
Paris weekends

Contents
Lord Montague’s Paris weekends
The late Lord Montagu used to fly his Zephyr to Paris
for the weekend, which was pretty damn stylish.
P-A Nord
A Swedish Triumph enthusiast takes us for a drive in
his favourite TR.
The Ayrspeed Diaries – Wraith I
The magnificent one-off Art-Deco RR speedster
currently being orchestrated by Ayrspeed Automotive
Adventures Ltd, has its origins in Bugattis racing in
France.
ABFM
Vancouver’s All British Field Meet boasts an
eye-opening ratio of Tigers to Alpines and TR8s to
TR7s: it’s worth a trip.
Roadtrip
The first Roadtrip story is a short voyage that takes
place on a new but very old-school wooden motor
yacht. If this boat had wheels, they would be wire
wheels.
WireWheels Magazine is published by
Ayrspeed Automotive Adventures Ltd -
which is the venue for the orchestration of one-off cars such as
the boat-tailed Rolls special, and for prototyping other ideas, if
sufficiently interesting.
www.wirewheelsmagazine.com
iain@wirewheelsmagazine.com
The Ayrspeed Diaries – Open Cloud I
An offshoot from the Wraith is a commercial project
converting Silver Cloud saloons to two-door opentops
in the Mulliner style.
Temptations
The GN Cyclecar is the ancestor of the Frazer Nash
dynasty, and there’s one for sale in Holland. 60,000
Euros. $90,000. £54,000. But they’ve had it for a year
now, so they might be open to offers…
Off Topic - Country choice
The lucky among us can choose what country to live
in. Which is the best option for a petrolhead?
Hands On
Mini Marcos part I
The editorial Mini Marcos is always at the back of the
queue to get finished, but rocketing values are focusing
attention on it.
One will be at one’s Club
The Lagonda Club’s AGM was a friendly affair with
some excellent cars to examine and admire.
No liability is accepted for any information published herein: the
editor’s degree is in English and Art. His automotive opinions and
for that matter his chassis concepts are based on writing 1000
motoring articles and 20 books, but he has no formal engineering
qualifications. Caveat emptor, innit.
www.ayrspeed.com
iain@ayrspeed.com
Gentlemen, start your engines
WireWheels Magazine celebrates an
approach to life symbolised by cars with wire wheels.
These wire wheels are metaphorical as much as literal.
It may be pointed out by the sage and wise that wire
wheels are actually not particularly good engineering
as such, because although strong, they are very heavy
and increase undesirable unsprung weight. That’s
undeniably true, unless the rims are alloy and cost
as much as a divorce; but wire wheels do contribute
substantially to style and flavour. For personal cars,
perhaps that’s more important. Engineering efficiency
frequently lacks flavour: ultimately, efficiency puts
you in a secondhand Kia.
Two themes as the magazine launches are a boat-tailed
Rolls-Royce speedster and the conversion of a Bentley
MkVI to a blown 1930 lookalike, with a side order
of a Bentley S1 turning into a turbocharged two-door
convertible. These are currently being orchestrated or
built by your editor’s alter ego Ayrspeed Automotive
Adventures Ltd. (www.Ayrspeed.com)
The Art-Deco Wraith speedster absolutely demands
wire wheels. This Rolls rolls on 19” Lagonda-spec
wires with convincing vintage-looking tyres of radial
construction. The car is a commission, so the writing
of substantial wire-wheel-related cheques for it was
painless.
Ayrspeed’s brewing supercharged 1930 lookalike, the
Beast, is getting a set of brutally expensive but 100%
correct 21” Blower Bentley wire wheels with stonking
72mm splined hubs by Richards Brothers.
Silver Clouds look slightly wrong on wires, but on
the almost-identical Bentley S they look just right.
That makes no sense, but is just the way it is. Borranis
would look rather exquisite, but £12,000 is quite a pile
of disincentives.
Sports cars will be the main course, but other amusing
cars such as Minis will be featured just for fun. So
will boats, planes, scotches, cigars, watches and other
amusements that make life worth living.
WireWheels roadtrips will involve cars, but also
yachts and small aeroplanes: few of those have actual
wire wheels, but in spirit many of them do. A roadtrip
is taken for the sake of the journey, so roadtripping is a
state of mind with a flexible definition.
Our Good Life correspondent is Helen Poon, who
although youthful has a fetish for elderly cars and
has studied deeply on the subjects of single malts
and cigars. Helen’s amusing car collection includes
a 1937 RR 25/30 with rather great-auntish Thrupp &
Maberly coachwork; a supercharged 1924 Italian OM
of legendary unreliability; an Alvis; and until recently,
a 1938 MG TA, which Helen acquired from me in a
swap for my current 1947 Bentley, after a long and
cheery evening spent on a virtual tour of the Speyside
whisky distilleries. A very WireWheelish decision.
Exotic vintage cars are great fun, but their ownership
is restricted to the lucky and the commercially adventurous
and successful. Writing for Classic Cars and
other magazines has provided drives in a GT40, Testarossa,
Alfa 8C, Bugatti and so on, but the enjoyment
of those is limited by their rarity and cost. Driving the
blown ex-Le Mans Figoni-bodied Alfa that collected
the triple prize at the top Villa D’Este concours and
then came back to clean up at Pebble Beach was interesting,
but actually not fun. Damaging or breaking it
would have caused huge upset. It was also something
of a bastard to drive, with very heavy and lifeless controls,
and with power only available at 3500rpm and
no rear or ¾ visibility at all. Respect to the hard men
who used to race those things.
The most exhilarating drive recently has actually been
in an MGBGT. To be honest, there is probably more
fun to be had at the achievable end of the classic car
world than at the rarefied end. The MG in question

By Zephyr to Paris
If you could fly
your Zephyr to
Paris for the
weekend… why
wouldn’t you?
The late Lord Montagu flew
his favourite Ford to Paris on
occasion in the 1950s, and
that’s pretty damn stylish
by anybody’s standards. I’m
talking about the late Edward
Douglas-Scott-Montagu (1926-
2015) rather than Ralph Douglas-Scott-Montagu,
the current
4th Lord Montagu.
If you’re going to use wire wheels, don’t mess about: the Art-Deco-inspired Wraith has six of them.
sported a Ford 5-litre V8 and a Tremec 5-speed box.
The handling of an MGB is solid and predictable, but
not set up for 295lbs.ft, although the body and rear
axle are strong enough. Too much power is just right,
as Mr Shelby suggested, and pressing on to any extent
in such a beast requires your full attention. But as soon
as you ease off, provided you’re not halfway round a
corner, the car goes instantly back to being a sleeper
MGB, amiably friendly and baritonally grumbly. It
even sounds pretty much the same with a B-series or a
V8. Strongly recommended.
When it comes to discussing power, the usual pub/
internet/mainstream-magazine obsession with bhp
numbers will be sidelined by lbs.ft numbers where
available. For road cars, we want to know the low to
mid-range torque numbers. 6500-rpm bhp doesn’t
mean much: you only spend five minutes a year at
6500rpm unless you’re on the track or have a bike
engine.
WireWheels stories will be as long and as well illustrated
as they want to be. I’ve been writing for classic
car magazines for a long time, and one of the bonuses
of digital publication is that we’re not limited for
space. Printed magazines have to edit stories down to
fit the cramped space available, space that is continuously
shrinking as paper magazine sales decline…
which is partly because of shrinking editorial budgets.
Readers are not stupid, and when quality declines and
prices rise, they sensibly respond by reading their
magazines at WHSmith, but not buying them.
We don’t subscribe to the dumbing-down ever-shorter-magazine-story
theory popular among publishing
accountants: the average novel is 100,000 words
long with no pictures, and intelligent people still read
books.
A good number of my stories previously published
in classic car magazines will be explored at greater
length, with more pictures, and sometimes with video.
Our ad-based digital magazine business model does
not require a financial contribution from readers, although
we may publish a print version at some point.
Collecting top stories is expensive, but although Wire-
Wheels Magazine may not be cheap, it is free.
Cheers, Iain
Lord M’s Zephyr is long gone, so we organised a MKI club car for the
magazine shoot. The Sainsbury shop front can still be seen at Beaulieu,
although the street scene was still being built when we visited.
My Lord Montagu, as it were,
was the originator and the heart
and soul of the National Motor
Museum at Beaulieu, as well
as the Beaulieu Autojumble,
so all British petrolheads owe
him something of a debt for his
contribution to our world.
I went down to Beaulieu to
interview him some years back
for a series I ran in Ford Heritage
magazine entitled “My Favourite
Ford.” (Ford Heritage
magazine was a bi-monthly
that was relaunched as the still
successful Classic Ford.) The
Favourite series featured all
sorts of fascinating people such
as astronomer Patrick Moore,
whose favourite Ford was the
600,000-mile E493A Prefect he
had owned for forty years, and
rally driver Malcom Wilson,
whose soft spot was for a MkI
BDA Escort.

A later, darker-coloured Zephyr also bears the AA19 registration plate. AA20, the 1903 De Dion
Bouton, is still the first car you see as you visit the museum.
The new profession of Public Relations appealed,
and his first job was located in Mayfair, which meant
spending the week in town and weekends at Beaulieu.
Home in London was Mount Street, where in
1949 you could park with no problem at all. Nowadays,
you wouldn’t even risk slowing down in Mount
Street in case you got clamped and relieved of £500.
He could also park outside his office in Grosvenor
Hill in those days, but parking an ageing Hillman
outside your Mayfair office wasn’t quite the thing:
the Hillman was sold to the suburbs when the new
Zephyrs hove into view.
The 1950 Motor Show at Earls Court saw the launch
of the Ford Consul and Zephyr, and although most
people had to wait for one, being a lord has its bonuses
which include pulling strings, leapfrogging the
waiting list and snagging your new Zephyr right now.
Actually, being in PR was probably a better string
to pull than being aristocracy, come to think of it:
people with triple-barrelled surnames are not Ford’s
target audience. Oddly enough, I spent some time
in the same world: I was a copywriter at J. Walter
Thompson in Berkeley Square, so Lord Montagu and
I were both writing commercial poetry in Mayfair
within a few hundred yards of each other although in
different decades, and we probably dealt with many
gin and tonics in the same pubs with the same sort of
colourful advertising and PR characters. Rather a nice
thought.
The Zephyr was collected from Percy Hendy in Southampton,
who are still selling Fords 70 years on. The
car cost £759 plus a brutal 33% purchase tax: the UK
was still trying to export as many cars as possible and
discouraging Brits from buying them. Lord Montagu’s
Zephyr was supplied in Ivory, not an official colour,
and he remembered it having no radio but lots of
white Bakelite switches.
The Zephyr was not just new and sexy, but quite fast,
particularly in comparison to the plodding sidevalves
of the period. It was light for its size, with a monocoque
structure rather than a separate chassis, and
the engine was a straight six of 2262cc and 68bhp.
It was oversquare and revvy, pushing the car to a top
speed of 85mph. The front suspension was independent
by newfangled and advanced MacPherson struts:
Earle MacPherson was still Ford’s vice-president of
engineering. Compared to cast iron beam axles and
cart springs, the new strut suspension represented a
quantum improvement in handling, and the Zephyr
acquitted itself quite well in rallying, at one point in
the hands of one Maurice Gatsonides, inventor of
Lord Montagu’s favourite Ford was his MkI Zephyr,
in which he had a great deal of fun in the 1950s. The
interview started oddly, with Lord Montagu saying he
hoped I didn’t mind about his reputation: I was vaguely
aware of some ancient scandal.
“No, not me,” I responded, “I live in Brighton.”
That cleared the air, and what was scheduled to be a
brief interview rambled hospitably on into a tour of
the museum and a fascinating preview of the closedoff
street section of the museum, which was just being
built.
The “reputation” he was talking about was a prosecution
for being gay in 1954, or more accurately for
being well-known and bisexual, in something of a
show trial. Maintaining his dignity and cool through
the whole grubby process of public trial and imprisonment
helped strengthen the movement that revoked
that law in 1967. So the Gay Classic Car Club owes
him even more than the rest of us. Nowadays, homophobes
seem both backward and closeted, and most of
us have progressed to regarding sexuality as more or
less irrelevant when evaluating new people. In 1952,
it would have been the smart move to spend the more
louche sort of weekends in Paris, where those leading
a frisky lifestyle were less likely to face the wrath of
the dull.
Lord Montagu rose above all that crap and not only
created the National Motor Museum, but launched and
hosted the Beaulieu Autojumble in his back garden.
It’s possibly the most delightful automotive event in
the world, and is the biggest in Europe. For everybody
who enjoys pottering about with vintage and
post-vintage cars, that one man has contributed more
to improving our automotive lives than any other
individual, and WireWheels magazine suggests that
we all raise a toast to him next time we find ourselves
holding a glass at an appropriate event.
The Zephyr in question was Lord M’s second car.
His first had been a pedestrian Hillman Minx, which
tootled him back and forth to Oxford University, and
which after graduation in 1949 was used for his first
extended Continental tour, setting the scene for many
future automotive amblings in France and beyond.
Pic credit RuthAS. The Silver City air ferry service to France. This picture by transport historian Ruth AS
synchronistically shows a light-coloured Ford Zephyr being loaded: it might well be Lord M’s Zephyr.

