One step beyond


In 1970, this was the car that turned the Buggy world on its head. Today, 40 years later, it’s still doing the same thing



Matt Elms may never have seen a Manx SR in 1970, or indeed not seen one at all until general Buggy pervert Lee Cooksey showed him a picture of one a couple of years ago, but once he did, there was no looking back. 


Unable to get that image out of his head, Matt started to find out more about the Manx SR and then, one appeared for sale on thesamba.com. It looked like a good buy – a very original  SR2, still in its original Royal Blue Metallic paint, with the original Western Cyclone wheels in place, and at what Matt considered the right money. “I loved the idea of having an air-cooled VW that very few people know about, and even fewer have seen in real life,” Matt continues, "before I knew it, I’d sent a load of money to a guy in Colorado for a car I’d never actually seen!”


Not everyone was as enthusiastic about it as Matt though. Even Matt’s wife, the deliciously named Spam, had her own thoughts on the matter: “When I broke the news to Spam, and showed her the pictures of the car which was on its way across the ocean, she hated it! ‘That’s more shit even than a Beach Buggy, and you know how shit I think they are,’ she said. 


But Matt’s elation was short-lived. When the new arrival docked at Chatham, it looked a sorry state. One of the doors had popped open when it was being transported across the States and had hit a bridge, ripping it off and damaging both the door and its complex hinge assembly. “I spoke to a mate of mine, Joe Rackley, and he recommended his friend, Carl Cunliffe, who he said would be able to fix the door.” Carl took one look at what was involved, said yes, and work began the very next day. By then though, Matt had had a chance to better assess the rest of the vehicle, and things weren’t improving. “The floor turned out to be really rotten, huge holes had been cut on the insides of the tub, the door latch mechanisms were different on either side and the original door handles had been removed,” he recalls. But the worst was still to come. Having decided to restore it properly, Matt, Lee and Carl began disassembling the body panels, only to find some were under a great deal of tension. In short, the car had been in an accident at some stage and rather than fix the body’s metal subframe, whoever had done the “repair” work had simply shifted the panel mountings to make it appear straight again. “It quickly became a monster,” Matt explains with the kind of candour that only comes when the job is done. “I became the project manager, doing the research, locating and buying parts and making the styling decisions, while Lee [Cooksey] took on the mechanical side of it and the floorpan restoration and Carl did all the glass-fibre repairs and bodywork, which was the major part of the job. In the end, over 300 holes were filled in the body – some as much as a foot long – and close to 1500 hours spent on it. So much work in fact that there was no way the original paint could be kept, or even matched, so Matt decided to change it completely, and Audi Ibis White was the only choice for him.


Luckily, Matt’s mate Joe is a model maker, so he was commissioned to make a brand new door hinge assembly from scratch, but they still took a solid week’s work to get to work right. Thank goodness they came ready fitted when you bought one of these new!


Wanting to emphasise its simplicity, Matt chose to stay with the no door handle and no side window look, as well as losing the wind deflectors the car came with. He also kept the original 13- and 14-inch wheels but had them meticulously restored by Alan and Perry at Interwagens in Finsbury Park, restored the tail lights (Volvo P1800 incidentally), replaced the big, ugly front indicators with classic Lucas L488s, chased down a pair of NOS Lucas 7-inch headlights, sourced a replacement pair of reversing lights, an NOS Formuling France steering wheel and Hurst Indy shifter, restored the original seats, gauges, Blaupunkt radio and, as he put it, “everything else...”


All this time we’ve been talking about the body, but looking at contemporary road tests, it was clear there was more to this street Buggy than meets the eye. Certainly, the racy bucket seats, sporty steering wheel, auxiliary instrumentation and wide tyres all had a purpose, but did it live up to the claims of its manufacturers? “A taut, responsive machine,” claimed Karma Coachworks, “everything the Porsche 914 should be and isn’t,” said Car & Driver; “a practical vehicle for all round sports or traffic use,” enthused Road & Track. In a feature on the new SR2 in Dune Buggies & Hot VWs, August ’75, they rave about the “NOW car”, “A 1500lb package that offers superb handling, attention grabbing looks and exhilarating performance along with reasonable fuel economy.” Sounds impressive, but how true really are all those claims? Matt: “It’s ridiculous! Everyone looks at you. They know it’s based on a Beetle, but can’t quite believe what they’re seeing. Overall though, the reaction is positive.


