Car Corner

[highlandsflyer]

Remember to feed the dog!

 

[FairfaxPat]

Got to drive one of those 246 Dino's BITD in the hills of Marin and Sonoma-lotta fun...

 

[highlandsflyer]

Cool! I got a ride in one as a very lucky kid, we had a hotel and I was always begging guests for turns in their cars!

 

[swannymere]

Best colour on possibly the best road going Porsche ever.

 

[highlandsflyer]

My grandfather drove one of these before he bought his Morris 1000, and then his Skoda Estelle.

 

[FairfaxPat]

Me in my 55 Speedster in 1984...

 

[highlandsflyer]

I almost posted that myself as a joke Pat!

 

[FairfaxPat]

I lusted after this 32 Ford Ferrari V-12 at a local car show last year-it's got aero inboard rocker arm shocks/springs like modern formula cars...

 

[integerspin]

Alright then. I'll take your 33 Stradale and raise you 25 litres.

What the hell is that?!

It was built by a bloke from Brockham, Paul Jameson. As far as I know he sold this car, unfinished to
the owner of a Auto trans place in Epsom, Paul Dodds. It didn't have a body. I first saw it in a magazine, as it is now,
in ~1973. The motor was, according to Jameson, a rover meteor engine out of the belly of a tank.

After this Jameson built the Beast, Merlin engined, mid engined, with cockpit either side of the motor and all
the gauges, including altimeter, from a Spitfire. It had short stub exhaust poking up from the body and it
sounded like a plane when it started. I used to ride my Harley through Betchworth at night and the exhaust bounced
off the walls and houses in the village, sounded great, you want to hear a low flying Merlin trundling up that road;-)
That would have been late 70's I guess. I ran out of petrol in Brockhamhurst road one day and a car stopped and asked if I
needed anything, the bloke lived just along the road and he offered me some petrol from his lawn mower, it was Paul Jameson
and I got shown the car and look around a very interesting workshop, he seemed to mend Merlin engines, quiet a few in his workshop and plenty of other interesting things.
I ride along his road most days I might stop and see if he's still about.

Rarrrrhhhh!

Two facets one pic!

Long time since I have seen one of those.
Directions to a blokes house were, turn into the road and it's the house
with a Montreal in the drive. We knew him for ten years or so, didn't
ever see it move!

 

[Raging_Bulls]

What the hell is that?!

It's commonly referred to as "The Beast".

The chassis and engine were indeed Paul Jameson's work, as integerspin pointed out.
John Dodd (Paul Dodd is his son and restored the car some time ago) was a genius with automatic transmissions, so he was asked to build a transmission that could handle the power of the engine.
He ended up buying the rolling chassis and turning it into a car.

As for the engine itself, it is still unclear if it's a Merlin or a Meteor. Jameson says it's a Meteor, Dodd says it's a Merlin.
It has two spark plugs per cylinder, which is an aviation requirement and classifies it as a Merlin. As far as I can tell, the Meteor has one plug per cylinder. Then again it has a wet sump like a Meteor.
It's probably a bit of a Franken-build, a Meteor lower with Merlin heads. Dodd reckons it has "about a thousand horsepower at 2500 RPM".

At first it had a normal body (as far as anything with a 10-foot bonnet can be considered normal), with a Rolls Royce grille and the roof of a Capri. In this guise it was mainly used for shows and drag races while he worked on the cooling and reliability.

A fire in the garage destroyed the car, but the engine and chassis remained intact. Dodd then had that station wagon body built, again with a Rolls Royce grille.

He often rode it on the autobahns, which had quite a few supercar owners scratching their heads because they would be going flat-out in their 911s, Ferrari Daytonas or Lambo Miuras, only to be passed by a gigantic station wagon.

Legend has it that the polizei asked Rolls Royce to stop testing their new prototype on the autobahns, because although there were no speed limits there, speeds of over 200MPH were considered anti-social.
TBH I doubt this is true. John Dodd himself once said that he preferred to keep the speed below 180MPH because he was too worried about the (enormous) flywheel. Mind you, the car is geared for 210+ MPH and will reach that without breaking a sweat, so it's theoretically possible.

All that's certain is that Rolls Royce did eventually sue Dodd and wanted the grille removed. Unfortunately he lost the case and both Dodd and the car disappeared overnight.
Years turned into decades and The Beast was almost forgotten, but some people were still searching. Eventually a reporter tracked him down in Spain.

Funnily enough, The Beast is still registered in the UK and despite the court case the DVLA still lists it as a Rolls Royce. At least that's the manufacturer name you need to enter if you want to look it up in their database.