the Gatso speed tax camera. Some departed motoring
pioneers will be remembered with more affection
than others. Although to be fair, Gatso did develop his
cameras to improve car competition timing rather than
to extort money from the public.
well, as AC’s tweedy customers didn’t want a pleb
Zephyr engine, even if it was better than the Bristol
engine it replaced. In the end Carroll Shelby came
along with the American V8 plan and we know the
rest.
P-A’s 3A
As Lord Montagu was still in his twenties at this point,
there was usually a weekly attempt to set an unofficial
speed record between London and Hampshire. The
light body and leaf-sprung live rear axle made the
rear end tail-happy in a developing Ford tradition, and
Lord M had a word with the Beaulieu plumber and
got some lead fixed to the boot floor. This apparently
worked a treat, and shortened the London-Beaulieu
times considerably. There was no speed limit in the
early 1950s, although you could be prosecuted for
“wanton and furious driving”.
That first Zephyr went to Venice as well as on many
French trips, and subsequent Zephyrs and Zodiacs also
saw much service on continental trips. There were
no Channel car ferries in the early 1950s either – you
drove your car to the docks, and it was winched on
to a ship by crane and cables. This was apparently a
matter for crossed fingers, as the crane drivers occasionally
dropped somebody’s pride and joy on to the
dockside.
There was also the Silver City Airways air ferry
service, which Lord Montagu remembered as being
ridiculously cheap, based on a car and four people.
It used a commercial Bristol 170 aircraft with an
opening nose to fly from Lydd in Kent to France and
Switzerland. The inaugural Silver City cross-channel
route was from Lydd to Le Touquet: in another odd
small-world resonance, a ‘road trip’ coming up in this
very magazine is a trip in a Robin aircraft from Lydd
to Le Touquet for lunch.
Yet another small-world Zephyr resonance is that the
Bristol car company decided to stop manufacturing car
engines in 1961, dropping the AC car company in the
poo with their Ace, as AC had abandoned making their
own ancient 100bhp engines and committed to buying
120bhp engines from Bristol. AC’s emergency option
was the Ford Zephyr engine: cheap, tough, revvy and
quite powerful at 170bhp, once the dreadful exhaust
arrangement was changed for a proper manifold and
more carbs. The standard Zephyr system involves the
exhaust piping being clamped to the side of the cylinder
head, with holes cut in it roughly where the exhaust
ports exit. The Ford option didn’t go down very
Lord Montagu was getting more and more interested
in automotive history by now. The Zephyr bore the
registration AA19, but the plate AA20 has been in the
family since 1912. AA20 is now on a De Dion Bouton:
it was the first car to be an exhibit in the Beaulieu
museum and is still the first car you see when you
enter the museum, which we recommend you make
an effort to do. The Zephyr’s AA19 plate is now on
a 1925 Rolls-Royce Phantom that belonged to the
previous generation, John Scott-Montagu, the 2nd
Lord Montagu. He was also a motoring pioneer, an
MP who enthusiastically promoted motoring: in 1899
he was the first person to drive a car into the yard of
the House of Commons, a 12hp Daimler. In the same
year, the same Daimler finished third in the touring
car class of the Paris-Ostend race. One of the first ever
motoring journalists, the 2nd Lord Montagu launched
the weekly The Car Illustrated and the monthly The
Car. The 3rd Lord Montagu, the subject of this story,
launched and edited Veteran and Vintage magazine for
23 years: it seems to be in the blood.
Pic credit Charles01. The 1951 Zephyr represented a
sea change in British cars, being a light monocoque
with independent front suspension. MkI Zephyrs
were bangers when I was a teen, and many fellow
boomers will remember them with affection.
Pics P-A Nord, Paul Pannack, Iain Ayre
This story was originally published in Triumph
World, and is published here in an extended
version with more pictures.
Per-Anders Nord, editor of the Swedish
TR club’s impressive magazine, goes by
the name P-A which saves time.
Perhaps it’s a surprise to find that a diehard Triumphisto,
the editor of a Triumph magazine, drives a modified
rather than just a gleaming TR3A. Is nothing
sacred? Should we be appalled? Some will be.
On the other hand, P-A’s approach to rebuilding his
TR in a custom format that suits his own ideas has
been executed in the perfect manner that should keep
everybody happy. Nothing that has been done cannot
be returned to standard in a few days of spannering,
other than the louvred bonnet, and not only is the
incorrect fibreglass front panel removable, but the
optional original steel panel has already been restored,
prepped and painted to match the rest of the car. Further
moral support for P-A is that his car is a tribute
to a specific TR2, the one that came 19th at Le Mans
in 1955, driven by Leslie Brooke and Mortimer Morris-Goodall.
Part 1 of 2
P-A is therefore ethically squeaky clean. Originality
versus modification is a saloon-bar argument that will
keep classic car enthusiasts happily aerated forever,
but nobody can object to mods that can be reversed in
an afternoon with a couple of spanners.
Putting a big-block V8 in a rodded pristine 2000
Roadster or cutting the roof off an Italia would generate
justified outrage and abuse, and rarities such as
prototypes, race cars with history and the few remaining
examples of any rare type should be treated with
respect and left original - but if you want to make
something more personal out of one of the remaining
thousands of mainstream Triumphs while rescuing it,
bash on and enjoy yourself.
So what were the mods that P-A applied to his TR3A?
First and obviously, he’s used a TR3 front panel. This
is fibreglass and just bolts in place. He always liked
the Le Mans yellow/green No. 68 Triumph racing
colour scheme, but it doesn’t work very well with
the later wide-mouthed TR3A grille. The later grille
doesn’t really work very well stylistically anyway, be-

it’s been left alone for the moment. An engine that
achieved both 100mph and 34mpg in 1955 does not
need to be upgraded.
The yellow nose band identified just one of the Le
Mans Triumphs. There were also red, white and
blue noses contrasting with the BRG base colour.
The influential 1948 Jaguar XK120 was responsible
for some dramatic waistlines in cars that
followed. The later TR6, developed from the TR2
chassis, retains a slightly cramped cockpit because
your elbows originally went outside rather than
inside a TR.
Even with a full-size spare wheel and tyre secreted
behind the number plate, the TR3 has a useful boot.
cause it’s a modernising update from 1957, and when
history has moved on, the pre-update original, which
is usually a more cohesive design, frequently looks
better. The most desirable later big Triumph nowadays
is the TR5 or TR250, because it offers the old-school
Michelotti styling combined with the improved performance,
independent suspension and straight six of the
upcoming TR6.
Other than the styling upgrade, P-A’s improvements
have mainly been in the braking, steering and gearing
arenas. He likes the sturdy four-cylinder Triumph
engine, and the one in the car is a good strong one so
P-A’s TR has been an expat for most of its life, having
been exported new to Albuquerque in the USA
in 1958. In the 1990s it was repatriated to the UK by
a Brit and then sold to a Swedish dentist, who took
it home to Sweden. P-A bought it from the dentist in
2010, in drivable condition, with the engine rebuilt. It
had been rebored out to 2138cc with a +10 thou crank
regrind, reconditioned conrods and the internals fully
balanced. P-A has added electronic ignition, to get the
best power out of it and to enhance reliability. This has
so far worked for him, but not for me: so far, aftermarket
electronic ignition has a 100% failure rate. So,
fingers crossed for P-A.
The restoration was a full body-off job, with the main
body tub sympathetically repaired rather than restored
to new. All the original panels went back on to the car
after repairs. The inner wings are rather battered, having
been bashed out, apparently with a brick, after a
historical and what must have been a fairly substantial
impact that probably required replacement wings and
a front panel. The inner wings remain bashed, but are
freshly painted: they’re part of the car’s history. The
bent front bumper irons on the chassis have simply
been deleted. Not Required On Voyage, as the sticker
on the old steamer trunks used to say.
You can’t easily design a monocoque that has an
Audrey Hepburn waist, but you can do it if you
have a chassis. Full styling advantage was taken of
this option.
With a strong engine of a decent size, the TR is quite a fast car, and it feels a great deal faster with the cutaway
doors making it seem almost like a motorbike.

