No exciting runs out to report, on the 1st I just took it up to Local beauty spot Newlands Corner, then on the 2nd I took it to Surbiton on a mission. There's a bit of a story to it, so get comfy.
Many many years ago I worked at Dunsfold (Oh happy day!) & sat next to a chap called Chris. He was building a car - an SSC (nee Sylva) Stylus. The car is, to the casual bystander, the same as a Fury, but it was the sainted Jeremy Phillips' subsequent design & has bigger doors, an actual boot - with a lid, & an inset bonnet. The demonstrator was once road tested by no-more a person than Jeremy Clarkson - who really liked it. Anyway, Chris spent most of the '90s building the car - with the running joke that "next year he'd be driving it to LeMans". The car itself was a bit special as rather than the usual MkII Escort, he used a RWD Toyota Corolla as the base car, that gave him a 130bhp revvy twin-cam engine, an all alloy five speed gearbox, a limited slip diff & rear disc brakes. So in it's day, it was pretty "exotic" for a kit car. It was also extremely well built - it took as long to built as my car & Chris DIDN'T have to fit-out an extension, or do an engine swap on a Rickman!
Chris did a whopping 750 miles in the car & was seconded to work in America, that accounted for the next nine months, then there was a spell Oop Narth, then back to America, where he met a girl (you can guess the rest). So circumstances added up & Chris was going to lose the garage, so needed to sell the car. I was able to put him in touch with a buyer & the deal was done. Now due to the build timing of our cars, they had never been in the same place at the same time, & I'd always wanted a photo of the two cars together, so on the day of collection I took the Fury up the A3 to Surbiton & found this:-
Bit of an "issue" there, but the skip was due to go by 11:00 so that was OK. At 10:45 the skip-hire Co. was called & we found out that a/ No-one had been dispatched to collect it. b/ There was no-one at the depot to send. c/ They knock off at 11:00. So we had a problem, fortunately is was one of the smaller skips & by brute force we were able to shunt it sideways just enough to get the Stylus out past it, take a few photos for posterity, & load it on the trailer to go off to it's new home where it will be stripped, refurbished & live a new life as a track car. Which is Nice.
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