Vintage Thing No.53 - GP Centron

This post was prompted by a request for information about the GP Centron at the 2009 Exeter Kit Car Show. Somebody had one and wanted to know more about it so they put up a board about it in the designated car park for kit cars. They knew it had connections with Cornwall but not much more than that.

I apologise for the quality of the pictures but these are photos of photos. I left my name on the writing pad asking for more info so if I hear anything I'll do an update.

I happened to visit the factory at Threemilestone just outside Truro, when the moulds for the Centron II briefly resided there during the summer of 1983. At the time I was an industrial design student and tried to get a summer job out of them but had no luck. The company were called Statestyle and were developing an ultra-violet curing process for woven mat glass fibre. Staff on their experimental production line had very well bronzed forearms - it was a kind of rolling sunbed.

The GP Centron was the first Beetle-based exotic kit car and was designed by Val Dare-Bryan, who had worked on the Unipower GT, together with GP's Pierre du Plessis. As originally designed, it had a fold forward canopy-cum-doors arrangement but after about a dozen cars were built between 1970-71 it was re-designed with more conventional doors and offered as the GP Centron II. According to Chris Rees in his book Classic Kit Cars about 4 Centron IIs were built before GP sold the moulds - that's the fascinating thing about old kit cars; the production numbers are often vague.

The Centron II eventually came to Cornwall and Peter Tuthill in his book Cornwall's Motor Industry reckons that two more were built as the Lalande by a firm called G V Plastics in St Columb Major, near Newquay.

I saw one of these cars at the Statestyle factory at Threemilestone. It was black and quite well finished with air brushed murals of - if I remember correctly - snakes and spaceships. Even back then, this sort of thing was a bit old hat but Peter says it won an award for best paint job at the Wheels West Car & Hot Rod Show in August 1983.

The proprietor of G V PLastics was a Mr P G Gilbert but at Threemilestone I got to know a likeable chap called Colin Clifford who was just as happy talking about CB radios as kit cars. I'd seen an article about the car in a kit car mag and plucked my courage and rode over to the factory on my Honda 125 and introduced myself.

Colin Clifford was quite interested in employing me but didn't have anything in his budget to pay me. He wanted to develop wind up windows for the Centron and fit different rear lights. I did some speculative drawings that smoothed out the lines of the side windows but these have long since been lost. They had already made some mouldings to fit under the back bumper to hide what was rather obviously a Beetle power plant. With its Morris Marina/Austin Allegro door handles, the revised Centron could've looked a bit like an obscure Lotus - from a distance (against the sun).

Performance was probably quite good even with a Beetle engine for the car only weighed 670kg.

What's interesting from this photo (of a photo) is that the flying buttresses of the Centron II are gone and there's a bigger rear window that looks like it's hinged, so some development work must have been carried out by the Cornish firm(s).

The owner making enquiries about his car's history at the Exeter Show wrote next to the photos that his car was built in Bodmin in 1983 and was sold at auction in 1989. Beyond that he knew very little about it, although he had tracked down another GP Centron.

The registration number matches the pictures of the Lalande Centron in Peter's book so could this be an old friend of mine, the old black car with murals that I saw at Threemilestone that's been repainted?

The project came to a halt soon after I visited the factory and Peter Tutthill states that production was taken over by a firm called MDB Sportscars. They also owned the Charger kit car, another VW based exotic that had grown in stages out of the Neville Trickett designed Siva Saluki. MDB began to modify the Centron into the Sapphire but the days of the Beetle based exotic were coming to an end.

Chris Rees pithily describes the Centron 2 as "Not so much a 'has been' as a 'never was'".

However, as the first VW based exotic, the GP Centron must have a place in history and any remaining cars really should be preserved as examples of those (relatively) care free days (although maybe they didn't seem like that at the time).