[MONTH IN CARS] Barn finds
Genuine motorsport Morris recovered after slumber of more than five decades
This 1965 Morris Mini MkI hasn’t been on the road since 1973, when a thump to its offside front wing marked the end of its participation in that year’s Tour of Mull Rally. It was being campaigned by Gerard Paton and Gerard McCosh in the 1973 Shell Oils/The Scotsman Rally Championship, and it seems the two Gerards parked it after the ‘off’ in Mull.
It changed hands in 2000, going to the Lancashire-based collector David Lucas. No restoration work seems to have occurred before his passing in 2023, when the car was extracted from a wooden lean-to and offered for auction sale by H&H in July 2024.
The Morris sold for just £1550, despite it having a host of period rallying features that include a bolted-in roll cage, internally-routed fuel lines, auxiliary Speedwell gauges, bolstered front seats, Works-style dashboard extensions and a Rileybranded, twin carburettor-fed A-Series engine redlined at 7000rpm on the tacho.
Damian Jones of H&H explained that the new owner, having bought the car unseen, was deterred by the extent of the rust and consigned it for another sale with H&H in November. The car sold for a similar sum to July’s auction figure and may now, at last, have found someone willing to embark on a muchneeded full restoration.
Rare UK-built AMG Mercedes-Benz S124 is one of one!
What is thought to be the only S124-series estate car converted in the UK to AMG specification has been rescued from outdoor storage in an Edinburgh cul-de-sac. The conversion was performed when this car was new in 1987 by Ron Stratton Ltd of Wilmslow, Cheshire, and is said to have cost the same as the purchase price of the base-model 300TE. In the days before AMG was merged with Mercedes, the tuning house allowed just a few concessions around the world to build and sell its products – two in the USA, one in Japan and Stratton in the UK.
The car was bought by CAD/CNC engineer Ruairidh McKenzie, who heard rumours of an old AMG Mercedes lying under a car cover but took them with a pinch of salt. But as the son of a senior Mercedes dealer technician, he had a good second opinion to fall back on.
‘We went to see it and soon realised it was the real thing, not just an S124 with a body kit,’ says Ruairidh. ‘The kit is the proper AMG “Gen 1” and it has AMG’s “Aero 1” wheels, the branded dashboard cluster, the Momo steering wheel as used in the AMG Hammer saloon and an interior that was completely re-upholstered by Stratton, with unique stitching on the door cards.’
It also has the highly unusual option of an SEC-style nose, with a large grille grafted onto the S124’s bonnet, something that only a few other Stratton-built cars seem to have. The engine, which would have come over to the UK ready-built from AMG in Affalterbach, is a 3.2-litre, high-compression version of the M103 unit, good for 234bhp and 155mph, according to the contemporary Stratton AMG catalogue.
Remarkably, Ruairidh joined some dots in the car’s history when he moved it into storage to begin the restoration. The landlord of the storage business, David Seaton, had bought the car as its third owner from Edinburgh dealer Kenny Dunn in 1989 for £32,500, reduced by trading a Porsche 928. David towed his racing car with it for a year and remembered the first owner – the boss of Scottish poultry firm, Marshall’s Chunky Chickens – had taken the car to Wilmslow for servicing rather than let anyone else touch it. Some 35 years later, the mechanical condition still seems good; the car fired up first time, and Ruairidh is working through structural repairs the car needs first before a repaint and a return to the road.
Missing Fifties Cowap Sports Cars special returns
This is the CSC MkIII prototype, a car with a chassis created by Charles Sidney Cowap, whose initials coincide with the name of his forgotten marque – CSC, or Cowap Sports Cars. It had been thought lost by those with an interest in the Fifties specials scene for perhaps 50 years, until it appeared for sale recently in Manchester. The body that Cowap used was a Rochdale MkVI. Before Rochdale made complete kits and cars, it offered bodywork to the burgeoning scene for home-built specials, its first GRP offering of 1954 being the MkVI.
The Cowap MkIII chassis appears to follow the popular Cooper/Turner/Tojeiro approach of using a transverse leaf spring at each end, with lower wishbones and two sturdy chassis rails. This car has actually been in the hands of one extended family since it was new, but the current owners, Chris Robinson and his son Kai, never got the story of the car’s earliest origins.
‘It came to us from my uncle’s grandfather,’ says Kai. ‘My uncle – my dad’s half-brother – got it from his father, and it was his father in turn whose name is on the 1955 logbook with the car. Beyond that, we don’t know much about it.
‘It was on the road in 1973, because we have an MoT that dates from then, but it was taken off the road for a re-paint and stripped down, and then never put back together again. It was outside for a while, but since the car came to us, it’s been in a dry container. It seems to be all there bar the seats, we reckon.’
Two engines and gearboxes come with the car, one that appears to be a 998cc A-series and one that is possibly the original 803cc Austin A30 unit. Was an engine upgrade contemplated along with a fresh coat of paint?
In attempting to discover more about CSC cars, Classic Cars magazine tracked down a present-day Charles Cowap who was able to confirm that there was indeed a Charles Sidney Cowap who died in the early Seventies. He had various motor trade and engineering interests in Lancashire. This ties in with information from Chris Rees’s book British Specialist Cars, Specials and Kits, 1945-1960, which captions a photo of the car pictured soon after completion, in The Motor, 14 September 1955: ‘The CSC MkIII sports car, developed by Gainsborough Engineering Co of Middleton, Lancs in conjunction with Wrigley Motors Ltd, was expected to be in production shortly at a price of £700 including tax. It used a Rochdale MkVI body and weighed 11.5cwt with Austin A30 running gear. On 16in wheels, it was claimed to exceed 70mph.’
The price seems high when the same sum would have bought a two-year-old Austin- Healey 100 from The Motor’s small ads, which may explain why the firm did not last. No other CSC/Cowap cars and chassis have emerged during our research. Anyone with information on the marque, or with an interest in taking on this car, should email classic.cars@bauermedia.co.uk and their message will be forwarded on.
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