Riding in a roadgoing GT40

YOUR COVER STORY about roadgoing GT40s in 206 gave me the incentive to share some memories of when I was a young boy growing up in Northamptonshire. Father was Rover distributor for the county and so he was offered some now highly desirable cars as partexchanges against new Rovers. Owners often had inflated ideas of the value of their car, however, so not all came our way.

I used to go to a local sailing club with some friends and there in the car park I saw what I still view as the perfect performance car: a roadgoing Ford GT40, in gold. It belonged to David Bennie, a local plant hire business owner. David had many exotics over the years but it’s the GT40 that I remember best.

As a typical teenager, I had written off to many manufacturers and importers of exotica for

Above A roadgoing GT40 is always memorable, as Robert Coucher found out with MkIII chassis M3/1103 in issue 115. brochures and anything else that they would send out. Ford Advanced Vehicles at Slough responded favourably to my request, so my head was crammed full of information on the GT40. One day I was with my father at a local pub and David was there; the two of them had done deals on various mundane cars in the past so he knew us. No doubt I was sharing my knowledge to the assembled adults and David

There are now some serious collectors collecting and racing these cars but most of us are the old-school, hands-on kind of guys who are more interested in the greasy bits than finding the correct chrome-plated ashtray. It would indeed be a shame if word got out to the extent that they became unaffordable mainstream objects. Richard Disbrow, Dorset