GN THUNDERBUG
It is a GN chassis “I used to have a car called a Parker GN, which was an extremely fast vintage racing car but I had to trailer it to race meetings. So I wanted a car that I could drive on the road and race. I’d been collecting GN bits for years and finally got enough bits and a friend of mine said his dad had owned a Riley with a huge great vee-twin engine.”
He built it up 25 years ago “So I tracked down a 1908 Riley crankcase and some mid-1920s Salmson cylinders, made a crank and the rest of it is pretty much standard GN. It is a 1922 GN chassis from Basil Davenport’s road-going version of GN Spider. I built it about 25 years ago as a VSCC special and it has worked out brilliantly.”
He drives it on the road “It is a fabulous road car and it is lovely to drive. It handles perfectly and I do tend to drive it on the ragged edge but it is very easy at the ragged edge and doesn’t do anything you don’t expect it to do. It is just fantastic. You just put the silencer back on, take the numbers off and drive home.”
It revs to 1500rpm “It is a very low revving twocylinder four-litre engine and I used to get valve bounce at 1500rpm. So I put some stronger valve springs on, it can go a bit more than that. It is geared to do 65mph at 1000rpm and it will probably do 90mph flat out. In top gear, you get an explosion every five feet and you can certainly feel it firing. Because it is a 90-degree vee-twin engine, it is very well balanced.”
It only has rear brakes “There are only brakes on the back axle and I can lock the rear wheels up. I’ve driven cars with brakes that are a lot worse. You never get understeer and into a corner you use the brakes to bring the tail round and I’ve never had an issue with the brakes.”
It is a family heirloom “My son Hughie also races the car and it’s part of the family. It has a patina on it and it’s taken nearly 30 years to get that look with stubborn stains. I go over it with an oily rag and some WD40. There is a bit of paint missing on the top where I barrel rolled it at Phoenix Park about 20 years ago.”