ONE of motoring’s biggest mysteries has been solved.
Supervan LIVES.
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He won’t say how much it’s cost him. He’s not that foolish.
But he did tell me: “My biggest fear is that if anything happens to me, my wife would sell it for what I told her I paid for it.”
Absolute pearler.
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Now let’s start at the beginning.
Supervan was basically a Mk1 Transit body plonked on top of a Cooper Monaco race car chassis with a race-tuned V8 from a Ford GT40 in the back.
It was so comically fast it would lift a front wheel attacking corners and keep on pulling all the way up to 150mph. And it did donuts. We’re talking 1971 here. Race fans at Brands Hatch and Silverstone lapped it up.
When Ford finished with Supervan, the race car parts were stripped for other projects and the basic remains were sold on, which is where Andy’s life-long obsession kicked in, aged 19 and working as a Ford engineering apprentice.
In 1973 he paid £500 for the “bare shell and four wheels” – rebuilt Supervan with a Mustang V8 and made it road-legal.
Family life meant he eventually had to let it go. Supervan then passed through several owners before the trail went cold in the mid-Eighties.
Until Andy got a phone call some years later.
He said: “I’d been hunting it down for a number of years – but nothing came to light. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch.
“Then one day I got a call and somebody said they knew where the remains of Supervan were.
“I went to have a look, ran my hand under the sills and knew that it was the van that I’d owned. It wasn’t even a van at all – just a floorplan and a bit of bulkhead.”
Andy brought Supervan home to Essex and has spent the past 24 years secretly acquiring original components to rebuild it.
Now it’s almost done.
Andy said: “Some of the guys said if I didn’t get on with it, they’d put a Chevy engine in it, so I better get it done.
“I want to take it out and rip the tyres off it. I’m only the temporary custodian. At some point somebody else will do the same. That’s what it is there for.
“It’s not a paperweight. It’s not there to sit in a display cabinet. If you want to take it out and rag it, that would be fine by me.”
As I said, top bloke.
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