This project was born during a moment of insanity I experienced sometime around mid June 1994. Having been knocked off my trusty old Z1000 for the umpteenth time I decided I needed a break from all those Volvo drivers out there. You know the ones - they're always trying to see if their SIPS devices are really as good as they're cracked up to be. So they try a little test. Nothing major. Nothing really dangerous like a truck or another Volvo driver. No. It has to be something relatively light and fairly soft. Something substantial enough to test the system but not life or even limb threatening. Motorcyclists, they're tailor-made for the job. Not too big and not too hard. Just right! And if they should croak? Well it's only grubby biker scum. There's plenty more where they come from - mores the pity. Er ... I've digressed a little. Bitter? Me? Why would I be? Just because he drove off having given me a false name and address because he wasn't insured? Well, yeah ... maybe I am just a teensy-weensy bit.
Anyway. As I was saying, time for a change. Time to get myself a cage and take a rest from all those shiny bonnets (that's hood if you're American) that all those drivers were permanently proffering. Having always had pretty nippy bikes in the past I was used to having something quick and mean looking. I wasn't going to settle for anything less when I made the transition from two to four wheels. Being an impoverished student at the time I couldn't afford to buy a sports car of any worth. My only asset was my bike. I decided that I'd offer it up as a straight swap for any interesting and QUICK car that might be available. I placed a small ad in various specialist car magazines and within a week found myself swamped with numerous offers. Eventually, having waded through about twenty cars, I ended up with the Hensen M30 featured here. At the time I was seduced by the quirky TVR front / Ferrari rear styling. That, and the massive 3 litre V6 which lazily burbled from beneath the bonnet. Needless to say it all turned sour immediately I took possession of it. I wish I could say I was suckered into the deal, sadly that's not the case. I really wanted this car. So badly, in fact, that I totally ignored both the car's faults and the advice of my friend. The latter was specifically taken along in order to keep my feet on the ground. Fat chance! I saw THAT bodywork and heard THAT big six engine and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Hensen M30 was designed by Hugo
Hen
rik
sen
and put into production some time around 1984. As kit cars go it was rather ahead of it's time. Pretty much everything you needed came with the standard kit priced at £4,000 inclusive of VAT. For that you received the body / chassis unit sprayed to your own choice of colour. A full luxury interior including quality seats, carpets, stereo, electric windows, electric aerial, sunroof, leather steering wheel. On top of that you got a four headlamp system, 8 - spoke sports wheels, BF Goodrich tyres, up rated shocks, a stainless steel exhaust system plus everything that didn't come with the donor car. All the customer had to do was find a half-way decent Ford Granada Mk.1 and transfer the required parts over to the Hensen chassis. Nothing could have been easier. It really should have been a successful kit. It had everything going for it. And yet it wasn't. Despite having aggressive good looks, a luxury interior (even by production car standards) sure-footed handling and a huge V6 pulling a much lightened car, it never really took off. Only twenty-three cars were built. Today only seventeen exist. Mine was, at chassis no. 21, one of the very last examples to be built at the Milford Haven works. After number 23 the molds were sold and shipped over to America where an entrepreneur had hoped to stick seven litre v8 engines in them and flog them to the home market. It never happened. The businessman got sick and, as often happens in America, his medical bills reduced him to a pauper. Somewhere in America the original molds lie quietly rotting in a lock-up.
So much for history. I can't speak for the state of the remaining cars but mine turned out to be a real pig. The sort of car that used to be turned out by British Leyland at a quarter to five on a Friday afternoon. Everything that could be bodged was. Anything that would have been easier to get right rather than wrong was left off altogether. The electrical system resembled spaghetti. Often the loom would be cobbled together using a handful of Scotchloks and a variety of cable of varying thicknesses and colours. Pretty much anything that ran off electricity was erratic at best and dangerous at worst. None of the fibreglass panels had been properly keyed and so it was possible to strip huge expanses of bodywork with little more than a thumbnail. The interior furnishings were moldy because the roof and doors leaked like a sieve. All the steel brackets and fasteners were either rusty or dangerous bodges. A prime example was the accelerator pedal bracket made from an old biscuit tin which had, unsurprisingly, begun to fracture. Make no bones about it, this car sucked harder than an industrial vacuum cleaner. It came as no great shock to me when it failed it's MOT. Actually, I only put it through the test in order that an examiner could point out just how badly I'd been ripped off. I mean - I'd swapped an extremely rare £3,000 Kawasaki for this crap. I was entitled to feel a wee bit hacked off.
