The intriguing story of chassis 766.2 – The first Unipower GT Ordered, Delivered and a Competition version

Given that it’s the 60^th Anniversary of the Unipower GT, its reasonable to perhaps celebrate the very first Unipower GT both ordered, built and delivered.

Chassis 766.2 after initial development at the U.P.D Factory

Whilst the full story of chassis 766.2 is recounted in my book on the marque, it is appropriate at this time to give this unique car a series of Blog posts to commemorate its history and that after 60-years it is still very much alive and well and in period condition.

Let’s go back to the initial launch of the Unipower GT and in particular, Press Day on the 18^th January 1966 of the Racing Car Show at Olympia in London. Universal Power Drives presented a bare chassis on a revolving platform and the Prototype car as had been used for all the publicity shots at the time. The Prototype was actually quite a different car beneath the fiberglass body, from what would be built as a production car, having a less sophisticated chassis and suspension.

One of the first visitors to the Unipower stand was Mr. Emlyn Newman and his young son who took a liking to the new sleek car with its Mini power plant. Emlyn owned an engineering company in west London and also was a good friend of Gordon Allan who made crankshafts as well as developing special engine projects and saw the potential in the new car.

Emlyn Newman and Son on the Unipower stand in 1966

On enquiring if a competition version was available, his question was met with some apprehension as it was the last thing the small start-up company needed to be doing, as they didn’t have the resources to build and develop such a version. However as it had been stated at the bottom of the car specification leaflet, that a competition version would be made available and that Emlyn had insisted on giving them a cheque there and then, the desire to get the first sale was too great and the order was taken.

This was to be the only order taken at the launch, they were an unknown quantity and the cars were expensive compared to others alternatives. The Unipower’s designer Val Dare-Bryan was despatched to come up with the modifications necessary to make the car suitable for competition.

The build of Chassis 766.2 was commenced and the completed car was delivered on the 2^nd May 1966 to Emlyn. It is still not clear why this chassis carry's the .2 and not .1 nomenclature, as it was the first car built (as verified by both Ernie Unger and Val Dare-Bryan), but for whatever reason, the factory build record cards for both cars had the chassis numbers, all were hand written, with the last character overwritten subsequent to its origonal designation, changing the 2 to a 1 and the 1 to a 2. To be clear, the car that would then carry chassis 766.1 (a standard production car with a 998cc Cooper engine) was not ordered until the February after the Show and was delivered to its first owner on the 9th May 1966. Given also that the first character of the chassis number refers to the month of production, why did both chassis numbers start with a 7 when they were delivered in May (6). Were they just completed early ?. The factory Build Record cards were all written up at commencement of construction, so this may have been the case given the lack of orders at the time. On the majority of cars subsequentrly produced, the first character was the month of delivery and as the intention had been to build a car a week, they would have hoped to be able to specify the chassis number's month of delivery at commencement.

The story of the design of 766.2 and how it performed in initial testing and its aftermath, will be covered in the next Blog in this series.