One of the big bonuses of restoring traditional sports
cars that have a proper chassis is that they dismantle
into manageable pieces: with the exterior panels detached,
inverting or moving the body tub is a piece of
cake. Cake is incidentally very important in Sweden:
one of the charming elements of Swedish culture is
Fika, which requires you to down tools, eat cake, drink
coffee and chat.
The solid-quality Triumph interior was all in
good condition, and was simply cleaned, detailed
and refitted to the car.
The body was restored mostly standard, apart from
two sets of louvres being let into the bonnet. This is
partly to make the rather featureless expanse of the
TR’s bonnet more visually entertaining, and partly to
relieve the underbonnet heat that will be generated by
another of P-A’s future plans for the car, about which
more later.
The chassis was in quite good shape, but after some
repairs it was treated to one of the TR chassis stiffening
kits that have developed over the decades of
both competition and high-mileage stress fractures.
Essentially, these include the lower wishbone mounts
at the front, the rear spring hangers, the rear suspension
turrets and triangular fillets at various corners.
Optionally, stiffening the X-brace between the main
chassis rails is also a good idea. TR stiffening kits are
easily available from Triumph World’s advertisers,
and researching the chassis bracing carried out on the
factory works competition cars would provide some
useful ideas. Racing established where more stiffness
was needed.
Having stiffened the chassis, P-A then converted the
steering from the TR3A’s steering box to the rack
system fitted to TR4s and newer TRs. This makes the
steering both sharper and lighter, and given that P-A
is using radial tyres that add steering weight, it makes
good sense.
All of this was carried out in close consultation with
our friend Bengt Åkerblom, owner of a rare and delicious
Triumph Italia: these people are full-on Triumph
enthusiasts and most of their available spare time is
spent in, under or around Triumphs. Fortunately for
P-A, his wife Kerstin is also cheerfully involved –
she’s the designer of the club magazine that P-A edits.
So she entirely understands midnight finishes and
deadlines.
The gearbox has been changed to a 5-speed Toyota
Supra box, with a conversion kit from HVDA Triumph
Transmission Conversions, available from Moss Mo-

The engine had been freshly and well rebuilt with
some balancing when P-A bought the car, and it
will be rested under a bench when the new blown
engine is fitted.
tors. The Supra box is a good one, used in quite a lot
of V8 Cobra kit builds, and this gearbox can be, and
in this case has been, modified to handle 300bhp plus.
That’s a good idea, given the next development that’s
under way. Fifth gear ratios vary, but all the fifth gears
on Toyota boxes are overdrives, with a drop of at least
20% in cruising rpm. 1950s cars were never designed
for sustained speeds above 50mph because there were
very few places where you could do that. Where higher
consistent speeds are possible, it’s well worth the effort
of sorting out a cruising fifth gear to drop revs, noise,
wear and stress. The Triumph’s final drive ratio is a
reasonable 3.7:1. Wheels are light eight-spoke Minator
alloys, 5.5J x 15” with 185/70 x 15 Vredestein radials,
and P-A is very happy with them.
The final update for P-A’s TR was the upgrading of the
brakes to TR4 specs. They were TR3A discs anyway,
now they’re better TR4 discs.
The body went back on with its rusty corners repaired
and the exterior panels fettled and sorted, and then
it was time for several coats of modern primer and
then a top coat of British Racing Green. BRG is a very
flexible concept, and now really just means a nice darkish
green. In this case it’s Jaguar Racing Green, 701/
HEN. The new fibreglass TR3 front panel was prepped,
painted BRG with yellow and fitted, but the old steel
TR3A front panel was also restored and painted at the
same time.
The interior was in pretty good shape and was just
detailed and cleaned. The car has now covered around
2000 miles since its rebuild, and a future trip of 2600
miles will see it at the Triumph TR register international
meet at Malvern in Worcestershire, recommended
as being an excellent event.
The hints about further performance refer to this winter’s
project for Bengt and P-A, which is a brewing up a
low-compression TR4 engine to be fitted with a supercharger…
watch this space.
Wire wheels look very nice, but a set of
alloys substantially reduces unsprung
weight and helps handling. Painting
them body colour works well too.
Above: Back home after the restoration. The garage is not wide, but
is usefully two cars long.
Left: There’s no pressing need for the bonnet louvres while the engine
remains standard, but future forced induction will dramatically
raise engine bay temperature. We’re ready for that.

It’s always fun having your car featured and photographed:
if you drive something amusing, tell
us about it at Iain@WireWheelsMagazine.com
Prowling the narrow streets of Stockholm. Most of
the city is quite old, and P-A lives near the centre.
Here’s the block for the low-compression new engine
being brewed up ready for supercharging.
The period Judson supercharger doesn’t have a reputation
for major power gains, but we’ll see how it does
after Bengt and P-A have sorted it out.
P-A has enjoyed driving this car since finishing it, and now he’s supercharging it for next summer.

Body tub turned out to be not too bad when stripped.
There seems to be a small lion standing on it, or a
very large cat.
Front inner wings seem to have been bashed
straight with a brick or a stone axe or something.
Straight wings and front panel are probably period
replacements.
Roadgoing TRs benefit from a chassis stiffening
kit when a chassis is stripped and restored, not just
those used for rallying: they all tend to suffer from
fatigue cracks.
The rear damper mount is one of the chassis’s weak
areas, and the welded-on stiffening cradle reinforces
three sides of the chassis beam.
The engine had been
recently and successfully
rebuilt while the
car was domiciled in
England, so it was just
painted and put back in.
One of the benefits of a separate chassis – two sturdy chaps can carry the empty body tub around to be
welded and painted, no bother.

A rich coat of Jaguar’s version of British Racing green
for the finished body. It’s convenient to paint other panels
separately, but reassembly then requires max care.
Dr Åkerblom deals with the gearbox upgrade to a fivespeed.
Sweden is big and only has ten million people,
so the roads are empty: a fifth gear is well worthwhile.
The wide-mouthed frog look of 1958 was a cool and fashionable modern update: looking back from 2018, many
prefer the early small grille. P-A sourced a new TR3 front panel in GRP for his car.
Designers often forget to provide an exit for engine
bay heat, so these louvres help out. There’s going to be
more underbonnet heat from the blower next year, so
this is also forward planning.
The body rust was limited to just a few vulnerable
corners, easily repairable with steel, tin-snips and a
MIG welder.
P-A and Bengt admire the finished rolling chassis. Next job is the body restoration. Bengt has a nice garage but
no room to build it bigger, so work is mostly done elsewhere.

The interior was in quite
good shape, and was
cleaned and reassembled.
Woodrim Moto-Lita
steering wheel is always
a good idea.
The reassembly is almost complete. Replica old-school Lucas battery is a nice touch. Wrinkled
inner wings are out of sight, so no worries.
In another discreet minor
deviation from standard, a
new aluminium radiator is
fitted with a fairly substantial
pusher fan. July in Sweden
can see 30°C temperatures.
The car that inspired P-A’s colour scheme and styling: 1955’s Le Mans entry. The TRs did well in many motorsport
arenas, and are still respectably fast now.

The Ayrspeed Diaries
The Silver Wraith Speedster
Part I
The origins of this Silver Wraith speedster
go way back, to 1977 and the demise of the
portly British character actor Sebastian
Cabot, who appeared as a butler in many
Hollywood films and TV series.
Cabot lived in Victoria BC between films, and drove a
1950 Silver Wraith. After he died, the car was sold to a
North Vancouver dealer, who instructed an apprentice
to strip the paint ready for a quick paint job. The apprentice
obediently complied, using a 10” grinder and
removing quite a lot of the surface of the aluminium
coachwork as well as trashing the interior and glass.
The car was scrap, and was sold minus the body to
designer Brian Johnston. When he should have been
working, Brian spent many hours drawing sketches
of the magnificent bodywork he was one day going to
create for the car.
The image that inspired my original plan for the Silver
Wraith chassis when I still owned it. Delete running
boards, install cycle mudguards: a big, handsome open
sports tourer.
He even got as far as a mockup of a cabriolet idea
in thin plywood: but then research with the Chapron
coachbuilding company’s heirs on his unidentified pile
of Delahaye bits revealed that Brian owned the mortal
remains of the 1947 Paris show car. The Wraith, not to
put too fine a point on it, got the boot.
I didn’t really want an elaborate full-bodied two-door
sports cabriolet, I fancied something between a 1930
Bentley and a 1920s Phantom, so I bought the Wraith
project. It ambled across on the BC ferry to Vancouver,
where it sat under my deck for some years as
more urgent matters arose, although bits and pieces
were collected for it: a Jaeger clock, a genuine 1920s
Bentley steering wheel, a MkVI gear lever.
Then the Wraith project got pushed even further back
when a rescue MkVI Bentley presented itself: this one
had been raided to keep other RR club cars going, but
was more or less still intact. It could be put back on
the road pro tem, much more quickly than the longterm
project building the body for the Wraith.
Except that it couldn’t. The prices asked for the trivial
bits and pieces missing from the car - wiper system,
door handles, that sort of thing – totalled something
like $20,000. It would be cheaper to throw it away and
buy another one. It joined the increasingly posh scrapyard
that is the editorial garden.
Then a rather dramatic idea planted itself: a boattailed
Bentley. The roots of this new idea began in
Angouleme, at the fantastic annual vintage race held
in this delightful southern French hilltop town, around
the ramparts of which mad people race vintage cars
every September. It’s a bucket list event and will be
extolled in full ere long in WireWheels Magazine.
One of the anomalies surrounding this racing is that
one of the early vintage grids is jammed with a suspiciously
large number of Type 35 Bugattis, but is not
advertised as a Bugatti race. It turns out that the reason
for not calling it a Bugatti race is that the few brave
people who actually entered real Bugattis protested
that calling it a Bugatti race was bollocks, because the
cars were nearly all fakes.
This was fascinating, as every Type 35 in the paddock
looked absolutely right for 1925. The fakes are made
in Argentina, and are beautiful and virtually undistinguishable
from the real thing. They are made by Pur
Sang, they cost around $200,000 and they are patinated
after being built.
It became a fascinating business trying to spot the
real cars, as the fake patination is superb. You really
have to dig down into experience and psychology.

I always like to use 3D mockups rather than drawings when inventing cars. You can’t sit in a drawing, and real-world
mistakes and dead ends are immediately obvious.
Sidetrack #1. I’m like a dog spotting a squirrel. This
attractive 1937 Charlesworth sports saloon body was rescued
from an Alvis special project, because it could have
looked excellent on the Wraith chassis. But - both the
body and chassis would have had to be mutilated to make
it fit, so the body went off to Australia to be reunited with
a correct 1937 Alvis chassis.
The number and quality of repairs, or lack thereof, is
a clue: very few people would deliberately damage a
new car and weld it back together, so those with no
repairs are likely fakes. On a racing car almost 100
years old, there will be gas-welded, stick-welded,
MIG-welded and possibly TIG-welded repairs. After a
while, clues come into focus: a huge new LED brake
light suggests a real Bugatti, because the owner knows
his car is real, he doesn’t need to prove it, and he
doesn’t want his $3,300,000 treasure to be rear-ended
by a $200,000 fake. The same Bugatti has its French
registration written on the tail in Sharpie. It has exactly
the right degree of care/carelessness in the calligraphy
that would be applied to a priceless but well-used
possession, neither too casual nor too perfect. That
precise degree of casualness would be difficult to fake.
I’m not a big fan of open-wheeled racing cars, so I
spent much of their track time over the race weekend
checking out Pur Sangs. The end result was a deep appreciation
of the perfect proportions of the petite Type
35 body, which is typical form-and-function Bugatti
sculptural genius.
Sidetrack #2. The tiny Type 35 Bugatti body encountered and examined and admired
at the Angouleme vintage races has absolutely exquisite proportions. Would
that shape translate to a big Bentley scale?

