MYSTERY CAR

This month, we’re back to continental Europe — and now in the early-to-mid ’50s with this neat little coupé. What have we here? Send your solution, by email or snail mail, to Mystery Cars No. 228, NZ Classic Car, PO Box 46 020, Herne Bay, Auckland by mid January. The winner will be the first correct entry opened from the entries box. Last month’s Mystery No. 227 was the final series of the René Bonnet Missile, the 1964 Missile II. The story of this car begins when René Bonnet and Charles Deutsch were partners in DB, but this particular model was built after the split-up of DB, when Deutsch and Bonnet went their separate ways, Bonnet continuing sports and GT car production with three series of Renaultengined models. His new design was the René Bonnet Djet, which later became more popular as the Matra Djet, when Matra purchased a controlling interest in the René Bonnet enterprise. But Bonnet kept two older designs in production, the FWD front-engined Le Mans and its twoseater cabriolet derivative, the Missile. And that was our last month’s Mystery, in its final Missile II configuration, and our picture showed the 1964 version, pretty much at the end of production. The basic design traced back to DB days, when the FWD Panhard chassis design and flat-twin Panhard engine were the main building blocks for DB design, but by the time the Missile II was being built, the shape only remained, with the chassis now being the Renault R4 FWD platformtype chassis, and the engine usually the 1093 tuned version of the rear-engined Dauphine, adapted slightly to fit its new location up front in the Missile’s FWD chassis. Note that it was still only an 845cc engine, but pushed out a healthy 41kw gross (55bhp) in the 1093 version, and was surprisingly light at around 580–590kg (1279lb) dry weight, so its top speed of around 160kph made it quite a snappy performer. We’ve not been able to trace production figures, but it is likely not many were sold, because reading between the lines, it seems like 1962–’64 were not good years commercially for René Bonnet, as Renault backed away from Bonnet when some of his competition projects were unsuccessful, though Matra soon after stepped in to keep the Djet in production. Looking back on November’s Mystery, it seems a production glitch took place. The Mystery picture was right, the Honda L700 van with its twin-cam engine from the S-series sports car, but somehow text from the month before found its way in. Apologies to everyone for that. I think we’re right this month!