50 Years of the GTM – and you can still buy one!

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Starting life as a model chassis made of empty cornflakes packets, the GTM, or Grand Touring Mini, lives on 50 years later. It was Bernard Cox who presented the car for the first time as the Cox GTM at the Racing Car Show of January 1967. It was a very clever semi-monocoque made of sheet steel using Mini front subframes front and rear and a fibreglass body. The Mini-engine was fitted to the rear subframe, making the GTM the first mid-engined kit car. Some say the concept may even have out dated the Lamborghini Miura, but we’re not too sure about that. Fact is that, at £330 for a full kit, it was a lot cheaper in back ’67. Cox built around 55 of them before he was fed up with the project and sold it to his neighbour Howard Heerey, who’d also helped him develop the car and who eagerly campaigned a works racer.

Under the Heerey GTM-name another 170 cars came to life up until 1971. More changes, facelifts, re-engineerings and take-overs followed, which led the GTM, now named GTM Coupe, to turn into one of the most popular kit cars well into the 1990s, when GTM Cars was led by Patrick Fitch and Peter Beck. And don’t think it died after that. In 1995 the project was taken over by Primo Cars, who kept on selling it. Next custodians were Westfield and Sylva, and only last week the GTM was announced officially in its latest guise: as the Hambly Coupe, now under the wings of enthusiast Derek Hambly who bought his first GTM in 1974 and couldn’t get enough of them. And while Derek showed his car at the National Kit Car Show in Stoneleigh last week, the GTM Owner’s Club celebrated the 50th anniversary at Blyton Park some 100 miles further north in the UK (above and here). Congratulations!

(Words and pictures Jeroen Booij)

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