BILL GWYNNE’S RS2000
Thanks for running the feature on Ian Caddy’s ex- Bill Gwynne RS2000 in the November 2019 issue. I worked at Hartford Motors ( Banbury) in the department that looked after preparing the new and used car sales stock. This enabled me to learn mechanical skills and body repairs and spraying. We’d service and do body repairs right through to final valeting prior to displaying on the sales pitch. When Hartfords provided this car for Bill, he was also an employee as he was running our motorcycle department.
Bill was also a top biker too. If there was a decent trials bike in sales he’d often be seen screaming through the yard on the back wheel! He’d had a bad neck injury in his career, as we understood, but it didn’t deter him at all.
HWL 1S was prepared between events in the main workshop aside from specialist work and body repairs through our main accident repair shop, but when it was due to be sold off it came to our department for a pre-sale tidy up. We were able to give it a blast up the road as we did with the many ex-rally cars that came through sales — ex-works Mk2s and an ex-Tony Pond TR8 in Unipart colours to name a few. I was roughly 20 years old and paid to go driving about in things like that under the guise of a pre-sales road test — what a time we had!
Anyway, I was tasked with removing HWL’s decals, and repairing a nasty groove in the driver’s door above the feature line where the red stripe is, as it was being advertised in the appropriate magazines. This, no doubt, would have been when Ian took it away.
Great mag — from a classic Ford fan both restored or modified. I currently own fastback this Mustang.
Steve Grant, UK