THERE is one important element missing from the present enthusiasm for classic and historic cars. Not much attention is being paid to the post-war Scottish ``specials'' whose competition careers faded out as full-scale factory enterprises took over.
William Henderson, whose father Bill keeps the most extensive photographic archive of these highly individual cars in action, nevertheless managed to have them accepted as the subject of his degree thesis at Glasgow School of Art.
The most famous pre-war types were the Anderson Specials from Newton Mearns. As the surviving example in the Museum of Transport shows, they were also what would now be called ``concept cars''. James Anderson experimented with features like front-to-rear connected suspension.
Other notable one-offs in the Thirties included the Watson Special, and the Alexander Specials which competed at long-lost events like the Bo'ness hill climb and the Beattock Summit sprint.
In the late Forties, Alex Reid's versatile Omega was BMW-based. When Reid's competition partner John McCubbin built a special of his own, he took the same BMW route for the Jackal, the first syllable being his nickname, while the ``al'' represented his friend Alex. Those two special builders used the facilities of their engineering workshops.
Ian Hopper and Jimmy Gibbon were backed by the formidable resources of their family garage firms. Gibbon's original special was based on a Rover 10 chassis, with a stark body for trials and a more civilised one for speed events. This multi-purpose machine was christened the Girastro. Gibbon himself, Jimmy Ramsay and Kenny Starling from his Rover agency's service department, each contributed the first two letters of his surname, while Rover provided the final syllable.
Their later Rover Special was built up from a P3 chassis, given striking aerodynamic bodywork and a 2.6-litre engine eventually enlarged to a full three litres, years before the Rover factory followed suit. This was one of the first privately-built competition cars equipped with disc brakes.
Hopper's first post-war special, registered FUS 1, was a low-slung coupe with a Triumph Dolomite engine in a modified Riley Kestrel chassis. It could have been a prototype from a mainstream factory.
His second special, EHS 12, had a BMW engine and an ex-Armstrong-Siddeley preselector gearbox. It was fitted with properly detailed open two-seater bodywork (he abhorred ``the orange-box type of body with lavatory door bolts for door catches'') and could touch 92mph on the Winfield circuit, no mean speed for a 1.5-litre sports car in 1950.
The most successful Hopper Special was JGE 300, built up on a modified chassis frame of the type Joe Potts of Bellshill produced for his 500cc Formula Three and 1000cc single-seaters. Its power unit was a detuned version of the engine Lea-Francis marketed for dirt-track racing in the States.
Ian Hopper won many awards with JGE 300 in races, hill climbs and rallies. There is even a photograph of this remarkable all-rounder returning from a holiday at Strontian with a gralloched stag wrapped up on the luggage grid.
There were many other very effective specials. Nigel Kennedy's Stafonak trials car had an ingenious twin-gearbox installation giving 13 forward gears and seven reverse! Bottom gear was the almost incredible ratio of 97.2 to one.
Peter Hughes's Axis, the Burdmonk and Harfeach, Ivor Page's Mercotto, George Hendry's Speedy, the cars of Mirrlees Chassels, Peter Goodall and Bill Lamb, Tom Legget's Crocus and many more graced the competition entry lists. Jimmy Veitch created the Osclyat, the initial letters of a very rude answer to the obvious question: ``What does Osclyat mean?''
Ian Hopper's EHS 12 was for sale not long ago in Wales, while JGE 300 is under wraps awaiting restoration. David Black, who helped to build it, is about to give it the once-over. Peter Anderson has the Stafonak, which was bought for him as a schoolboy in the Sixties, and he later drove it on lap record runs on the Cowdenbeath stock car track. Jimmy Gibbon's Rover Special is in rebuildable condition.
With Historic Ecosse having established its own style of racing at Knockhill, it would be nice if some original Scottish specials could come under starter's orders once again.
Further information on the fate of any such specials will be welcomed; but since this was not intended to be an exhaustive account, you need not begin: ``I was thunderstruck that you failed to mention the XYZ . . .''
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