1959 AUSTIN HEALEY JAMAICAN
Current owner: Matthew Moore
It’s based on a Healey 3000
“It’s a 1959 Austin Healey 3000 Mk1, rebodied in California in around 1966 or 1967. It was originally a left-hand-drive car in ivory white and in the late 1960s a company called Fiberfab Velocidad put the new body on. They did new bodies for a variety of cars and apparently only about six Healey Jamaicans were made and this was one of them.”
A few other similar bodies sur vive
“There is one on a TR chassis and one on an MGA chassis and I found another one on a Beetle chassis. I bought that as a spare. I think this is the only one on a Healey chassis though, apparently, John Chatham has one in a garage. There is also one just popped up for sale in Australia. They do turn up and occasionally people come up to me who know what they are.”
It came from California
“Most people have no idea what it is. Underneath it is all Healey, the chassis and everything. I used a lot of parts from Denis Welch Motorsport. The car turned up in a collection in California and it had dilapidated badly. Someone shipped it to the UK and I bought it about four years ago on ebay.”
It needed a lot of work
“It was in horrific condition and we stripped it right down and spent about a year rebuilding it. It was badly constructed in the 1960s and they’d built it on a rough Healey at the time. So the car was bad, the build was bad and it was a bit of a nightmare. We had to unpick someone else’s work, restore the car and then work out how the body went on. The Dexion they had used went straight in the bin! It was complete apart from one front corner through accident damage.”
He’s racing it regularly
“I’ve now been racing it for three years and I can get it fairly close to the front. It’s producing about 285bhp, so it is quite lively. But that brings other problems and at Thruxton it pulled the back axle off the mountings. It’s on a par with the Healeys and it handles well. I think it is the only one racing. I enjoy racing with the HRDC.”