Originally posted by GD66
David, can you help ? Do you know about the lineage of the Bobtail that used to go round in the late 60s in New Zealand in the hands of Grant Bloore ? They are pretty thin on the ground down this end of the globe, I wonder if it is the ex-Bill Patterson model that appears in the Caversham photo above. Whatever the case, I recall seeing pics of Jack Brabham hunched down in one, working hard...;)
No, the Patterson car stayed on its own side of the Tasman, as AFAIK did a second one in Australia at about the same time.
The car Grant Bloor raced was one of two NZ Bobtails. At the beginning of 1957 Jack Brabham brought out the 1500cc (FWB) car he had raced with the works team in Europe the previous year, while Ronnie Moore raced an 1100cc (FWA) version. (Australian Allan Mackay also ran an 1100 in NZ at the same time, but that was sold in Oz). The Brabham car went to Bruce McLaren, Merv Neil, George Lawton and back to Merv Neil, while the Moore one stayed in the South Island with Ian McKellar and Ken MacMillan, then came north for Doug Lawrence.
The lineage gets complicated at this point. The 1500 had had a hard life, the 1100 less so. Doug Lawrence bought the 1500, transferred the good bits (bigger engine, disc brakes etc) to his earlier car, and put the inferior bits in the inferior (ex-Brabham etc) car. This was sold to Colin Ngan and later passed to Jamie Aislaibie while the ex-Moore car, now with 1500 engine, was raced by Lawrence (and his teenage son Graeme) then Ian Green, Doug Smyth and Bloor. Bloor replaced the ageing FWB engine with a 1500 pushrod Ford and the next owner, John Hyde, ran this until about 1970, by which time engine-size was up to 1790cc. This car was eventually sold to Australia while the other was all but destroyed in a fire.