Monday, February 2, 2009

A WA Icon

With some interest arising from the West about the welfare of a very potent car from over there, before I continue to assure those enquirers that it is certainly alive and well, I thought I would drag out and share some old photos of Errol's old car. This one, apart from showing the strength of the chassis, gives us a look at that Mercedes diff which sort of looks like it's only independant on one side.




And this one shows the work needed to squeeze that V8 in.

Those expensive BBS wheels were there from the start. One of them is giving sealing problems at the moment.

Now here it is in Kapunda with more holes in the bonnet than a block of Swiss cheese. The car was advertised for sale in Perth a few years back and attracted the attention of Steve Rowley in SA. He sold off the 2 Mark 7 project cars he had begun working on and flew over and bought it. At the time he lived at Williamstown, not far from me, and used to be able to take it for regular blasts in the hills but when he moved to Kingston SE he didn't get to drive it much. Last year Colin McAskill bought it and took it to Adelaide. The locked diff makes it a very difficult car to drive (it had already managed to spit Steve off the road on one occasion) and it also puts strain on other components, cracking brackets and housings. Colin really only wants to use it for Sunday drives with his lady (let's face it, he has the SR6 for serious track work) so that's why it's up this way, getting that welded up diff replaced by the spare one, among other things.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm puzzled by the comment "independant on one side only?????" that doesn't make sense, surely if the centre section of the rear end is pivot mounted to the chassis, the wheels would swing in an arc around it. Maybe the rear end may be correctly termed "swing axle" as per VW beetle...?