The boat-tail Bentley, mocked up for the 2018 ABFM , where it got a pleasing reception. That body was sold to Al Levit with
the Wraith chassis, but the developing Wraith body lines meant none of it could actually be used. It may yet be revived.
This idea hooked RWM’s Rob Maynard as well, and we happily wasted a couple of months of evenings making it happen.
It’s astonishing how long a relatively simple body can take to create.
The reason for using the word “fake” rather than
“replica” or “lookalike” is the dishonesty. Faking
patina and entering Pur Sangs in a race as Bugattis is
not on. We have absolutely no problem with honest
replicas and lookalikes.
I began to wonder if the exquisite Type 35 shape
would translate to something several times the size,
built on the redundant chassis of my Bentley? There
was no guarantee that it would – I have seen several
designs falling flat on their faces during the translation
from small pretty clay model to full-sized hideous
gargoyle.
I got talking to my friend Rob Maynard of the RWM
restoration shop in Delta BC. A talented automotive
sculptor, he also thought this Bugatti-inspired Bentley
body was a fascinating idea, and the upshot was several
months of absorbing evening time spent cutting,
rolling, hammering and tweaking.
With a major local car show coming up, the Bentley
body overflowed into daytime and many more hands
got involved, and it squeaked past the show deadline
after some very late nights. It was received with
delight by the audience, and I got a sore throat from a
full day of endless chat.
A success overall, and although not a beauty, it ended
up a spectacular and handsome car.
So now what? You can only fit aeroscreens on a car
like that, you can’t legitimately fit a screen or a roof
of any sort. As a car, such a thing is actually not much
use, and I hadn’t made it happen because I wanted to
own it, but to see if it could be done.
I wrote a story about it in the RROC club magazine,
suggesting that another member buy it and take it
forwards.
A call came from Al Levit in Chicago, very excited
about the idea of buying the Rolls chassis and
the boat-tail off the Bentley, and having a car built
that would be influenced by one of Brian Johnston’s
sketches. Would I be able to orchestrate such a build?
Too right I would, it’s an excellent idea. Do I know the
right people to execute it? Absolutely. Rob Maynard
at RWMandCo for the bodywork, and local engineer
and prototypist Adam Trinder at AMT Machine for the
chassis and structural work.
Selling the RR and the boat tail to Al actually worked
fine for me as well, because if I kept the leftover Bentley
chassis and not the Rolls, I could create something
more like a Blower Bentley than a Phantom. Changing
my own plan was no problem at all.
A deal was done, Ayrspeed Automotive Adventures
Ltd came back to life and the build commenced. Al
is the best client Ayspeed could hope for – reliable,
flexible, supportive, enthusiastic, involved and good
company. We all look forward to his inspection visits.

Background - Ayrspeed’s history
The sketch for the Brookland Swallow trike. Strong Italian 1960s influence, like many British cars. The
Brooklands museum set lawyers on me over the Brookland Motor Company name, so BMC (geddit?) died and
Ayrspeed was born.
The prototype on road trials. It drove very well indeed,
but was too heavy to be driven on a motorcycle licence, so
the Reliant three-wheeler drivers queuing up to order one
couldn’t use it. This was another prototype that did its job
of proving or disproving an idea.
ing occasions when my chassis improvement suggestions
were received with initial abuse but later quietly
applied.
The first original Ayrspeed design was the Swallow, a
2+2 three-wheeler using the Mini engine package. It
started as a spaceframe but evolved into a box perimeter
affair in consultation with Chris Hollier, another
outlaw car designer who got dragged into various daft
projects. Cobretti’s Bob Busbridge is another man who
now backs away making the sign of the cross when I
tell him I’ve had an idea.
The next design was the Ayrspeed Six, a replica of
the gorgeous Jaguar XK120, born out of the dreadful
dynamics of the real thing. Jaguar was forced to use
an existing high-set prewar saloon chassis chopped
short and fitted with a low and slinky body, leaving
no room for humans: Ayrspeed was not. The high and
My degree is actually in teaching English and art,
but modern schoolteaching is fairly unpleasant, very
hard work and insultingly underpaid, so the teaching
career was brief. After some time spent drawing
cartoons for an airline newspaper and shooting test
shots for model agencies, I ended up as an advertising
copywriter, climbing the slippery pole to J. Walter
Thompson in Mayfair. Working at JWT was very
pleasant indeed: the company canteen was Langan’s
Brasserie, the work was high-level and interesting,
and then JWT was bought by a yobbo with borrowed
bank money and was suddenly in trouble. If the UK’s
second-top ad agency was in the poo it was probably
time for a new career, which was motoring journalism
and books. Some writing was mainstream, such as
MiniMag, Triumph World, Fast Ford, Classic Cars,
launch-editing Classic Ford, but most was in the field
of high-performance kit cars.
The kit car world spans a very wide spectrum. Many
are dreadful things, recycling shopping tat mechanicals
into an amateurish chassis with clumsy bodywork
made of wattle and daub.
Others are the work of brilliant maverick engineer/artists
too independent, creative and disobedient to work
for Ford.
The top kit car boys are way ahead: Lee Noble is a kit
car man, and the Ultima kit supercar pissed all over
Koenigseggs and Veyrons for a decade, unbeaten in
0-60, 0-100, fastest quarter-mile and fastest 0-100-0.
On street tyres, and driven by the managing director.
The Ultima’s 0-60 was eventually beaten by another
kit car, a bike-engined Seven lookalike, but you might
say that it was cheating because it had two engines.
Decades of looking at both very good and very bad car
designs has been very useful, and led to several amus-
The first Swallow prototype, created with Chris Hollier in
deepest Norfolk. Mini mechanicals and doors, and the tail
was from a Volvo P1800, narrowed by 18” and with the fins
extended to reach their full glory. This was a lot of fun.
The Ayrspeed Six. Looked exactly like an XK120 Jag, but with a completely new light, stiff, practical perimeter frame/
spaceframe and XJ6 mechanicals. About a dozen or so were made, and the primary plan was achieved: building an XK
that felt and drove as well as it looked.

Jim Clarke worked at Lotus and made the clay for the
Lotus Elan +2. He was too nice to get or take any credit.
Two squirrel-chasers can’t be effective partners, sadly.
The slowly brewing Ayrspeed Eight will combine a rude
variation on the AC Cobra theme with a 302 Ford V8
and lightweight Mazda Miata running gear in a backbone-ish
spaceframe with perimeter beams.
The Miata track is much wider than the Cobra, which
means fat 1970s bulgy bubble front wheel arches need
to be made. That will balance out the wide 427 rear end.
This is a lookalike/interpretation anyway, not a replica.
rather truckish Jag ladder chassis was replaced by a
perimeter and spaceframe structure, completely hidden
within the original skin and interior, stiffer than an insulted
golf club blazer and with the handling and performance
of a D-Type. The seat height was dropped
by something like seven inches, with the floor slung
under the chassis rather than perched on top of it.
The Manx was a project partnered with the amiable,
talented but helmless Jim Clarke, designer of the
Lotus Elan +2, but it ended in an amiable divorce on
the day when he stopped making the agreed final production
moulds and started redesigning the whole car
because somebody’s girlfriend said the sills were too
high and she didn’t want to show her knickers. Slap
head, roll eyes. An attractive trike design based on a
gash XK120 bonnet, and a dramatic city buggy, were
stillborn.
The slowly brewing Ayrspeed Eight was, and is, a
Cobra lookalike. It was originally the Police Cobra,
with the idea of using old cop cars to brew up a budget
Cobra. The prototype did its job in establishing that
this was a crap idea. That project languished until I
discovered that propane has an octane rating of 110,
which means it’s race fuel. That allows the use of
insane amounts of turbo boost without melting pistons,
which happens within minutes if you overboost with
petrol.
Using lightweight Miata running gear, a propane
turbo 1700lb Cobra would have been the fastest ever
Cobra-shaped object. Keeping up with it in a conventional
2500lb Cobra replica would have required a
twin-turbo big-block, which would have ended up in
the kitty-litter at the first corner of Mission Raceway,
which is where I would have invited the Cobra world
to come and fight me.
Again, though, as with the boat-tailed open Bentley,
do I really want to own a viciously fast four-cylinder
Cobra? No. But the excellent Miata running gear is a
sound plan, and a secondhand Ford 302 V8 with a T5
will do nicely. The chassis will be a backbone connecting
the Miata subframes and adapted to the existing
cabin and floor structure.
The original massive and very wide spaceframe transmission
tunnel required for mid-front weight balance
with the heavy Ford block can be trimmed for more
cockpit space, and the engine can be allowed to move
forward a little. There will be a propane tank as well
as a fuel tank in the back, so it will balance nicely.
The job at hand is the Wraith, though, so back to that.
The extreme mid-front engine position meant very cramped footboxes. A less extreme engine position will allow a rethink
and a welcome increase in interior space.

The A BFM
There are dozens of carefully crafted vistas to be ambled
around. Even if you do spanners rather than spades, it’s
interesting to look at something different for a change.
A nice Derby Bentley with an
excellent radiator mascot. The
owner has been reducing his
collection, one of which was
my Bentley S1.
Vancouver’s annual All British Field Meet is a treat: put it on your bucket list.
First of all, Vancouver is an excellent place for a holiday,
as you can ski and sail in the same day, although
that does sound rather exhausting and requires both
boats and skis. You can do this in scenery that resembles
Scotland, only more so, and with less rain. British
Columbia offers truly spectacular landscapes from
seas to mountains to deserts, and is well worth exploring
whether or not there is a classic car show at the
centre of a trip.
The Field Meet itself is held in a major botanical garden.
Even if you have no particular interest in matters
botanic, the Van Dusen Gardens is full of all sorts of
intriguing approaches to garden architecture and some
strange new plants, some of which look very unlikely
and are possibly of alien origin. It’s well worth a few
hours of ambling, and the restaurant is good.
For those with non-petrolhead partners, the ABFM is a
very good car show to propose, as persons who are not
interested in cars but are interested in the rest of the
world will be genuinely happily occupied exploring
the gardens. You can meet up for lunch and talk over
each other.
The date for the event is a Saturday in mid-May:
Spring has usually sprung so there will be a lot of colourful
plant action going on. There’s a chance it will
rain, but that will just make Brits feel at home.
What will not make Brits feel at home is the quality
and rarity of the cars exhibited. From WWII on, most
of the best British cars were exported in a very serious
effort to make sure there was food on the UK’s table.
Many of them are still here. The Vancouver ratio of
Sunbeam Tigers to Alpines, and of Triumph TR8s to
TR7s, is enough to make a strong Brit weep. Or emigrate.
Wire Wheels magazine helped to judge the Debuting
Restorations. That gave us the chance to load up the
points in favour of those who get hands-on and carry
out their own resto work.
However, as the Americans economically say, show
don’t tell. Here’s a sample of the event entrants, most
of which come back annually.
This Aston Martin was left unused
for quite a few years, which doesn’t
make sense until you know that the
owner also has an Ulster replica.
Talbot and Alvis Firebird show the
best of British. There are quite a few
Alvises in British Columbia.

Very rare Rover 10 with a Tickford drophead body was
restored by Vancouver Island’s Steve Harris as a labour
of love. It makes no financial sense, but he has saved
many obscure British coachbuilts.
An impressive line-up of postwar MG T series cars. The
local club is pretty hardcore – as well as meeting for a
weekly breakfast, they drive these cars to California and
anywhere else they can think of.
My ride to and from the ABFM, a 1911 Silver Ghost.
No front brakes, but other than that, still a surprisingly
usable car at 107 years old.
MGAs by the dozen as well. 95% of the 1950s MGAs were
exported, many of them to the West coast of North America.
Many of them are still here.
An Alvis Speed 25, converted to a special in the last year
or two.
Looks as though the Alvis is running a little rich.

There were some good deals among the 30 or so classics
for sale, and low-value Canadian dollars make the deals
even tastier.
TR250s are the same as TR5s both in spec and in rarity. Here are two of them among the line of TR4s.
Shiny rubber-bumper MGB with chrome wires and a
cosmetic roll-over bar with padding that matches the seat,
and there’s something going on under the bonnet.
The line-up of TR7s is not: it’s all TR8s. Half a dozen or
so. Sometimes there’s a TR7 at the end of the line, looking
slightly self-conscious and inadequate.
It’s a supercharger that’s going on. The MGB’s long-stroke
and already torquey engine responds well to being blown.
Yes, these are all Sunbeam Tigers.With Ford V8s. It
sounds pretty damn good when they start up their engines
to go home. Oh, and I think there might have been an
Alpine too. Don’t really remember.