“It does handle well, and with the 1776cc motor it’s pretty quick too, but it’s so low you can’t drive it like a normal car. You spend all your time looking at the road 20ft ahead of you watching for potholes, or cat’s eyes! On motorways though, it’s amazing. The quality of the original glass-fibre is very good and it feels really solid – especially with the Targa roof section fixed in place – so there’s no panel flex at all.


“With the combination of 13-inch wheels and the 13-inch Formuling France steering wheel it’s quite a handful to steer, but on smooth roads it’s a really good ride, even better with a bit of added weight in it. However, I think a lot of that comes from the modifications we made when rebuilding it. We put whole new box-section chassis strengtheners in as the old ones were rotten, and made new H-shaped box section brackets for the seats to mount to that weld across from the strengtheners to the central tunnel. That stiffens it up a lot.”


So was it all worth it, we ask? The heartache, the work, the money spent? “When I think of cars that have stood out over recent years, they are nearly always either those that have raised the bar in terms of quality or something that grabs your attention that you have never seen – and then after you have seen it, you can’t forget it. That’s how I felt when I saw one of these for the first time. There can’t be many VWs, if any, left that people aren’t all over these days, and it really is the maddest thing to drive,” comes Matt’s reply. And with that he descends into the laughter of someone who knows it’s true what they say – you’re only as mad as the car you drive... 


 


 


About the Manx SR2


 


Stewart Reed is the man who, in the latter part of 1969, turned the VW Buggy market on its head by drawing a futuristic ‘sports roadster’ that was quite unlike any Buggy anyone had seen before. These days, Stewart holds the position of Chairman of Transportation Design at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, but in 1969 he was an eager, young automotive design student just graduating from that very same school. “Stewart instinctively had an unmistakable sense of style, and he drew beautiful cars because that was the way he was trained,” recalled Meyers in an article he wrote for Manx Mania magazine.


The result of their collaboration was the Manx SR, a bold new concept in Buggy design, one that offered a genuine alternative to the more traditional ‘fun car’, but also answered the more pressing legal issues that were starting to bear on anyone running a car on the street with an exposed engine and tyres. Indeed, evidence of the change in thinking of the Californian Department of Motor Vehicles in the 1970s is evident in the original SR promotional literature that states: “No tire [sic] shoulder should protrude beyond the fender lip”.


The new SR (which, according to Bruce Meyers, stood for Street Roadster, not Stewart Reed as some have suggested) hit the road running in 1970 and was so far ahead of its time that it stopped people in their tracks. 


However, where the construction of his original glass-fibre Manx body had been a straightforward affair – a fact that wasn’t lost on the many competitors who ripped off Meyers’ design – the manufacturing demands of the SR were a major undertaking. For a start, the car had doors – not just any old swing out doors, but forward hinged, upward opening ‘butterfly doors’, the most striking visual component of the SR. These took some clever engineering to put into production. Similarly, it had a functional bonnet with luggage space up front, a removable targa roof and a lift-up engine cover that covered all moving parts of the motor – again a concession to the Californian DMV. From the start, it was envisaged with a host of performance engine options, from a hopped-up flat-four to the Corvair and Porsche flat-sixes, to give it the ooh to go with the aah. “The Manx SR was complex,” recalls Meyers, “13 pieces of fibreglass and scads of metal parts... The SR was designed to discourage copying. And it did. It was so complex, we had a hard time building them!”


The BF Meyers & Co. company sold between 400 and 600 kits and built 12 turn-key cars between its launch at the SEMA show in the spring of 1970 and when production ground to a halt in December of that first and only year of production. No one seems to be able to say for certain how many Meyers SR bodies popped out of the moulds, but what is certain is that no one who saw one ever forgot it.








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