McRae Cars
In 1972 McRae, Malcolm Bridgeland of Malaya Garage, and car designer Len Terry build a new F5000. The car was initially designated the Leda LT27 following Terry's designs. In mid-1972 McRae and London insurance broker John Heynes bought out Bridgeland and set up a United Kingdom company McRae Cars Ltd at Poole, Dorset. As from 1 July 1972 the Leda LT27 was renamed the McRae GM1. Fourteen of these cars were built between 1972 and 1973. It achieved considerable success in the British Hill Climb Championship, driven by Roy Lane.
McRae followed this up in 1993 with a replica of the Porsche 550 Spyder. It was based around a 2.0-litre Porsche 914 with a five-speed gearbox. McRae was a technical perfectionist and Spyder is an accurate replica of original built by Porsche in 1954 and 1955. Some McRae Spyders are powered by a Subaru engine. In June 2000 McRae set up the New Zealand based McRae Cars Ltd. Since his illness in 2003 no more of these cars have been made and the existing 38 models are in high demand. The company was stuck off the register in June 2003.
Former McRae GM1 owner and driver, Alister Hey of Queenstown registered McRae Cars Limited again in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Graham McRae
Famous quotes containing the words mcrae and/or cars:
“Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread—without it, it’s flat.”
—Carmen McRae (b. 1922)
“I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)