This gorgeous Jag drophead was fresh from 30 years of
off-and-on restoration. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to
see a feature about it in the fullness of time.
The total number of entries is slightly restricted by the size
of the venue, but it doesn’t ever get crowded and you can
get around the whole event comfortably during the day.
Vancouver Mini Club is active and sends a decent display
along with the non–member Minis.
A brass band plays British brassy stuff. Elgar, Britten,
Purcell, Land of Hope and. But thankfully nothing from
Andrew Lloyd Webber.
WireWheels mag judged
Debuting Restorations
in 2019. We’re not
huge fans of cotton-bud
contests, but fresh home
restorations are another
thing entirely.
A miasma of Mokes: the long, warm, dry BC summers
make Mokes a tempting proposition.
If the automotive beauty and cheery chat all gets a bit much you can repair to a quiet corner, and sit and think. Or just sit.
Triple SUs on a cool
powder blue TR6. A
recent shock was discovering
that three much-derided
Strombergs are actually
the best way to fuel
a Triumph straight six.

A on the Rover stand, some examples of auto electrical
disasters where the smoke has got out of the wires.
Odd and very rare Morris Marina cabrio variant. Based on the 1.8 TC which essentially had an MGB engine and box
and was quite fun in a tail-happy way.
Rovers make a decent showing.
More Rovers. Before being blended in with BMC, Rover
had a distinct reputation for high quality and innovative
engineering.
Very pretty Marcos GT, but it was the impressive period
beard that caught our eye. It does rather look as though
the owner has got his head on upside down.
This is not a baby buggy, this is not even a pram: it’s a
Perambulator. Coachbuilt, leather-suspended, pinstriped
and gleaming. Didn’t notice whether it came with an
accessory baby.
Rather dramatic entrance. The whole place is architecturally
interesting.
Must be heading for lunchtime; the restaurant overlooks
the gardens, all very attractive. Better to make a booking
in advance, though.
Spectacular Healey making a debut appearance. Recently
restored to a very high standard.
Part of the fun of British car shows is the nostalgia for good
times long gone. On the fondly-remembered Ayre cars-owned
list is a HealeyMinster – one of the big Austin Westminsters
in black, with walnut, leather and an Austin Healey engine.

The vintage racing fraternity is quite healthy in BC, although
as the wrinklies retire, the age of acceptable classic
racers has to rise to include, dear oh dear, Datsuns.
A total of four Fords showed up. UK Fords were never a
big success in North America. Possibly because a Galaxy
was cheaper than a Zephyr.
Many Lotuses spend half their lives in pieces and suspended
from rafters, because you can. They look great
when they’re assembled, even if it’s only temporary.
Time to go home, but only three people are going home in
a 1911 Ghost.
Awards at the end of the day. The judging is not to Pebble
Beach standards so there can be grousing – but in real
terms the owners already know how their cars compare.
Land Rovers, like Citroen 2CVs, just don’t look right
without dents and wrinkles on the front wings. The LR
display at the ABFM is varied and impressive.
Hanging about outside, not permitted inside due to its lack of Britishness, is this Citroen 2CV. The owner ditched his
baguette and moustache and sneaked in pretending to be a Brit.

Road Trip
Steveston BC to Point Roberts USA
This isn’t a land road trip, but a sea road trip,
and a first small voyage on a friend’s rather
magnificent new old-school motor yacht.
a busy professional wife who doesn’t get much free
time. Makora was too big, with basic and rather dark
accommodation, lit by a few small portholes.
Sea Beast is a handsome boat with a wooden hull based
on fishing boat lines. Sea-kindly, practical and roomy.
Steve is a screenwriter with a few major successes
behind him, such as Max Headroom in the 1980s, and
the cult film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, from which
my favourite line is - “Generally, once I’ve eaten
something, I don’t want to see it again.”
Some of the successes have been celebrated by buying
boats, planes and Bentleys, and the previous much
bigger yacht was one such purchase, initially a delight
but lately unsuited to current needs.
The previous boat was Makora, a 47-ft gaff cutter, a
serious blue-water yacht capable of circumnavigating
the world in all weathers, and much fun was had
in her. However, she was designed in 1933 for long
voyages with a crew, and the owner’s current seagoing
habits have changed from oceanic ventures with several
hardcore marine friends to local potterings with
The new boat, christened Sea Beast after a favourite
historical dog named Beast, is a Carl Chamberlin 36,
a motor sailor with a gaff ketch rig. Two masts, with a
foresail up front, and a second boom on the mainmast
that provides a squarish rather than triangular mainsail,
and a smaller triangular sail on the rear mast. All
sail control lines lead to the cockpit, for easy singlehanded
sailing.
The engine is probably of more interest to WireWheels
readers than the sails, though – it’s a vintage Gardner
3L diesel, very slow-running and efficient, and overhauled
back in the UK by Gardner* before being fitted
to the boat. Gardner don’t make diesels any more, but
an offshoot company still exists to look after their old
The boat was commissioned to provide lots of light and
airy accommodation, with a big open cockpit, a crabbing
platform at the stern and three big sails to play with.
Main cabin and wheelhouse contains the galley, dining booth, inside steering position with radar display, marine
GPS, engine gauges. Cabins are forward and below, engine room is under the floor.
engines. The engine idles at 500rpm, and gives the
boat almost a 10mph cruising speed with the engine
turning at 1200rpm. There’s just a rumbling from the
basement and the sound of the sea going past.
The engine was imported as a museum exhibit, which
is quite genuine: the owner is genuinely delighted
to demonstrate and elucidate re the engine, and will
extol its virtues and history to anybody who shows an
interest.
There’s lots of light and space in the cabins, and
there’s a crabbing platform on the stern. The boat was
launched last year, having been built in wood by the
boatbuilding school in Port Townsend, Washington.
It’s 36ft long, and exactly the maximum width to be
trucked on a low-loader trailer without any problems.
The plan is that it will live between Los Angeles and
Vancouver: sailing south is easy with the prevailing
winds, but returning north is hard work and much better
achieved on a low-loader.
The trip in question was a matter of retrieving the boat
after minor work at a Richmond shipyard, and moving
it to its usual berth on Point Roberts, which is an odd
little section of the USA on a promontory in Canada –
it’s below the 49th parallel so it’s US territory.
Cars were placed in the right locations for retrieval
and the boat was fired up. We left at the top of the high
tide to use the fairly strong Fraser tidal current to push
us downstream. Coffee, muffins and off we go.
The Fraser River has several branches going through
Vancouver and the silty delta shallows go way out,
for several miles. It looks as though you’re out in the
open sea, but the GPS and depth sounder say different,
with quite a narrow channel. You’re navigating by

Jack the Kelpie replaces favourite and well-remembered
dog named Beast. Kelpies are smart Australian cattle dogs
that run over the backs of the herd rather than taking the
long way round. Because why wouldn’t you?
buoys that show the channel, heading straight out west
into the Salish Sea between Vancouver and Vancouver
Island. The channel buoys keep coming, and with
each one you’re thinking this must be the last one, and
finally it is. The shallow sea is quite choppy at this
point, as we’re hitting the waves diagonally, but the
boat is happy and rides the sea strongly and comfortably.
I was wondering how I’d feel about sailing out this
way, because the last time I was here I got shipwrecked
and sunk. I was on the crew of the Steveston
Lifeboat, out on a rough winter night doing radar
training, and the tide, river speed and wind were misjudged
by the helmsman, so we hit the rocks and sank.
Cold, dark, increasingly stormy, genuinely dangerous
and although discipline and training held and we were
successfully rescued by the other local lifeboat, it was
not guaranteed that we were all going to survive.
Many very stupid comments were later made on social
media by people who weren’t there, which was in
itself interesting. The expert armchair babblers reckoned
that lifeboat training shouldn’t be carried out in
bad weather. As we all know, of course, lifeboats only
carry out rescues on calm and sunny Sunday afternoons...
it reminded me that most opinions on social
media are very nearly worthless.
So how would I find myself reacting to sailing along
the same channel for the first time since the lifeboat
sinking? Well, I steered well clear of those bastard
rocks, but otherwise no mental bother at all, which
was good to know. Experiences like that can have a
dramatic effect on your mind, irrespective of any mental
strength you may think you possess: I have a friend
who was involved in the Paddington train crash, who
will never go near a train again.
Okay, out at sea far enough to have 60 feet under the
keel, and we turn gently leftward or to port. (a good
way of memorising port and starboard is that port
wine is red, and so’s left wing politics. Red is also the
colour of the port side navigation lights.)
The boat’s motion immediately calms down as soon
as we’re going in the same direction as the waves, and
then it’s just an easy cruise southwards to the marina
at Point Roberts. I was entirely happy at the helm,
keeping to deep water and avoiding floating logs. Give
me a steering wheel and I’m a happy bunny. Sea Beast
wouldn’t be sunk by hitting a log, but the resulting
dent in the massive wooden stem post would have to
be cut out and replaced to avoid future rot. A sunny
breezy weekday afternoon was free of traffic, and
after a couple of very pleasant hours of cruising, some
minor US passport bumf and we’re carefully backing
into Sea Beast’s berth.
The davits are usually swung out and have an inflatable
dinghy hung from them. There’s quite a swell from
astern, but we’re rolling with the flow so the motion is
comfy.
Payment for crewing and helmsman services comprised
Surf’n’Turf with a citrus-enlivened summer
wheat beer. It’s a tough old life.
On a good day you can see Mount Baker in Washington, fifty miles away. This was definitely a good day.
Alongside at Point Roberts after a twenty-sea-mile
voyage, and waiting for customs clearance. I only live a
quarter-mile away but it’s across the US/Canada border
so paperwork is required.

The Ayrspeed Diaries
The Open Cloud Project
Part I
The Open Cloud and Storm Cloud projects are a limited production of RR Silver Cloud and
Bentley S1 four-door saloons rebuilt as two-door convertibles for sale, in the style of the period
Mulliner coachbuilt conversions.
Steve’s previous boat Makora was a beautiful old 1930s thoroughbred, but unwieldy and rather gloomy below.
*Story – during a Gardner consultation visit, a
call came from India about a Gardner engine, resulting
in a confused conversation about when the
valves had last been adjusted, and then about the
last time the engine had been stopped and serviced.
It doesn’t stop, they were saying. What, never?
That’s right, it never stops. It runs machines in the
day and a generator for lights by night, and the
oil is changed while it’s still running. It turned out
that the last time the engine had been stopped was,
as far as anybody could remember, at least twelve
years previously.
This is a commercial project, brewed up in partnership
with Al Levit, Ayrspeed’s client who commissioned
the Golden Wraith. When the Wraith project was visibly
going well, Al asked if Ayrspeed could organise a
convertible Cloud for him as well, and then suggested
that we should make more similar cars for sale: that
instantly seemed like a fine idea.
The original Mulliner conversions sell for around
$600,000 and a good replica goes for about half that.
You can never tell how these commercial gambles are
going to go, but even if commercial success eludes
us, we will both drive away in a convertible two-door
Cloud – or in my case, a Bentley.
This is an intriguing project anyway, although it’s in
some ways more demanding and more complex than
creating a special from scratch. The (new) windows
must rise correctly in the lengthened and re-skinned
doors, and the roof must extend hydraulically, reliably
and without leaks. It must also work better visually
than the Mulliner roof, which when open is just
dumped inelegantly on the back of the car with a duvet
thrown over it.
RR designer John Blatchley’s Silver Cloud is a beautiful
car, and it solved a substantial styling problem
faced by Rolls-Royce in the early 1950s. They had to
blend modern styling with enough traditionalism to
keep old rich people buying their cars.
There is also the matter of the right sort of vulgarity.
Rolls-Royces must be slightly vulgar, but stylishly
vulgar. This is a delicate and subtle line which RR’s
current owners BMW fail to understand: their RRbadged
cars are just vulgar without being stylish.
It seems there was much argufying, committeeing and
discussion before Blatchley spread the Cloud sketches
out on the boardroom table. The Cloud design is actually
quite old-fashioned for 1955, but it is voluptuously
excessive in exactly the right way, and my feeling
is that it’s such a beauty that the Rolls-Royce suits
just saw the sketches and said okay, sold, we’ll make
that. One clue to this theory is that the doors look like
something of an afterthought, the rear doors in particular.
They are actually too small for a luxury passenger
car that was still often chauffeur-driven. The body
lines seem to me to have been drawn without thinking
about doors.

