Remembering John Dodd's Merlin-powered monster

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

If we were to tell you a tale of the almighty Merlin, a fire-spitting Beast and fantastical myths, you might very well wonder if you'd accidentally stumbled onto a Harry Potter fan website. Don't worry, you can keep reading. We're still very much talking about cars.

Some of you, if you were around in the 1970s, may have fond memories of the car in question. Others, who haven't seen it before and possess a more delicate constitution, might recoil in horror. All we will say is that it's not a car you can ever forget.

Epsom in Surrey is a very respectable place, thank you, a quiet town in London's stockbroker belt where the most exciting thing to have happened on any given day in 1972 might have been Mr. Jones coming home with a new Ford Granada GXL or Mrs. Pettigrew laying down a new box hedge. It is not the sort of place where one lives if one intends to stand out.

Fortunately, John Dodd never cared much for conventions. An automatic gearbox specialist by day, in his free time he was quietly working on a car like no other. Upset by the fact that Britain seemingly had no riposte to the onslaught of exotic, 170mph supercars which were emerging from Europe, he saw no reason why he shouldn't build his own car to beat them.

A fibreglass Ford or a rogue Rolls-Royce?

The result can be seen in the main picture, a leviathan of a car resembling a Ford Capri with a surfeit of growth hormones. Powered by nothing less than a 27-litre Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 - famous for its use in the Supermarine Spitfire and other wartime aeroplanes - and equipped with bodywork by Fibre Glass Repairs of Bromley, Dodd succeeded in creating a 700bhp monster of a car which could exceed 250mph, easily eclipsing any contemporary Lamborghini or Ferrari.

Perhaps we're being slightly flexible with the truth... In all honesty, we don't know exactly how much power The Beast, as it was christened, produced, or how fast it could go. It's possible that Dodd never discovered the maximum speed himself, but that wasn't the point. The point was that Dodd had built a car from scratch which would stop people in their tracks and, while the styling might have been an acquired taste, one must appreciate the skill required to make it a reality. Regardless of anything else, we don't have any doubts at all that it really is very fast, not least since the Royal Automobile Club clocked it at 183mph.

Débuting the car at the 1973 Custom Car Show at Crystal Palace, Dodd revelled in the attention it received and was happy to pour fertiliser on the rumours which sprouted up around it until they grew into ever taller tales. In suitably spectacular fashion, The Beast burst into flames while driving home from Sweden in 1975 but it was rebuilt to live again, this time with a fibreglass body more resembling a Reliant Scimitar.

Trial by fire, then by jury

Proud of his creation, Dodd fitted a Rolls-Royce grille to reflect its prodigious power-plant, but Rolls-Royce wasn't impressed. Preferring to be associated with owners such as Bernard Manning and Peter Stringfellow rather than an enterprising, do-it-yourself engineer, in 1981 it took Dodd to court to bleed him dry and demand its grille back. Conducting himself irreverently throughout, Dodd lost the case and was sentenced to imprisonment when he protested his charges.

Turning his back on the petty English, he started a new life in Spain, taking The Beast with him, although he did replace the grille. Dodd died in December 2022, a week before his 90th birthday, but he was still driving The Beast on the road even in his final months.

Words: Zack Stiling
 

Kommentar abgeben...