I joined the club at the last meeting, little did I know, I would be asked to write an article for the magazine!

I've been lucky enough to work on a lot of exotic machinery over the years, from an Argo F3 car to a 1918 Rolls Royce. I started my working life as an apprentice panelbeater with Ray Larsen in Invercargill. We were known as Jaguar restoration specialists, so having XK120, XK140, E types, Mark 1 and Mark 2 Jaguars to work on was interesting, although you had to have a fair amount of patience restoring rusty old Jags.

The apprentice ahead of me was Barney Tansley, who I happen to think is currently the best car body builder in New Zealand. He has built bodies for Lotus ll's, Mazda Le Mans sports cars, Jaguar C types, and a Ferrari Dino 206SP. Barney operates out of Queenstown and is running his own bodybuilding and restoration workshop. (If you ever get a chance to have a look at a bare aluminium body, don't worry too much about the outside, have a look at the inside, that is where you can tell if the guy who has built it is any good or not). I've lay on the floor for up to 30 minutes just admiring the welding and wheeling work on a Barney Tansley body. This guy is an old style craftsman and I would recommend his work to anybody in the world.

My first job actually building cars was for Barry Leitch. Barry is probably one of the best known car constructors in the South Island. I have noticed a few of Barry's cars are owned by club members, including his latest replica, the Lotus 23B. Variety is the spice of life and when working for Barry I was never bored. When I started there, the guys had just started the first Brabham BT21. This was my first experience with a single seater-racing car and I loved every moment of it. There is a saying that may offend a few members (Sorry) "real race cars don't have guards".

Barry does a lot of single seater and sports car restoration work. He gets cars sent to him from around the world. The Leitch Sevens were the bulk of our work, however we had some interesting resto's as well. A Ginetta G4, that we built a new chassis for, had a plywood floor and bulkhead panels fibreglassed to the chassis, which I thought was a good way of filling the gaps in a chassis without adding to much weight but also adding a high degree of torsional stiffness.

Another car of interest was an Anson SA7 Formula Ford 2000, which was designed by Gary Anderson, currently head designer for Jaguar Formula One Team. This was the first 'modern' racing car I had worked on. It was interesting to compare the design differences between a car from the 60's (Brabham BT21) and the 80's (Anson SA7). The Brabham had about as much room in the cockpit as your average lazyboy where as with the Anson, I had to twist my hips 45 degrees just to get my backside into the seat. The frontal area of the Anson is about half that of the Brabham and in the Brabham your feet are about 300mm behind the front wheels, whilst in the Anson your feet are level with the front of the front wheels.

I got to race the Brabham BT21 at Teretonga and at the Queenstown Road Race, It was a good car to do my first few races in, very forgiving of a driver who occasionally exceeded his ability to stay on the black stuff.

The next job I had was probably the best I've had, working for Dave Brown at Classic Car Developments. Dave is one of the rare breed, that can build extremely accurate replica cars from nothing more than a few basic dimensions and a bunch of photographs.

Dave builds C type Jaguars, Lotus 11's, Ford GT40's and Ferrari Dino 206SP replica's, that are as close to the original cars as you can build without actually being in the Jaguar, Ford or Ferrari Factory. Dave is an ex aircraft engineer and automotive machinist, who went into building high quality authentic replica's about 10 years ago. When I started working for him it was at the beginning of his first GT40 project, it was a massive project taking 14 months to complete.

The GT40 was completely different to anything I had worked on before, every car I had built up until that stage had been of space frame construction type, the GT40 was a steel monocoque chassis built from 20 gauge (1.2mm) steel sheet folded and spot welded to form a chassis.

The GT40 is by far the most exciting car that I have ever driven, every time I stepped out of it, I had grin a mile wide. It had fibreglass front and rear body sections, fibreglass doors, the engine was a 302 Ford V8 fitted to a ZF transaxle. The cars at Le Mans were known to reach speeds around 200MPH, and at those speeds you need very good brakes! Girling four pot alloy calipers brought the car to a halt with very little effort.

This car did everything, it cornered and stopped very well but the most impressive thing was the kick in the back when you put your foot down. As a friend of mine who owned a 500 horsepower supercharged 58 Chev says, "Nothing beats cubic inches".

Dave sells most of his cars overseas although one of the most interesting, the Ferrari Dino 206SP went to Dennis Chapman in Christchurch.

This car has a space frame chassis with an alloy body, built by Barney Tansley, it has an all alloy 2.0 litre Dino V6 engine. The Dino was a relatively complicated car to build especially with the lack of technical information, available on the car. It's being able to build a car very accurately without a great deal of information, that I feel is Dave's best talent. He is also quite willing to throw a part away and start again if he is not totally happy with the end result. It is this dedication to excellence that makes Dave's cars stand out from most other replicas. The Dino was about 2 months from completion when I moved to Christchurch, but I have had a good look at it since at race meetings and it is truly a lovely little car.

When we moved to Christchurch, I was out of the industry for a couple of years, but started to suffer from 'classic car withdrawal', so I got myself a job at Auto Restorations. This is a restoration firm who do everything except upholstery, in house. I was employed as a car body builder, building alloy bodies for mainly 1920 1930's sports and saloon cars. Auto Restorations receive approximately 50% of their work comes from overseas clients. While I was there, we had all sorts of exotic cars come through the doors, from early Bentley's, an ex Whitney Straight Maserati 8CM to Giles Villeneuve's 1979 Ferrari 312T Formula 1 car. Ferrari's in my opinion, make the most exquisite noise known to man.

Having shifted to Wellington, I'm out of the industry, once again, although I have a little project that I aim to finish. I started building a Brabham BT6 Formula Junior, in 1996, but finances over the past few years have prohibited me from completing it. The car is a relatively simple car to build; however, you cannot use a lot of parts from road cars. I have had to make a pattern for the steering rack casting. This was the first time I had ever attempted making a pattern and was quite pleased with the final results, however, when it came to getting a rear upright done, I consulted the experts.

A Ford 1500 engine powers the car; the transaxle is a Mk 8 Hewland; drive shafts are Hillman Imp; Brakes, Triumph Herald 1360 units. The original cars were very successful in 1963 in the hands of Jack Brabham and Denny Hulme and I am looking forward to getting it on the race track once completed and doing some laps.

Having received the car club profiles when I joined, I'd certainly be interested in having a look at a few of the cars that have, and are being built. I had a look already at Dave Bray's Speedster at the Whittaker's race meeting last year and was very impressed. I have also had a look at a Saker kit and think that they would make a pretty impressive road car, but I think I need get the current project finished first!

Well I hope I have shed a little light, not only on myself but also on what I think, is a group of very talented people, building some very interesting cars in the South.