Bandits at 12 o’clock!

Most of the remarkable or unusual vehicles we come across are in museums, or perhaps in countries like Cuba or much of Asia where everything is deemed repairable but occasionally we’ll come across one in use and in quite an ordinary location.

Above you can see the frog-eyed head-turner that was in my local supermarket car park, and immediately sparked my interest. The owner has had it from new but it had fallen into disrepair when he was working abroad. Having retired, he determined to rebuild it completely with original details wherever they could be found. Everything, as you’d expect of a vehicle from the early ‘60s was both hard and expensive to find – for example the teardrop shaped sidelights were £200 each!

The car is a Messerschmitt KR200 Cabriolet, produced in Germany by a company called Fend, (now part of Airbus) post war, when the parent company was banned from producing aircraft. WW2 followers will recognise the name from the fighter aircraft, ME109, famous opponent of the Spitfires and Tornados from the Battle of Britain.

I chatted a while with the owner and had a good look inside – a two-seater with the petrol tank behind the rear seat, the main immobilising mechanism was the petrol tap there! Steering was restricted by space – a wheel would be too big, so a horizontal bar with vertical handgrips at each end, the same as in a small aircraft. The first models apparently had actual cockpit covers from aircraft, made of steel frame and Perspex which lifted from one side, the occupants had to clamber over the side to install themselves. Powered by a single cylinder 191cc engine, driving the single rear wheel, it was no dragster, but extremely economical.

This soft top beauty is one of only two in Scotland, and was worth more than any other vehicle in the car park, at around £40,000, so I won’t give any clues to its whereabouts.