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You have to realize that to me,
cars were a second love after aircraft - it was the engineering
that intrigued me not the racing, then there was golf! As a Scot
I was brought up on golf but couldn't play during the war and
only got back to playing after I qualified at the DH Tech School.
I played at weekends - off a very steady 8 handicap - so Saturdays
and Sunday mornings were for golf. Colin and Hazel accepted this
even though they thought I was daft and the drill was that I
got off early on a Sunday morning so I was in early and could
scoot up to Gothic Cottage for lunch with Colin and Hazel. Hazel
insisted on a fair division of labour so she cooked and the men
washed up.
We used the lunch to thrash through
Saturday's race with Hazel having a fair input but on this occasion
Hazel - the shrewd business-woman - was complaining abut the
lack of a cheap kit car like the Six for "the boys."
On the "Bloody Sillies" she remarked that all this
thin ally bodywork on the 11 put it out of count. In my usual
"put a number to it" mode I came back with the question
about the saving being enough while Colin moaned that we were
up to the ears on next years car. Hazel came back with an idea
of the saving but could we afford the extra tooling and parts
to which my reply was that the car could be an 11 before paneling
and simple wings and bonnet. Hazel was intrigued and Colin could
see she had her toes dug in so he proposed that in return for
doing the washing up herself, we could have a look at the idea.
By tea time we had done a weight
check, cost estimate, quick performance check, done a few sketches
of bodywork and the idea looked good - so good we got out of
washing up tea and got on with the suspension calcs and drawings.
We had finished by midnight and Colin ordered the springs on
Monday, moved an 11 chassis in to the panel beaters and the 7
was running by the next weekend.
That's the tale, from then on
we forgot it and it ceased to have technical support. It never
appealed to me as I enjoyed the snug cockpit of my 11 and got
it into quite a comfortable road car in our learning curve up
to the Elite.
Hazel was quite a girl and a
much bigger power in Colin's world than most people realized.
At the Saturday afternoon design sessions she used to sit doing
her tapestry and taking in a bit more than she let on. Every
now and then there would be a comment that was usually to the
point.
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