Whilst on the Isle of Man last week, Malcolm and I were approached by an elderly chap who started telling us about his Austin 7, Morgan, MG and Scott experiences. His name was Derek Whittle and he'd been a garage owner/motor engineer in Rochdale until retiring to the IoM about 25 years ago. He'd had Sevens for much of his life as well as racing Morgan 3 wheelers and Scott motorcycles and we spent a fascinating 2 hours talking to him about his experiences. He was good enough to lend us some old photographs from the 1960's one set showing an A7 Special VT 6411 he pulled out of a breakers yard in Cumbria and restored. No photos of the finished car but a set of six taken in the breakers yard shown below. Further photos were from a VSCC Oulton meeting in the mid 1960's where he was racing his Morgan and once I've scanned them, I'll put these on here. They include a set of detailed photos of Ulster Team Car GW 82 never seen before.

Regretfully, Mycarcheck doesn't pick up VT 6411.





Steve

Location: North Yorkshire

Clearly an engineer par excellence, Derek also mentioned that the special VT 6411 was fitted with a pair of Amal carbs.
He also explained at length how he used a pair of Morris Minor handbrake cables (saloon, not Traveller)to operate the front brakes, rather like the Bowden system but better! He used the long brake levers with clevis pin ends which fitted straight onto the MM cables.
We later saw him at the Manx Classic scrutineering at the TT grandstands in Douglas where he was giving some useful advice to the owner of a Buckler which had an 1192 Ford engine fitted with ELVA overhead valve conversion. He had the same system in his racing Morgan.