The S1 being inspected at the early stages of pressuring owner Robin to sell it to me.
Smooth out the clutter of the rear doors and windows,
and the two-door Clouds look even better than the
four-doors, and much more natural. If you can call a
seventeen-foot sports tourer natural.
A rusty Cloud II has been the base prototype, and my
own S1 Bentley will be the production prototype,
fitted with a V8 and then turbocharged to become the
first Storm Cloud. It will remain a serene, gorgeous
and voluptuous luxury gentleman’s club for one. But
press harder on the throttle pedal and it will instantly
erupt into a snarling, tyre-shredding monster. Speaking
softly and carrying a big stick is always a fine option,
and this is a very big stick.
Sold, then: Ayrspeed was entirely happy to throw itself
into the long and difficult process of design-prototype
followed by production-prototype followed by limited
production.
Regarding the Mulliner convertibles, there have been
two interesting and encouraging revelations. One is
the poor engineering of the bracing under the monocoque
of the Mulliner-converted Corniche convertible.
On the earlier Corniches, the bolted-on crossbrace
beneath the car is woefully inadequate, resulting in
atrocious scuttle shake and torsional floppiness.
The other is Mulliner’s Cloud roof design, which just
dumps the roof and frame on top of the tonneau panel,
where it sits in a pile looking very inelegant. Initial
investigation reveals that the standard boot hinges and
internal support springs intrude into the tonneau panel
area in front of the bootlid, and that’s why the roof is
just dumped on top of it.
Changing to external hinges and gas rams seems an
obvious solution, allowing the new roof cavity to be
trimmed right back to let the roof disappear inside the
car. After all, if much smaller and cheaper sports cars
have properly folding soft tops, why can’t a Rolls-
Royce?
It will require opening up the body to establish the options,
but Mulliner have not set design and engineering
standards too high for Ayrspeed to improve on.
Mechanically it’s supposedly sound: it has had new rings
and a valve. You don’t automatically fit a whole set of new
valves at Bentley parts prices.
Another little bonus is Mulliner’s use of a cheap soft
plastic rear window to avoid the hassle of incorporating
a glass window into a soft top. RR soft tops should
really have glass windows, but staying with light and
flexible clear plastic means I can use a zip-out rear
window, which allows the perfect amount of fresh air
and nature without any noise or draughts.
I have had the advantage of reviewing and photographing
several hundred chassis designs over several
decades, some excellent, some atrocious, but perhaps
the atrocious ones have been more educational.
Cars at the very high-performance interface of track
car and kit car need to be able to hack it at a high level
in the chassis department, or people die. Strength
versus lightness is the main issue, and cost of materials
is irrelevant. That’s the critical difference between
specialist component cars and production cars: the
primary purpose of production cars is profit and they
must be made from cheap pressed steel sheet. Followers
of Jeremy Clarkson will never respect even
seriously good kit cars: they won’t do the research. It’s
their loss. Noble, TVR and Lotus come from the kit
world: QED.
The interior looks pretty good. Some better varnishing is
needed, but the veneer is all good with no cracks. Seats
are okay as well.
Replacing sheet steel with bridge girders or triangulated
upper and lower chassis beams certainly creates a
massively strong and stiff structure. A tricky problem
area is connecting hard tubular structures to softer
flexible sheet-steel-based structures: the interface is
likely to crack unless the load is well spread. When
monocoques are prepared for competition with continuous
seam-welding rather than a spot-weld every few
inches, they also suffer from cracking as their flexibility
has been reduced.
Usefully, the Cloud has deep inner sills, usually rusty.
The structure going into the converted cars will be a
deep steel tubular and/or spaceframe-based beam running
along the inner sill, seam-welded to the floor and
to the existing or repaired inner sill, with a riser at the
front door post to provide strong hinge points to support
the bigger doors. The door post bracing will connect
vertically to the bracing inside the screen frame to
support the roof front clips. There will be a riser at the
back of the door aperture inside the B-post, which will
also provide a hinge point for the roof frame. There
will also be transverse bracing across the front of the
back seat, and probably under the front seat.
This is strength overkill, but one aim is to retain the
standard weight and smooth ride of the car, and the
weight of the very heavy roof will be replaced with
heavy structures at the bottom of the car. I also want
to introduce proper seat belt mounts and some side
impact protection.
There are also some traditional bodywork tricks available,
such as simple little fillet plates at the corners of
the door apertures, which add anti-lozenging strength
out of all proportion to their size. That was a tip from
Aston Martin designer William Towns, who also
advised me never to use a straight line when designing
a car. What? Well, if you look carefully at his Aston
Martin Lagonda, as he suggested I do, all the lines

A second prototype donor has arrived, this time a Cloud II. Having one car working and the other available for moulding
and then primary prototyping is ideal.
The S1 is loaded onto a flatdeck to be taken to Carrosserie Ayrspeed, which is actually just a double garage in suburban
Greater Vancouver. The Bentley looks good, but the front wings, the sills and big patch panels in the rear wings
are made of fibreglass, with rusty nastiness lurking beneath. It matters not, as it will all be cut off anyway.
look straight but virtually none of them actually are.
One of the problems facing people who convert
Clouds is that the doors are aluminium and the bodywork
is steel, including the rear wings. The easier way
of making a two-door car out of a four-door is to cut
the back door in half, graft half of it into the old front
door, and weld the other half into the shell.
You can’t weld aluminium to steel. You can either
bodge the rear half-door to the car, using rivets, staples,
duct tape, glue or whatever, or you can just face
the fact that you have to remake two-thirds of the side
of the car. To do the job properly, the doors need new
skins, and the body needs a whole new seven-footlong
rear quarter, incorporating the wings and halfdoor
panels in one huge single panel.
I don’t yet know how the other Mulliner-inspired
Cloud builders deal with this problem, but I do know
there’s only one way of doing it properly.
There is massive work involved, with changes to
woodwork and trim requiring separate skill sets.
One bonus is that because the interior has to be retrimmed
and the woodwork rethought as well as major
structural rebuilding and reinforcement, we have the
opportunity to rescue some fairly rough examples of
Clouds: rust, flaking woodwork and cracked seats
would have sent some to the scrapyard, but as we’re
changing all that anyway, we might as well start by
saving a rescue car rather than chopping up a good
one. My own Bentley has a fairly good interior and
mechanicals, but the bodywork is nasty, with fibreglass
front wings, sills and part rear wings.
Task one was buying the car that would turn into the
first prototype. There are only small differences between
a Silver Cloud and a Bentley S1, the important
one being the radiator grille. I like the RR grille on
pre-war cars, but for me the uncompromising verticals
of a Greek temple don’t work with later curvier postwar
cars. The rounded Bentley grille does the job for
me, but the S1s were always made in much smaller
numbers, and many of them got Rolls grilles and were
used by the wedding trade: they’re pretty rare now. I
bought mine from a friend, who thinks I paid too little
when I know I paid too much. No worries, I will make
something excellent out of it.
Having the Bentley sitting in the garage has been very
useful in the initial sketching and thinking stages of
the project – being able to pop out to the garage with a
measuring tape saved much click time on the internet.
The next bonus was a Cloud II that came up. With a
fresh if slightly rough respray, that saved the time it
would have taken to repair my Bentley’s bodywork
before taking moulds, and allows the S1 to go back on
the road as soon as the transmission has been repaired.
I need to consult with lots of people about many tasks,
and being able to drive around in an example of the
car I’m talking about will be very useful.
We are pleased to be able to rescue Clouds that are at risk,
as parts and restoration costs have sent many of them to the
scrapyard. It would be a shame to chop up good ones. Even
now, these rather glorious cars still fall on hard times.

My current 1947 MkVI Bentley has been a good car, seen here on a rally tour a few years back.
Handsome, strong, fairly compact and very usable cars, but overall I’m happy to update to an S1.
TEMPTATIONS...
GN Cyclecar
This delightful little 1921 GN cyclecar
was spotted at Potomac Classics in Holland while
working on a story about amphibious Amphicars with
Herald engines for Triumph World magazine.
GN meant Godfrey and Nash. These were the forerunners
of Frazer Nash cars, and enjoyed astonishing
sporting success.
The 1921 cyclecar ran an 1100cc aircooled V-twin engine
with overhead exhaust valves and side inlet, and
made 17bhp at 2500rpm, with a three-speed gearbox
and chain drive. It had a solid axle with no differential,
weighed well under 1000lbs, and was capable of
70mph. The 17bhp figure doesn’t mean much as there
looks to be quite substantial torque: a large-capacity
long-stroke twin has some grunt to it, and the later
1920s Morgan trikes with similar engines are still fast
by today’s standards.
A Youtube search will find video of some fascinating
tyre-shredding runs up the assorted hillclimbs with
GNs and with the Frazer-Nash sports and racing cars
that they spawned.
One of the ramifications of convertible conversions
is that the seat backs have to be re-engineered to tip
forwards for rear seat access. Fortunately the backs
are separate, it’s not a true bench seat.
An offer of 60,000 Euros might buy this very nice
1921 GN cyclecar that has spent decades in a museum.
Ex-museum pre-war cars with no hydraulics to seize up
can often just be fired up and put straight back on the
road after a couple of oil changes.
There’s something visceral and very involving about
very light cars and trikes: the connection between
driver and road is very direct, and while there’s not
much grip from skinny tyres, skidding is not really
alarming as controlled drifting is the way you go
around corners quickly. Low-end racing cars still
achieve high corner speeds by slipping rather than
sliding, with an ideal 15% slip being the fastest theoretical
way round a corner.
The Frazer Nashes used chain drive, with the gears
changed by moving chains to different-sized chainwheels
on a solid axle with a narrow rear track and no
differential. That sounds as though it comes from the
1890s rather than the 1920s, but GNs and FNs were
fast enough to be seriously competitive, and their devotees
swear by chain drive.
The complete lack of front brakes on this car would
nowadays be somewhat hairy, given that the ideal
modern front-to-back brake percentage is usually
60%-80% of braking effort carried out by the front
brakes. I have driven a car with back brakes only, a
1911 Rolls-Royce Ghost. It was entertaining, and you
had to think well ahead, using the handbrake on the
main back wheel brakes to slow down, and leaving
the vertical handbrake lever clicked on as you went

