Tony Its a bleak picture you paint if most of Austin Seven activity is Special based.I would say from my observation that at club meetings and rallies most of the sevens are standard and they will continue to need spares to keep them on the road.

Heres Rubellion:


Based around a Ruby body, this car has quite a history as a Hot Rod. If you do a google image search you'll see it went from a standard Ruby body to a roof chop and then various colours and configurations until current day.

I've got an early issue of Custom car, which features "Wild Honey". I will have to dig it out!!

As a special owner I would love to own an original car
, and may one day own one. However 6 years ago I bought a pile of bits that had been off the road for 30 years and built a special, so bits of the original Ruby live on, even though I never have owned the body!

Why did I build a special?

The same reason people have been building them for donkeys years, I liked motor racing and was skint, history showed that an Austin Seven special could be fun to build and own, which is why I got involved in the Austin Seven scene.

Keeping old bits alive by building specials is a good thing, considering the throw away world we live in, BUT I have to agree that most people including myself would frown upon an original car being broken up to make a special nowadays. Do people actually break up good saloons to build Ulster reps??? This would seem wrong .

Steve.

How about this beauty? Was it ever a 750 racer?

Bantam.

The 1st pic does look like the 750 racer built by Mike Forrest. But looking at pictures in Alan Stanniforths book I see that the Forrest car was substantially lower. The book lists a number of stages of evolution of Mike Forrests car so maybe this is a copy by someone or perhaps an early experiment.

Steve.