Beschreibung:

Picture yourself easing open the long wrap-over driver’s door of this wonderfully patinated Ford GT40. Just 40-inches high, of course, this classical 200mph legend barely comes up to your chest. Gaze down into its broad yet snugly tailored cockpit, and savor its wonderful period ’60s look. Relatively few GT40s today retain the original-style perforated driver-cooling upholstery. This one does. Relatively few GT40s today retain the original-style thin-rimmed leather-bound steering wheel. This one does. Ease open the famous clamshell rear body ‘clip’, and study this GT40’s muscular Ford V8 engine. Relatively few GT40s today have featured Gurney-Weslake cylinder heads for the greater part of their lives. Yet this one has. Within context, what we are offering here is a wonderful GT40 for the discerning enthusiast – one with the patina of long preservation, coupled with the history of having been a genuine enthusiasts’ car throughout its long life. British Ford racing privateer Terry Drury – from Rainham, Essex – had been running another GT40 (chassis ‘1005’) during 1967 when he began ‘1073’s story. He pulled together sufficient finance during the winter of 1967-68 to purchase from Ford’s chosen manufacturers, JW Automotive Engineering Limited of Slough, Buckinghamshire, a brand-new but bare GT40 monocoque chassis, plus sufficient other components to complete assembly himself to racing standards. He fitted a tail body section which had been taken from a Paul Hawkins mould – ‘Hawkeye’ being the colourful Australian racing driver and GT40 campaigner who famously drove for all manner of factory teams, including both Ferrari (in the P4s) and Porsche (for whom he had won the legendary Sicilian Targa Florio road race) in addition to Gulf-JW Ford themselves (for whom he would win the Monza 1,000Kms classic). According to Ford GT40 authority Ronnie Spain, Terry Drury installed ‘as new’ a standard Ford 289 cubic inch V8 engine and ZF gearbox, but the contemporary race report in ‘Autospor't weekly covering its debut event – the British BOAC ‘500’ World Championship round on April 7, 1968 – describes it as follows: “Chassis no 1073 (was) in a peculiar orangey-gold colour, for Terry Drury/Keith Holland; this one had Weslake heads and Tecalemit-Jackson fuel injection”. The bronze-liveried car then qualified on the centre position of the ninth row in the 3-2-3 starting grid, with a lap time of 1 minute 43.2 seconds. In the second hour of the race Keith Holland brought the car into the pits to report a rough-running engine and Drury took over, only to return a couple of laps later for a plug change. Eventually – after no fewer than 91 laps racing against the works Gulf-JWA GT40s, Porsche 907s, Ferrari 275LMs and Lola-Chevrolet T70GTs, Drury/Holland were forced to retire their private entry ‘1073’ as the engine lost oil pressure. The car was then taken to Italy for the superfast Monza 1,000 Kilometres in Milan’s royal park on April 25. While the Gulf-JW ‘works’ car of Hawkins/David Hobbs won outright, the Terry Drury/Terry Sanger ‘1073’ – now running on 48IDA twin-choke downdraught Weber carburettors in place of the troublesome T-J fuel injection system - again had a troubled race, this time with detached brake ducts and other ancillaries shaking loose at maximum speed around the punishingly bumpy Pista de Alta Velocita speedbowl section of the combined road-and-track circuit. They were not alone for Jo Siffert’s brand-new second-placed works Porsche 908 also had a gearbox cooling duct wind itself round a half-shaft and rip oil pipes off its gearbox! Journalist Paddy McNally reported: “Drury, after his early stop, had been going like a bomb until he got blinded by dirt at Lesmo and lost the GT40, spinning and riding the crash barrier…”. The two English enthusiasts then repaired and rebuilt ‘1073’ and trailed it far to the south down the leg of Italy and by ferryboat across the Straits of Messina to Sicily for the Targa Florio. The repaired and rep