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       BACKGROUND OF THE CAR

  When I was at school a friend of mine purchased an Austin Seven Special for the princely sum of £10. (For those of you of more tender years that sign indicates pounds and £10 is the equivalent of $20. Even in those days (1963) that was considered cheap but when you examine it in a bit more detail it equated to about an average weeks wages at the time, say about $750 in today’s money.) The photographs are not of the best quality but you can see the basic simplicity of the design and the signs of some fairly vigorous cornering on the rear bodywork. I wonder where it is now? This car and particularly what it exemplified stayed in my mind and eventually I was able to obtain a car that exuded the same spirit.

In the 1950’s many Austin Seven Specials were built and raced extensively throughout England and a lot of other places as well (this was known as the 750 formula and still exists in the UK). One of the engineers who started his career designing and racing these cars was Colin Chapman who called his cars Lotus’s (Lotii??). In about 1957 he introduced the Lotus Seven, the least compromised and purest sports car ever made available to the public. This has become the inspiration for all clubman sports cars made since then, with it’s simple unaerodynamic body shape, the minimalist nature of its fittings and lack of unnecessary creature comforts. With no roof, no doors, no windows, no air conditioning, no ABS, no cruise control and no traction control nothing is as much fun as driving one of these through the twisty bits on a bracing Sunday morning.

After leaving school various other priorities intruded into my life and clubman type cars were put on the back burner for a while (about 40 years). Eventually circumstances conspired to allow me to join in with a group of 16 people who were building 16 clubman style cars from scratch. I came into the project halfway through so a lot of the actual construction work had already been done.  After 2 years of Monday nights, Wednesday nights and Saturdays my car was ready for registration. The final result was even better than I had dared hope and I have been having fun in it ever since. The car is called a Clementé and uses the drive train from a Mazda MX5 sports car. After taking the car for an enjoyable 6,000Km shakedown cruise soon after registration I thought I’d like to take it for a decent drive and this trip is it.