Last pictures of oil tycoon, 80, killed on veteran car rally
THE elderly driver who died while taking part in a veteran car rally was a retired Canadian oil millionaire.
Ron Carey, 80, was driving a 116year-old car in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run when he accidentally strayed on to a motorway and was hit by a lorry.
Mr Carey, who owned a £3.8million classic car collection, was thrown into the air and killed.
His wife Billi, 75, who was in the passenger seat, suffered serious head injuries. She was flown by air ambulance to St George’s Hospital in Tooting where she is in a stable condition.
Hours earlier, the Careys were photographed sitting in the 1903 Knox Runabout ‘Old Porcupine’, which was not fitted with seatbelts, before the start of the run. Another photograph on Sunday morning showed them driving along The Mall with the car’s hood down.
Mr Carey was driving the Knox, which – as was common in American cars of the era – was steered using a lever known as a tiller rather than a wheel.
The vehicle had no indicators and a top speed of 35mph. He is said to have taken a wrong turn off the official route on the A23 at the junction with the M23 at Hooley, Surrey, at about 10am. The car was wrecked in the crash.
Mr Carey, from Calgary, Alberta, is thought to have participated in the London to Brighton run in 2011, 2012 and 2013. His close friend Rick Pikulski told CTV News Calgary: ‘It’s very tragic, gutwrenching news, I’ve known Ron for almost 40 years and he was very well-respected and well-liked.
‘He’s a tremendous loss. He was an avid collector. He had a passion. He was very well-travelled and would go on these vintage car rallies all the time.’
Mr Carey was orphaned as a baby and taken in by his grandparents. At the age of 17 he went to work on oil rigs in winter, and in the summer he worked in road construction, operating crawler tractors and earth-moving buggies. In 1973 he started his own firm, oil drill bit service company J&L Supply.
He said: ‘I was never without a job. When the rigs were operating, I was on one. When they were shut down, I would get a job doing whatever was available.’
Philanthropist Mr Carey was a major donor of vintage vehicles to Canadian motoring museums.
The rear-wheel drive Knox Runabout,
which has two extra folddown passenger seats in front of the driver, was designed by Harry A Knox – one of the pioneers of the horseless carriage industry in the US – and sold for $2,000 (about £400 at the time but the equivalent of more than £40,000 today).
It was known as the Knox Waterless because of the air cooling system, or more familiarly the ‘Old Porcupine’. One model fetched around £53,000 at auction in 2012.