Crossbar isn’t very elegant, but bracing big wings strongly
is crucial or they vibrate and fracture their mounts.
Aircooled V-twin cylinder peeps out of the engine bay.
G and N were Godfrey and Nash, evolving into Frazer
Nash later.
be honest a Morgan trike from a few years later with
front brakes and much more power would offer much
more usable fun for similar money.
Given the average real-world fun budget, a more
realistic idea is the excellent JZR Morgan trike replica
for £6000 or so, which gets you real performance and
outstanding handling, with power from the sculpturally
beautiful Moto Guzzi V-twin of the same 1100cc
size… so we’ll leave the GN where it is and just admire
it as an intriguing piece of history.
Front brakes are for pansies.
down through the gearbox as well, then letting the
brake off if you had judged the traffic lights right and
could keep rolling. Much like driving a truck. The
footbrake in the pre-WWI Ghost activated a powerful
transmission brake on the propshaft, which would lock
the back wheels on demand, but which would overheat
very quickly.
A light sports car with no front brakes? Not so much
fun in today’s traffic. The Rolls-Royce was reassuringly
the size of a gentleman’s club, and people kept clear
of it to some extent. But there’s no IQ test required to
get a driving licence, and many modern drivers would
assume that a 1921 car has ABS brakes just like them,
and would cut in front and stop. Leave a braking space
in traffic, and some lane-swapping numpty will occupy
it.
The cyclecar craze was fading by 1921 as Model T
Fords made large, substantial, practical mass-produced
cars way cheaper than handmade cyclecars, and to
Simple and elegant engineering.
Mudguards are stiffened by swages.
Boat tails were a popular style in the 1920s and 1930s.
Not practical, but pretty.
Instruments are apparently also for pansies. No need for
a speedo: the cops will tell you how fast you were going.
There is a fuel indicator, but only in the sense that it says
either “there is fuel” or “there is no fuel.”
“No need for a speedo: the cops will tell you
how fast you were going.”
This can only be the oil tank, also pressurised by hand:
there’s no radiator and no radiator water, and there’s
no screen washer. Or even a wiper. The lever will be the
handbrake, as there aren’t ten gears.

Off Topic
Which is the best country for petrolheads?
External rockers make valve lash adjustment
a piece of gateau.
The cyclecar was discovered at Amphicar specialists
Potomac Classics on the Holland/Germany border. Well
worth a visit.
Anybody who drives an amphibious car has a well-developed
sense of humour.
WireWheels Magazine is international, and although
moving to Europe is potentially closing up for Brits
to some extent, there are still options open for readers
who decide to be international too. Your editor and
your main European photographer have now both
moved on from the UK, and part of the decision on
where to move to in both cases was to do with motoring
issues.
Motoring magazines usually stay safely clear of
politics for commercial reasons, but in these times
putting our collective head in the sand is unwise, and
options should be considered. Authoritarianism is on
the move, with fascism brewing again. The trick is to
balance complacency against paranoia, and to make
the right decision.
In the case of our senior photographer Paul, leaving
the UK was partly to look after his long-term girlfriend,
who is Croatian born but, unwisely, ethnically
Ruthenian, and who lived through the 1991-1995
Yugoslavian civil war.
She feels that the UK is becoming uncomfortably like
Croatia before the 1991 war, and she wanted to leave.
Iain’s old small
house in Barnes,
London SW13.
The selling price
was usefully
doubled by the
posh postcode.
There are now no
evening parking
spaces within
a quarter-mile.
Rented garage
behind the house
got burgled three
times in the final
year before emigrating:
enough.
Not to return to Croatia, which although beautiful is
as corrupt and potentially violent as it always was, but
to somewhere culturally stable. Canada was the first
choice, but house price inflation put British Columbia
out of reach. Rural Sweden was the next choice, and
that looked pretty good. Paul will still spend time in
the UK, but is no longer tethered there by a mortgage.
He’s originally South African and was brought to the
UK as a child, so he holds a British passport.
My own wife, the WireWheels designer, is also Croatian
born, and like Paul’s girlfriend is not ethnically
Croatian – she’s half Slovenian and half Bosnian, so
they are both quite lucky to have survived the 1991
war. Paul and I don’t have a particular fetish for Croatian
women, we just happened to meet ours when we
were finally ready to settle down.
Fuel tank is pressurised by a hand pump.
Healthy snacks along the autoroute, with excellent
Belgian mayo.
November 2018, and Paul heads for Sweden with two
cats, his Croatienne, his hifi and his Ninja on a trailer.
I left the UK partly over a passport issue. Having
married a Croatian, my passport was taken away by
the British government “for administrative reasons”
for 14 months. Researching my legal rights revealed

far larger than the official numbers admit, all tries to
drive on the same roads at the same time. Rampant
CCTV surveillance, speed tax cameras, fines for not
telling the clerks when you’re not using your car, fines
for parking, fines for misplaced wheelie bins and so on
used as tax grabs. Fuel taxes literally double the cost
of petrol, car and motorbike thieving and fraud are endemic,
and if you want to build or substantially modify
your own car, you face a fearsome testing regime
that has successfully demolished a previously thriving
and creative kit car industry.
cultivate the local mayor and the notaire for a happy
life. Brits will probably still be allowed to go and live
there after Brexit.
A petrolhead friend emigrated to Spain a while back,
and that has been a success. He lives in a gorgeous
national park halfway up a mountain, and drives Land
Rovers and European classics including a Fiat Dino,
the one with the Ferrari engine. It’s pretty hot though,
so the day is partly spent in siesta, and everyone goes
out for dinner at 10pm. Again, Brits living in Spain
will probably be allowed to stay in Spain.
Iain’s Vancouver house, with six bedrooms and a quarter-acre
or so.
that the British are not really citizens of a country, but
subjects of the Queen. With no written UK constitution,
there’s no real citizenship and Brits have no legal
right to a passport. By the time the British passport
was returned, I was already on the road to a Canadian
passport. Canadian civil servants would not dare take
away a journalist’s passport.
Geographically split childhoods seem to inhibit blind
patriotism. I was born in Glasgow and removed to
London at ten. Never liked London much. When the
British passport problem set off the warning bells, I
was fine with moving somewhere else.
Many people feel patriotism, but it makes no sense
to me. Birthplace is random, so being proud of being
born somewhere makes no more sense than being
proud of having a bellybutton: everybody who is
born gets a location and a bellybutton. Like many
of the ideas people die for, the concept dissolves on
examination. Many people are proud to be from their
country, their county, their town. Should they also be
proud to be from their street and house? It gets silly. Is
it treason when they sell their house? Are they traitors
to their street? At what exact distance from your house
should you start becoming patriotically proud? 500
yards? 1760 yards? Anybody with a good answer, do
let me know.
Options
Looked at coldly, the UK is not the best place for
petrolheads to live. Classic car insurance is cheap, but
general car insurance is expensive. Average road speed
is dropping quite dramatically as the rising population,
Iain’s three-car garage in Canada: fingers crossed, no
burglaries so far.
On the up side, the British classic-car world is healthy
and thriving, with clubs, tours, shows, racing, all sorts
of action going on.
Clerks and their rules can be a nuisance in other parts
of Europe, with Belgium, Holland and France coming
down hard on anyone who wants to drive something
different. A friend in Belgium makes a living from
illegally altering the look of the bodywork of Audis
and so on, but so subtly that the anti-fun police can’t
actually spot what’s been done.
Paul’s little house in Watford, with a tiny garage beside it:
better than nothing.
One of the possible options is Australia, but Aussies
are weirdly cowed by their civil servants, considering
that they are descended from a bunch of very disobedient
criminals. Their clerks take classic cars off the
road for a rust bubble, and only permit classics to be
driven on club-organised runs, with their cops enforcing
traffic law to the letter. As a place to live; well,
quite a few people have emigrated there and then returned.
It seems that if you fail they quite like that, but
if you do well they get jealous of bloody immigrant
Poms.
France has its points if you don’t want to alter your
car. Tax is generally brutal, but it pays for very good
medical service. If you don’t want to build or change
your car, but just want to drive it in the sunshine on
the good Routes Nationales left empty by the new motorways,
there is a lot of space, there are mountains,
there is year-round good weather towards the south.
Although the speed limit on the Routes Nationales has
recently been reduced to 50mph, so we’re cruising
rather than charging now. French food is still superb,
and the French tend to work to live rather than the
other way round, with meals, leisure and chat being
important. If you move to the French countryside,
Paul’s new playroom in Sweden. You could probably get
five or six cars into it if you didn’t want to work on them
as well.
Paul’s new house on three floors near Markaryd in southern
Sweden. Not sure how many bedrooms there are, I
didn’t count them.
The USA should be petrolhead heaven, with available
perfect climates, thousands of miles of albeit rather
neglected roads charging through fabulous scenery,
cheap gasoline, V8s everywhere and a culture
obsessed with cars. But it’s governed using fear, so
everybody feels they need a gun as most of the country
is dangerous tribal lands with bandits everywhere.
Believing that the place is Afghanistan is actually
turning it into Afghanistan. You don’t react to rude or
dangerous driving in the States, in case the driver has
a gun. People with psychosis and bipolar depression
can afford Kalashnikovs, but not medication, and you
see the results of that in weekly mass shootings. So the
fun of motoring in the USA has somewhat evaporated.
My choice of country in the end was British Columbia
in Western Canada. Vancouver is a progressive,
civilised, relaxed, racially and culturally very mixed
place that was built by expat Scots and still has some
Scots in its character – hospitable and cheerful, and

