1966 Janspeed Unipower GT

[JC T ONE]

Took a few photos yesterday, despite being painted quite a number of times in the past there are remains of the Janspeed red paint evident in various places.

Chassis tube inside the door mounting panel :

On the door mech...

Behind the door lock...and beneath the red is the original white paint...

Quite a lot of the original white here...

More pics later when I get a minute.

Great detail photos Always nice with proof on a cars heritage.


Jens Christian

[Pete]

Now you see it...



just...



Now you don't..

[33JOY]

Sorry if this link is irrelevant to this thread but I just spotted the following photo on the Brighton & Hove MC website. Taken at the 1981 Brighton Speed Trials:



Peter

[rpb203]

Nice shot of Gerry Hulford's car. Wheels look lost in the arches though?

[Spider]

This thread is yet only another example (to me) as to why I don't usually look at or read this section of this forum - to us this car is just the unobtainium - only seen on the pages of a few books.

Very very nice & sexy car indeed.

[JC T ONE]

Now you see it...

just...

now you dont...

"show off" very cool pictures.


Jens Christian

[Ghul]

Yes that's my car going back to the late '70's. Its running the tyres from the Tyrell P34 six-wheeler Formula 1 car. In fact Patrick Depailler's tyres to be exact. I tried these both for circuit racing and the B&HMC sprint (winning the Forrest Lycett Trophy five years running before they increased the class engine size to 2000cc. Only missed winning the following year by 0.5 sec though !), as they were both soft and wide. I had Weller Wheels make up some 10" x 10" steel wheels so I could try them. I believe I was the first to get these, out the back door, to use as Goodyear normally knifed the tyres to stop other tyre companies trying to copy their technology. Worked really well against the tyres/compounds available at that time. Looked a bit strange I agree being so small, but they worked !. Could only afford these as second-hand tyres, so when the P34 project/car was banned, Goodyear stopped making the tyres. So back to Dunlops !.

Gerry

[Pete]

Nice shot of Gerry Hulford's car. Wheels look lost in the arches though?

I think that's also the case even with 10" wheels on any comp Unipower GT , I'm sure Janspeed would definitely have run my car with bigger wheels and tyres had they been available at the time ('67), ditto Gideon Lloyd ('68). 12" alloys and the tyres to suit weren't really an option until slightly later. Personally I actually think they suit 13".

On which topic, considering all the different size wheels you've run your car on Gerry over the years from those tiddlers up to 13", how did the bigger wheels affect the handling ?

[Pete]

A contact sheet from Triple C's Brian Harvey (via Gary Marlow) of what look to be a lovely set of slides of the Cars & Car Conversions team...





Love to get hold of the original set, especially as the dash can be seen. I'm on with that now. There's possibly more because Harvey is pictured close up sitting on the sill in a previous shot earlier in this thread, unless it's a close crop of one of these shots taken from the chopper.

By August '68 the car was replaced by a Ginetta G12....

[Pete]

Another milestone, the day the car turned up at Combe in new red paintwork (car 117)...August 28th '67..



In late '68 it was recorded as fitted with one of these...



Harvey doesn't recall a 5 speed box so I need to pin down exactly when that was fitted.

In November 1969 this ad appeared in Autosport :



Coincidentally Graham Goodman's Autospeed outfit who were selling the car for Lloyd in late '68 and early '69 were based in Gerrards Cross. F100 as referred to in the ad was a short lived sports car series which was designed to do for sports cars what Formula Ford did for single seaters.

[Ghul]

Well the Tyrell 10" wheels/tyres worked well because they had low unsprung weight and also were a soft compound but as the car was not that heavy, they worked well. The Unipower does seem to need lots of grip on the rear end and most of the Unipower's I've driven oversteered to a greater or lesser degree dependant on which tyres were used, however the road cars did not seem to be too difficult to control.
I have to say that on 13" wheels/tyres, the car was pretty impressive as the following picture will show taken at Bruntingthorpe testing grounds many years ago with me driving, for a magazine article.

The cars also ran on 12" wheels with Firestones in period, but cannot get the same profile tyre now.

Gerry

[Ghul]

As to the Jack Knight 5-Speed box, I drove Piers Forester's own car, with the man himself with me, down the Great West Road (A4) in West London in May 1969 with a 5-speed box. So it was around then for sure. I think it was an option from sometime earlier that year. I'll look into it.

Gerry

[rpb203]

Gerry, a fantastic shot of your car at speed! Must have been/is pretty exciting to drive in anger?

Whatever happened to OYF 80F, it does seem to have been well used by the press in it's time.

Cheers

Gary

[Pete]

Ta for the info Gerry. Yes a wheel lifting shot that !

