THE ORIGINS OF A CAR MAKING
OBSESSION WORDS AND PHOTOS JIM BENNETT
During 1961 my older brother Cliff had acquired a Ford 10 midget racing car from Dunedin car dealer Sid Cottle, father of racer Barry, with a little encouragement from me, his kid brother. The only condition was that I take over his project to build an Austin Seven special for which he had been collecting parts.
He had already upgraded it with a Ford Eight engine and said that he would assist me and fabricate the body work if I paid what it cost him for the Ford engine. I was then 14 and with an after school and Saturday morning job at Dunedin Electroplaters thought I could fund this. As Cliff was a panel beater I felt that we could achieve a fair result. He had books including How to Build 750cc and 1172cc Racing Cars and Racing and Sports Car Chassis Design both of which I had studied at length. The following year we had the chassis on its wheels and I had begun my final year at King Edward Technical College where I was studying School Certificate engineering subjects. The Austin chassis had been boxed to stiffen it. This entailed welding a steel strip to the underside of the top-hat section side members. Reset springs and a dropped front axle had already been done to lower the chassis. At the rear, spring 34 Beaded Wheels
mountings were welded to a Ford 8 axle housing to locate Austin Seven quarter elliptic springs. Radius rods were fitted on the axle housing as well as mountings to a cross member on the chassis. Cliff was having some work done by an engineering business on parts for his midget and he told me that one of the staff said that they may be looking for an apprentice in the New Year. The new owners of this business were successful motor sport competitors. One of these, Gerald Hoare, had built what may have been the first quarter mile dragster in New Zealand, while staff member John Martin had built a very quick Triumph drag motorbike. I could not imagine a better place for a budding car constructer to serve an apprenticeship. I was on their doorstep on my way to high school the following Monday with my school reports to hand. This was something of a surprise to the owners
as they claimed that they hadn’t really discussed this position seriously. However they interviewed me and at my suggestion permitted me to start work, part time, after school and during the August holidays as a trial. I never mentioned to them that the electroplaters were reducing part time staff and I needed a job to pay Cliff for the Ford 8 engine. As my toolmaking apprenticeship progressed so did work on the car as I gained more engineering skills. A tubular frame to attach the bodywork was made and I created a light tubular structure for the driveshaft tunnel, which extended to the front corners of the chassis, to add torsional stiffness. I had read somewhere that this is what Colin Chapman had done for his Austin Seven based Lotus Mk3. By now I was driving my first car, an Austin Seven Ruby, on which the brakes were rather pathetic. To remedy this, on the special I converted the brakes to
