Thursday, September 17, 2015

Peter Brock and the Daytonas.. he was interviewed at Goodwood and it's very interesting


When Le Mans was over Carroll didn’t really care about the cars because he was involved with the GT40 programme by then. So one day the tax men visited Alan Mann’s workshop and said “okay, we’re going to have to collect the tax on these cars. That, or they have to be out of the country in two weeks or we’re going to fine you.” So telexes went back and forth to America, but nobody was really paying any attention. Anyway the tax men came back and said “okay, we’re going to take these cars, put ’em on a barge out to the North Sea and dump the lot overboard.” Well that finally got the attention of the folks in California, but the only reason they decided to ship the cars back was because that turned out to be cheaper than having the UK government sink ’em! That’s how little value the cars had at that time. Nobody cared about them at all.’



was each car they built an improvement over the previous one? ‘No, they stayed pretty much the same. We made a few minor mechanical improvements. The starter motors would vibrate apart at first, so we ended up packing them with plastic which cured that.’


It turns out that after Bonneville, where it set 25 new speed records, it returned to Shelby in Los Angeles and "was in such a mess when it came back. It was caked in salt after running for 12 hours, the headlights were falling out, the doors were broken… it was horrible! Carroll came down, looked at it and said “Oh man!” then he asked around the workshop “anybody want this thing? We’re gonna junk it. How about eight hundred bucks?” We all laughed and walked away …’


full story at https://grrc.goodwood.com/goodwood-revival/turning-down-a-daytona-coupe-for-800-and-almost-dumping-the-lot-into-the-sea-with-peter-brock#1R2177RC2hoQx0Rz.97

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