Once I'd read through the VERY long list of failure items it was obvious that I had two options open to me:
a) Write off the three grand and dump the car on the first sucker willing to kick in a few hundred pounds to take it off my hands.
b) Strip the whole car down to the chassis and rebuild her to the same high standard that my previous bike projects had enjoyed.
Well obviously I plumped for the latter. I couldn't afford to just let £3,000 walk. At the very least I needed to rebuild the car to a standard that would allow me to sell it on. In the end my enthusiasm to get to grips with this latest challenge to my spannering ability got the better of me. I decided to build a full on race car.
It was absolute hell from the project's inception in 1994 to its completion in late 1999. Everything was a major struggle. New parts for the original Ford Granada donor are pretty much non-existant now. Electrical switches and the like can only be found in scrap yards (and often turn out to be junk), mechanical parts have all been sold long ago. Even the pattern part manufacturers are gradually winding down their spares itinery. In the end I became fed up with trying to obtain non- existent parts or obscenely priced Ford alternatives. I decided to redesign the entire car save for the chassis. Even the bodywork was radically altered in order to compliment my improvements. Everything was designed with a view to being able to buy spares off the shelf for it. Electrical components, filters, ignition systems etc. etc. were all bought from leading stockists in order to make running the vehicle as fuss-free as owning a standard production car. Even so, a great deal of one-off bracketry, trim, supports and similar had to be fashioned by myself. This proved to be extremely time consuming and is one of the reasons the project has taken so long to finish.
The biggest headache, however, was the extreme expense involved. A recent audit placed the cost of the project at some £15,000. To be perfectly honest the project would never have got off the ground were it not for an extraordinary piece of good fortune. By pure chance I spotted a request in
Which Kit?
car magazine asking for people to write about their projects every other month in return for subscription to the mag, a handful of car show tickets and being immortalized in print. To cut a long story short I wrote to the editor, he accepted and I milked the situation for all it was worth. I shamelessly exploited my connection to the magazine in order to obtain sponsorship by way of product donations. In return I would plug a sponsor's wares within the copy of my articles. If they had been extra generous I'd throw in a few pictures of their product 'in action'. It goes without saying that company logos were also sold space on the bodywork. In this manner I managed to build the car with a relatively minor cash input from myself. At the end of the day I think I spent about £2,000 of my own money on the project. Tops!
Here’s a quick rundown of the current spec:
Reconditioned
3.1 litre Ford Essex engine with Weslake heads, fast road performance cam, breathing through a K&N air filter atop a reconditioned Weber DGAS carburetor.
Reconditioned four speed performance gearbox
Totally reconditioned steering and suspension gear with all new parts, bearings etc.
Brand new
2”
lowered suspension springs combined with heavy duty adjustable shock absorbers.
Goodridge hoses (the finest fluid carrier available to humanity) throughout. Literally every flexible pipe on the car is a stainless steel braided performance hose.
Totally reconditioned braking system with new discs, pads and shoes.
All
copper pipework has been replaced with Goodridge pipes.
Fully redesigned sports interior resplendent with a brand new Pye quad speaker sound system.
Stainless steel exhaust boxes.
Totally brand new electrical and lighting system.
Completely redesigned alloy dashboard with all new switches and SW instruments.
Lightweight perspex windows throughout.
Redesigned fuel system. Incorporates a specially redesigned alloy fuel tank and quick release fuel cap.
Quick release four point racing harness, plumbed in fire extinguisher, built-in roll cage, and emergency cut-out switches.
Completely restored fibreglass bodywork with all the improvements that the Hensen design should have had but didn’t.