When it comes to obscure, shed-built performance cars, there’s no country quite like the UK.
As the nation that’s home to six F1 teams, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brits are amateur engineers. There’s an entire industry dedicated to selling cars as jigsaw puzzles for people to screw together themselves.
In fact when a Brit finds out that there’s not a car to suit his needs, he makes one. Then he starts selling them to his friends. It’s how the UK became home to Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin and Morgan. Or, more recently, TVR, Ginetta, Radical, Ariel and BAC.
Step forward, Ray Christopher. Christopher was reasonably well known for the GT40 replicas his company GTD made in Poole, but he felt the need for a modernized version. Taking the GT40 as a base, he came up with his own mid-engined performance car. However, the company ran into difficulties shortly after showing off the first prototype in London and the project foundered.
Anders Hildebrand, formerly a sales agent for GTD, took up the mantle. His Spectre Motors firm bought the rights to the R42 – Ray’s 42-inch tall car – and set about a production run.
The Spectre R42 used a Ford Mustang Cobra 4.6-liter V8, good for 350hp. Its aerodynamic body scored a drag coefficient of just 0.28. By all accounts the car was genuinely good to drive too, helped along by company chairman Derek Bell. But, like many shed-built supercars, that’s where the good news ended.
Despite the excess of leather, wood and thick pile carpet, the inside of the Spectre was a Dagenham parts bin. Almost every component came from a Ford Fiesta or Escort. Even the car’s key was a Ford item; in some cases it still had a Ford badge. You might excuse this, until you learn that the Spectre cost £70,000. That may not seem all that much now, but in 1995 it was broadly the same price as a Ferrari 348 or Honda NSX.
The R42 looked rather unfinished from the outside too. This is because Spectre ended up making the body from glass fibre, instead of aluminum, and used local boatbuilders.
Soon the money ran out and so did the Spectre’s existence. The company made 26 cars and was building a replacement, the R45, when the doors closed.
However, the R42 did have one last small claim to fame, by the way of a straight-to-video movie called ‘RPM’, starring a young Famke Janssen. This 1998 film featured the Spectre as a secret, eco-friendly supercar. It’s seen in the opening sequences demolishing a Ferrari F40 and Lamborghini Diablo around the Paul Ricard Circuit.
Rumour has it that the directors chose the Spectre precisely because it would be unknown. Sadly for Spectre, the film ensured it stayed that way.
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