KEEPERS
There were quite a few sports cars that the late Sir Stirling Moss was willing to endorse, but none as diminutive and unusual as this!
'Having owned, repaired, restored and re-engineered more than 14 Minis, I know full well the importance of the Unipower GT. So, when I saw a scruffy example on a Unipower stand at a car show in 1981, with a note on it saying that the equally scruffy No1 car (which took to the road in July 1966) was for sale, buying it was a no-brainer for me. I instantly turned down the chance to own the Ginetta that I had been looking at.
‘The Unipower GT was an extraordinaryary specialist car. It first took shape 60 years ago when designers Ernie Unger (who worked on the Hillman Imp project) and Val Dare-Bryan wanted to make a sports car, adopting race car principles and based upon Mini mechanicals.
A certain Ron Bradshaw – who Unger knew when they both worked for Ford – became involved and was working on the Ford GT40 project at the same time, so it’s no coincidence that these mid-engineded sports cars look alike and share exactly the same height; 40.5 inches!
‘Dare-Bryan had previously worked alongside Colin Chapman and went on to design Attila racing sports cars, so there’s real pedigree in the Unipower GT’s make-up. Val and Ernie were sticklers for getting it right and you can detect this in the quality of the GRP body. Chassissis spaceframes were made by Arch Motors, which still supplies frames to Caterham to this day. The Unipower name came from backer and maker Tim Powell, owner of Middlesex-based Universal Power Drives Ltd. Powell manufactured specialist trucks but dropped out of the Unipower GT project in 1968 to become a legend in powerboat racing.
‘KYL 294D was in a sorry state and more like a rolling shell than a car, so it required full restoration which I completed myself, including the re-spray. I wanted to return the car to how it looked in the original pictures but I also wanted to modernise it where necessary. For instance, one of the car’s flaws was poor high-speed stability in side-winds, which I’ve improved (but sadly not eradicated) by grafting on the front spoiler from a Golf MkI and re-tuning the suspension. ‘On the other hand, I re-built the rear wheel arches back to standard – they had been sawn off to enable wider wheels to be fitted.
This limits wheel size but the handling and performance are more than adequate. The 1275cc engine has been bored out to just under 1.4-litres – fuelled by a single Weber DCOE – and is good for at least 100bhp, which gives extremely vivid performance in a car that weighs considerably less than a Lotus Elise. �
