[Derwent]

Originally Posted by crmalcolm

Could it be this car:


Roger Phillips:
“Our racing car (yet to be named) was conceived in the White Horse Pub, Chichester. There were three of us in this marriage that conceived the car; Tony Cowell, a Master Blacksmith of the old Wrought Iron School, who wielded a torch as an artist wields his brush, he even used to weld up speedo cables! Alongside him was Michael Homer, the son of a noted Selsey Lobster Fisherman and both of them lived a few doors apart in Selsey.

I joined these lads as the third of the ‘Three Musketeers’ as we were known, after noticing Michael’s much modified 850 Mini, which had all the Downton bits and went like a rocket.

[...]

Not wishing to risk my daily driver again (which had morphed into a Mk1 Cortina GT 1500) I was listening to Michael when he suddenly came up with this wild idea of building our own car. He was full of the news that there was to be a new 1100cc Sports Racing Class and he reckoned he could design and he and Tony could build a super low and light weight car to these new regulations using a BMC engine, which he reckoned he could put together with his brother in law’s help. I remember Michael saying that the regulations called for doors of a certain area and he had come up with the idea of making the doors long but low, complying with the area requirement but enabling us to build a ‘proper’ race car. At the same time, Mr. Chapman and later others were having similar thoughts, all unknown to us.

[...]

The arrangement between the three of us was that I would fund the cost, Michael would design the car and build the engine and Tony would do all the fabrication. We would own the car jointly and share the driving.

[...]

The Jackson company was growing and getting busier all the time, plus the commute from Selsey was a bind so Michael managed to sweet talk a wonderful lady in Selsey who had a lock up garage that she never used and she kindly offered it to us as a workshop. The lady’s name was Pandora and when the question of a name for the car came up we thought that would be a nice name, so PANDORA it was with the add on of ‘Powered by Austin’, (Austin sounded so much better than BMC).

[...]

Work and progress was slow though and so to speed things up I suggested we get our own premises and start up our own garage business which we called, ‘Pandora Motor Engineering’.

I would recommend a read of the full article - even if I've got the wrong car....

There was also an article in the 4 Apr 19 Autosport where the current owner Andy Prill reunited the car with Roger following restoration, and Roger had some time in the car.

Very interesting. Thanks