Engine Punk

I've recently been contacted by Gareth Jones who owns this Ginetta G26. It's a rather smarter G26 than the one that we fetched home and Gareth is looking for some wheels with the right offset to fill the arches and make his car sit on the road properly. Mondeo wheels look wrong. He says that "the Cortina wheel bolt pattern is quite common among Peugeots and many others, but the offset normally used on FWD cars is different, and the Ginetta needs something that’s deep-dish to make it visually correct too!" Since my close up encounter with a G26, the styling has grown on me and I have to say that of the G26 family this version with the pop up lights is the best. Some angles still look a little odd but once you know where not to look you stop looking at it that way - don't you? Okay, it's like an itch that you've got to scratch and takes a little discipline but it's somewhere around the rear quarter that I feel it's a little awkward but only from a c...

Somebody sent me this scan of the Gillie in its original form some time ago and I've just stumbled across it in my archive files on my PC. I think it was from top chap Roger Swift who runs the archives for the Imp Club. It shows the Gillie in its original form and to anyone who has ever restored an Imp some of those panels look strangely familiar, especially those rear wheel arches. That is because they usually live within the Imp bodyshell. The Gillie drew its looks(!) from the structural panels themselves and for pressings that were never designed to be seen the look, well (how can I put this) as if they were never meant to be seen. But of course that was part of the charm of the Gillie. It was a chirpy looking thing and this picture shows it standing tall on its skinny little tyres thanks to the hub reduction gears that lifted its vitals out of the way of rocks. It had a diff lock, too, and Tim Fry, who with Mike Parkes brought the Imp into being, said the Gillie would climb the...