49 FXN/13 FXN PROJECT
Back in 2010 I was contacted by Tony at Moorland Classic Cars asking if we could build his customer, Mike Wrigley, an exact re-creation of The Ex Lumsden/Sargent Low Drag Coupe (49 FXN). I said in principle we could so I set the wheels in motion.
The first step was to research the original car which we had worked on in the past and had access to.
We took some templates and dimensions but it was very apparent the car had had a colourful life over the last 50 years, including being turned upside down in the lake at Oulton Park in 1965.
I decided to contact as many of the original team as possible, who hadn’t been together under the same roof since 1964.
In the end I managed to contact 4 out of the 5 original team members, Co-owners and drivers Peter Lumsden and Peter Sargent, Samir Klat and Brian Playford. Harry Watson was the only member I couldn’t find but he was last heard of in Australia.
This car started life as one of the 12 aluminium Roadsters but received considerable modifications and expertise of Samir Klat and Harry Watson, which through a private exercise produced some most interesting and exciting developments. In many ways this took the Light Weight E-Type to the forefront of technology at that time.
Klat and Watson were studying at the Imperial College of London so had access to the College facilities. Samir had also had experience working with Frank Costin on the aerodynamics side of the Le Mans Lister.
The whole exercise was to create a car with as much power as possible and a more aerodynamic body to reduce drag.
In the end they produced a beautiful aerodynamic car which proved to be one of the quickest competition E-Types in history.
I emailed Samir who agreed to help us with the project and he came to the UK bringing 68 of his original negatives of when they developed the original car in 1963/64.
These negatives proved very helpful in the success of the whole project providing many valuable details. This gave us the opportunity to scale exactly from the photographs which Samir very kindly loaned us.
One particular photograph was a perfect side on shot which we used for the side profile of the car. We scaled this up to full size and printed it off full scale, as a friend of mine had access to a full size printer at Porsche in Germany. When the car was complete we invited the two Peters, Samir and Brian to our workshop who all agreed what a fantastic job we had done.
Samir’s final email regarding the project on completion was very heart warming as he stated we had produced a car exactly as his original car was.
I would like to thank all involved with this very exciting and rewarding project.