The Canadian MX5/Miata collection. One standard NA
Sunburst, and an NB that is magically going to turn into
a Cobra one midnight. Or possibly a pumpkin.
Canucks are only unpleasant when really pushed too
far: they retain some Scottish berserker genes.
The roads in BC are fabulous, with a whole playground
of mountains and deserts, and four distinct
seasons. Vancouver Island offers many more miles
of roads, all virtually empty off season. There are no
speed tax cameras and few cops, although the Princeton
police collect their doughnut money from speeding
tourists. The downside is that Vancouver city traffic
is often at a crawl, the driving standards are poor, and
there is actually a limited number of roads to play on -
there are only a few roads out of Vancouver, which go
either through or over the mountains to the rest of BC
and up to Alaska or Washington State.
Politically Canada is stable, with British-style underlying
chums-based corruption but at a bearable level.
Tax levels are okay for the self-employed with a good
accountant, not so good for the trapped and salaried.
There’s none of the tiresome UK and European car
rule crap. If you don’t want to use a car for a while,
you just leave it in the drive and don’t insure it. If
you build a car, you take it to a very local garage
licenced for doing government tests, and if the structure,
brakes, steering and lights are okay, you’re good
to go. If you want to drive a rusty old banger, you’re
welcome. There was an annual emissions test that used
to be a pain for old British cars with SU carbs that are
rather dirty on idle, but once the majority of old polluting
cars had gone, the annual emission testing was
dropped. Government clerks deliberately letting go of
power and control still seems weird to a Brit.
The annual MOT test equivalent in BC was abandoned
way back when it sank in that poor car condition causes
so few accidents that they don’t even show up on
the statistics: accidents are all caused by the careless,
the drunk and the texting moron.
Fuel costs are about half those of Europe, although not
as cheap as the USA or Russia.
At the time of leaving the UK fifteen years ago, I
was lucky to cash in on house price inflation in London,
and sold my cramped two-bed terraced house in
Barnes, SW13, for enough to buy a six-bed detached
house in a Vancouver suburb. The garage holds three
cars and assorted tents hold more.
Since that time, there has been rampant house price
inflation in BC as well, with Chinese people, sensibly
enough, getting their money out of China and buying
safe Vancouver property with a reliable legal title.
When Paul’s time to leave the UK came, he had
also collected some UK inflation money in a small
ex-council house in Watford, but it was nowhere near
enough to buy anything in Vancouver which would
otherwise have been the first choice.
Then came Brexit, and a Croatian passport is suddenly
more valuable. The exit of the UK from the European
Union has been a shambles, and the mess continues to
stumble on from crisis to crisis. The EU has to make
the UK visibly suffer to deter any other EU countries
from following the UK to the exit; half the UK population
didn’t want to leave anyway; the referendum
was tainted by lies and cheating. Future options for
Brits to go and live elsewhere in the EU are not guaranteed.
Croatians can still go and live anywhere they
want in Europe, and can take their British partners
with them, no matter how the Brexit shambles ends, so
marrying one is a good idea.
Paul’s research into options revealed that Sweden is a
pretty civilised place. There is some nationalist nastiness
brewing up in the rough ends of a few big cities,
but the countryside is sparsely inhabited by pleasant,
educated people who all conveniently speak excellent
English, and whose driving is polite and disciplined.
There are only ten million Swedes in a big country full
of lakes and mountains, so there’s plenty of space, and
a general movement of people from the countryside
to the cities has meant that rural property prices are
very reasonable. Paul’s small Watford end-of-terrace
paid for a big detached house with a very tasty threecar
workshop/playroom and an expansive garden in
southern Sweden.
There is an annual car test in Sweden which seems
less demanding than the ever-tightening UK MOT, and
all cars over five years old need to be tested, classic or
not. The recent ill-advised dropping of annual testing
for cars more than forty years old in the UK should be
distrusted, as the underlying plan may be to separate
classic cars from the general fleet and then restrict
them to controlled use such as official club-approved
events, parades and driving to repairs.
Paul’s current fleet comprises two Kawasaki Ninjas,
a Ducati, a comfy Volvo estate and his Mazda Eunos,
which is going to spend the winter in the comfy heated
garage being fettled for next year’s cruising. We
already have friends in the MG, Triumph and Miata
clubs in Stockholm and elsewhere. Paul is also dreaming
about TVRs again.
My own current fleet comprises a 1957 Bentley S1, a
1947 Bentley MkVI, the potential future blower Bentley
project, a 1990 Mini Cooper RSP, the Mini Marcos
project, a Dodge campervan, a Jeep, a 1958 Chevy, a
Cobra project, a limited-edition 1992 Miata and until
recently a Triumph TR6 project that I realised would
have cost more to sort out than it’s worth, so bye-bye
to that. One day I’ll just go buy a good TR6, which
will cost the same but will only take two hours to buy
rather than 250 hours to restore.
A more interesting project is the Cobra brewing up
out of a dead Miata and a Ford 302 V8. That puts me
over ten cars. Owning more than ten cars is admittedly
heading for excessive. In the UK, I just had two cars –
a Range Rover and something amusing like my Ayrspeed
XK120 replica. Ten cars is better, or at least the
option of having ten.
Leaving the UK meant that I still wrote for the same
magazines but mostly as a foreign correspondent,
and has meant an interesting annual visit to keep in
touch. That means sofa-surfing around friends, some
of whom I actually get to visit more than when I lived
in London, and annual chats with the British magazine
editors and my book publishers.
The crowding of UK cities and roads has definitely
been getting worse every year, and travel is best
Sweden is a huge, old and civilised country – exploring it from the inside will be excellent fun.

HANDS ON
Mini Marcos
Part I
Pics courtesy Billy Dulles
The Mini Marcos is a 1960s British racing car
repurposed for budget driving fun: the editor’s
example is a probably unique NOS barn find.
he high gearing, excellent aerodynamics and reliability of
the early racing Mini Marcoses allowed them to bite at the
heels of Ferraris and Porsches. (pic Billy Dulles)
BC offers spectacular natural beauty and entertaining roads. It looks rather like Scotland but more so, and it doesn’t
rain in the summer.
started in the very early morning. As of last year, I
wouldn’t try to visit two places in one day in the UK
any more, as the travel times are so random.
It’s not all gloom, though - neo-Triumph motorcycles
are very good indeed, TVR may be making a comeback,
the enthusiasm for classic cars is filling up every
new event that Goodwood can dream up, and exiting
the EU may give the Brits a new spirit of enterprise.
We wish them the absolute best of luck with that.
The 1966 Marnat/Ballot Lena Le Mans entry. (pic Billy
Dulles)
The Mini Marcos was conceived by test pilot and
racing driver Dizzy Addicott, and realised as a Marcos
model in 1965. It was an excellent piece of design
work, almost as dramatic a rethink of the Mini concept
as the Mini had been a rethink of the motor car.
That might sound like overstatement, but the fibreglass
monocoque Mini Marcos is around 30% lighter than a
Mini, is more stable with a longer wheelbase, is much
faster with its completely different aerodynamics,
and has a much lower centre of gravity because the
glasshouse is smaller and mounted significantly lower.
There’s no chassis, as the car is a lightweight GRP
monococque using the Mini subframes.
A Mini handles like a kart anyway, but a Mini Marcos
makes a standard steel Mini feel like driving a bus full
of fat people. Driver Jean-Pierre Jabouille is on record
The weight of most Mini-Marcoses is in the area of
1000lbs, so even 65bhp makes them pretty lively. The
engine ran a little hot as it was broken in from brand new
during the race, so they popped an additional radiator in
for a few laps to cool it down. (pic Billy Dulles)
as saying that the Marcos handled like a Formula Junior
single-seater, high praise indeed for a Mini-based
component car.
The Marcos’s performance and handling were effectively
demonstrated during its debut race at Castle
Combe in September 1965. The wet track suited frontwheel
drive, and regular Mini racing driver Geoff
Mabbs didn’t just win – he lapped every other car

Spark Models pay tribute to the early Le Mans Marcoses
with models of the 1966 car and the 1967 Chris Lawrence/Jem
Marsh entry. They were a big deal in the late
1960s.
A Minivan’s chassis plate and paperwork kept the
entry legal, and the Marcos shell was flown to Le Touquet
on a Silver City Airlines Bristol Freighter, which
was an air ferry service also used by Lord Montague
to fly his Ford Zephyr to Paris for weekends: but that’s
another story.
The shell was fitted with an unofficial Cooper S GpII
spec BMC racing engine. It was not an official public
sale, in case the engine blew up and embarrassed
BMC.
Billy Dulles recalls that he warned Stuart Turner at
that time that the French were going to cheat to prevent
a third Mini Monte Carlo win by the British, and
he was right.
The wheels on the Le Mans Mini Marcos were secondhand,
bought from the owner of a previous Deep
Sanderson Le Mans entry. Billy and Jem Marsh went
to Paris to check on the building of the car, and Billy
Marcos made the most of their success at Le Mans in their advertising, but Mini Marcos sales have been slow for the
last 55 years. Perhaps they’ll pick up again as extreme fuel efficiency becomes ever more important.
The Mulsanne straight, before the FIA chickened out and added chicanes in 1990, was six kilometres long, enough time
for even a low-powered car to reach is absolute maximum speed: reportedly 146mph for a Mini-Marcos. (pic Billy Dulles)
on the circuit apart from a Ginetta, and won by a full
minute.
The Mini Marcos was officially launched at the Racing
Car Show at Earl's Court, London, in January
1966, and was entered in the 24-hour Le Mans race
that year. With French racing politics in mind, it was
entered via a French Austin dealer and garage owner,
because successful British entries in French motorsport
can find themselves disqualified on technicalities.
The result is part of Mini and racing history: the Mini
Marcos finished in 15th place, competing against
Porsche, Ford and Ferrari, and it was the only British
car to qualify as a finisher that year.
Billy Dulles was the driving force behind the Le Mans
entry. He had been exporting dashboards and other
Mini accessories to France in 1965, and to observe
French political practicality, the car was French-built
and would have French drivers. Thus a “Marcos
BMC” was driven by Claude Ballot-Lena and by
Jean-Louis Marnat, le dealer des Austins.
Later racing Marcoses had wheel spats for an extra few
percent of top speed: after all, you only have to win by an
inch to win. (pic Billy Dulles)

The coyote-ugly styling of the Mini Marcos is rather like Marmite – people tend to either love it or hate it. This factory
demo car got me hooked after a brief European jolly.
delivered the BMC Special Tuning engine to Paris in
the back of his Mini Pickup. It was a standard Rally
tune Mini engine in Group II configuration, with
a straight-cut close-ratio box and a limited slip diff.
Billy thinks he got a high-ratio 2.49:1 final drive
pinion set from Jack Knight, although it was all a long
time ago. It was definitely the highest ratio that could
be fitted in the gearbox casing. The engine was brand
new and had never even been started, so it was run in
during the first laps of the race: apparently it ran much
more smoothly towards the end of the race than it had
at the beginning. It was overheating early on in the
race, so the team bodged in an additional radiator for
a while: that’s not something you see done nowadays
at Le Mans. The Mini Marcos returned to the Sarthe
circuit the following year with more streamlined bodywork
and was clocked at 146 mph on the pre-chicaned
Mulsanne straight.
By now, non-race drivers were beginning to buy Mini
Marcoses to use as road cars. 1967 saw some improvements
and the launch of the Mk II, and the Mk III was
pretty well the same car but came with a hatchback.
Here’s an odd thing: Marcos took just a couple of
years to turn that back window into a hugely useful
hatchback, but TVR took literally decades. It’s weird,
because one skilled and focused GRP man could prototype
and test a design, and amend existing moulds
to turn a rear window into a hatchback in a couple of
months.
Despite being on the ball with design, hard times
brought a bankruptcy for Marcos in 1971. The Mini
Marcos design was bought by Rob Walker, who oversaw
the introduction of the Mk IV with a longer floorpan
based on the Mini Traveller wheelbase, and with a
taller body. The project was sold to Harold McDermott
in 1975, and Harold continued with it until he bought
the Midas design from Richard Oakes. A factory fire
resulted in financial disaster, and the Mini Marcos
design reverted to Jem Marsh.
Trying to build specialist sports cars as a commercial
business is a deeply silly idea, but luckily some deluded
obsessives still keep having a go, including yours
truly. It is possible to make a small fortune out of
making sports-racing cars.
But only if you start off with a large fortune.
In part II, the Mini Marcos build begins.
The Dennis Adams-designed
Marcos GT, the other sort of
Marcos.

In the next issue…
Vauxhall Hurlingham
1930s Vauxhalls used to rival Bentley and Lagonda.
Here’s why
RoadTrip
The Rush to Goldbridge, an excellent BC adventure
The Baker MGs
Exquisite prewar T-series racers in action at
Angouleme
Temptations
A TR6 to run away from, rather than just walking
Awkward…
Failed inspections and a delicate conversation
Plus the regulars – One will be at One’s
Club; L’Ayre du Temps; Off Topic; Hands
On; The Ayrspeed Diaries