Thanks to Gary I've now got another race on my list, Brands Hatch August 1968 :



So quite a few races at Combe , Snetterton ,at least a couple at Brands and one at Jarama. I wonder where else it went ? I've read a report in Autosport of a 'forthcoming race' with Mabbs at Crystal Palace in '67 but when I read the race report there's no mention of Mabbs, that's not to say he didn't race that day so I need to sift through quite a few race programmes and keep looking for pictures. I've not even started to list the speed events that Harvey did yet.

[Ghul]

Hi Gary,
Well yes the car was always interesting to race. I have to say that it probably oversteered less than some I drove, maybe due to the larger tyres the car ran. There is a picture of me at Donington Park in a 2 ltr Sports car HSCC race, where I was pretty crossed up coming out of coppice corner. And I had even tried a rear wing at that time to tame the rear end !. I came 2nd in the Championship though, so was trying pretty hard. Oh the HSCC made me take the wing off after one race by the way !.

As to OYF 80F, I'll check that out when I can shortly. I used to own NGH 8D the 998cc works demonstrator for many years, which also featured well in the press at the time. It was in fact the first car to be featured (by John Bolster) as it was a UPD car. I drove it all year round in all weathers as it was my only road car for around 20 years. So even when the snow and ice was so deep that the spoiler was acting as a plough, I still managed to get wherever I was going. Even did my second honeymoon in it touring Scotland for two weeks in March !. Car had done well over 200,000 Miles (I did around 150,000 Miles) when I sold it. It was on its second speedo when I bought the car as the car had had a 2.9:1 diff when run as a Demonstrator but had a 3.4:1 when I bought it. After at least one re-bore on the 998 Cooper engine, much later I put a 1275cc Cooper S in it and ran that with a 3.4:1 diff until I sold the car. The new owner ran it for a while before selling it to a dealer in Italy before it ended up in Japan.

Gerry

[Pete]

Had a couple of interesting conversations today and learned that : 1. Jan Odor remembers very little about the car sadly and 2. The lads at Janspeed who are still involved in engineering (only two) are restoring the Janspeed SCA Mini that Mabbs raced at the same time as my car !

[Pete]

A contact sheet from Triple C's Brian Harvey (via Gary Marlow) of what look to be a lovely set of slides of the Cars & Car Conversions team...





Love to get hold of the original set, especially as the dash can be seen. I'm on with that now. There's possibly more because Harvey is pictured close up sitting on the sill in a previous shot earlier in this thread, unless it's a close crop of one of these shots taken from the chopper.

From Brian Harvey :

"The black and white copy of a contact sheet is of shots that were taken at Denham airfield on the occasion of a promotion for Cars and Car Conversions magazine. The originals would have been in the magazine’s files and I imagine by now have been scrapped"

Hope not, in fact I suspect not as Baggot used one of the shots in his racing Mini book some years ago so there is hope.

[rpb203]

Pete,

Have you still not had any joy with the pictures? I wish I had followed them up when I first contacted Brian Harvey!

How's the rebuild going, nearly done?

Regards
Gary

[Pete]

Pete,

Have you still not had any joy with the pictures? I wish I had followed them up when I first contacted Brian Harvey!

How's the rebuild going, nearly done?

Regards
Gary

To be honest I've done bugger all research for a few weeks as I'm pulled out at work. Contacted Baggot who can't locate the source of the shot from the above contact sheet. I need to persue the location (if it still exists) of any C&CC archive though I was told by somebody else that C&CC dumped it all.
As for the car, engine's 'in build', fibreglassing is ongoing and paint soon but I've decided not to compromise the job in order to get it to Blyton so the chances are it won't be where I want it to be by then (though should be there on a trailer if nothing else). I've decided the wheel situation will just have to wait until I find the wheels I want (missed a couple of 7 1/2 x 13 JAPs on Ebay recently !! ), badges are ongoing (I'll email you about this), ditto header tank, Weber and inlet's sorted, some little bits to do on the brakes, headlamps and rims to sort. Dash is another story that I'll probably sort at the end of the year but need a decent image of the original first, I understand though it was black painted ali as per the 'Jan 4' Mini racer.

[rpb203]

Hello Pete,

Oh I know first hand how work can get in the way of the cars, that's what's happened to my Mk1 Marcos race car and the Unipower, amongst others!
I really can't believe that the C&CC photo archive could have been binned, it's got far too much historical importance and value.

With regard to the dashboard, was your car set up with the standard road car dashboard, they were pretty well set out. my dash was black from the factory and I can send you shots by e-mail if needed, the layout that Roland Petit had for your car was pretty much as standard and in aluminium finish.