For a year I have been obsessed with the Vanwall GPR V12, a recreation of the 1948 F1 single seater race car, and I still had an empty space in my garage. So, I asked my friend Tom and my brother Hans to come with me to England to go to the Factory to order one. I've had already several email exchanges with the owner about coming over and drive the contraption and I was eager and ready to give it a go.
Boy, did that turn out to be a disappointment. It turned out that there was only built example and that it was not there, but at some airport and could not be visited, let alone driven. An ugly 2 seater was at the factory, but was from a costumer and could not be driven. Tom, a brilliant mechanic and specialist on anything vintage British, asked many questions about how the car was put together and the owner had no good answers. We discussed how to import the car as a kit car into the US and he promised to send us a adjusted price.
Tom said that I should not remind the owner that he was supposed to send us something, because that would be an indication how this whole process would work. And he never reacted....... What a sales person.
We did get a CD which showed the car on Donnington track and even the car never went over 85MPH, after 4 laps the car was totally overheated. If I would have gone ahead with this project Tom would have to completely re-engineer the car. So, I'm probably lucky not to have this car and, the empty spot in my garage is now filled with the Spyker and I could not be happier.
Boy, did that turn out to be a disappointment. It turned out that there was only built example and that it was not there, but at some airport and could not be visited, let alone driven. An ugly 2 seater was at the factory, but was from a costumer and could not be driven. Tom, a brilliant mechanic and specialist on anything vintage British, asked many questions about how the car was put together and the owner had no good answers. We discussed how to import the car as a kit car into the US and he promised to send us a adjusted price.
Tom said that I should not remind the owner that he was supposed to send us something, because that would be an indication how this whole process would work. And he never reacted....... What a sales person.
We did get a CD which showed the car on Donnington track and even the car never went over 85MPH, after 4 laps the car was totally overheated. If I would have gone ahead with this project Tom would have to completely re-engineer the car. So, I'm probably lucky not to have this car and, the empty spot in my garage is now filled with the Spyker and I could not be happier.
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