Finding pieces of the body work became a saga in itself. It would have been unexpected that we would find any M8A panels in America because both the A cars went back to England. If we were ever going to find A bodywork it should have been in England and not in America because there are no cars there that it would fit. But on one of my trips to America, someone told me that that a piece of M8A had been sold in America. He said “Oh, when I worked for Motschenbacher back in 1973, before his workshop fire, I loaded an M8A body panel onto a truck for a guy.” “You don’t know who it was?”

I asked. “Oh no, I can’t remember who it was, but he lived up in the San Francisco bay area.”

And he said “I think it went on a tube frame car” and then it was just a case of heading for the bay and finding old timers who ran a car that looked like a McLaren, maybe a bit messed around with. I tracked down a car and followed its movements, and then came to a dead end, only to find one piece of body work but not recognizing it.

Because it niggled me for a year, on my second trip back, I followed it up again and sure enough it was the same piece of bodywork sold in 1973. The McLaren team had left the bodywork with Motschenbacher because he was the agent and they figured he may be able to sell it in California, rather than having to take it back to the other side of the world.

The rear wings are another fascinating story - the rear wings on an M8A were unlike anything else used on any other car, either a works or a customer car. It was one of the things where we knew what it looked like from the pictures but we didn’t know how to make them.
It turned out that the wings were one of the first pieces of bodywork that we actually acquired.

We managed to track down a guy in Los Angeles who had, believe it or not, dug the fire blackened and burnt wings out of the dumpster when they were cleaning up the Motschenbacher workshop after the fire. These two pieces of wings and sides are quite charred in some places but if you study them hard enough you can almost see the plywood - and that’s how they were made, on a plywood buck. By a bit of “carcheology” I decided that these particular two pieces of wing probably came off another body panel. We know it didn’t come off the body panel we have as the holes don’t match. However, we do believe that they came from Bruce’s car rather than Denny’s because they are in two pieces, as carried from the UK as hand luggage on the plane.

So back to the body and how we started putting it all together (I hope you don’t get your alphabet confused.) Now the M8C front, the upper portion was the same as the A but the radiator duct opening was different because the C body went on an M6 chassis and not an M8, so that portion had to be altered as the M8A radiator was narrower. The C dash has a large hump in it, so we had to get rid of that and this all took hours of studying pictures, reading books and just looking at the body and absorbing it all.

I knew that an M8E front was made from an M8B so it was a natural progression but because it was an understeering car, they quickly modified it before they sold the customer cars. One bit of information I got was that the front of the dash was always going to be constant, B, A or E, so I knew that by cutting the front off the dash, I had the front of the dash for our A. The D dash was different but originally I thought all I had to do would be copy the D dash but it was totally different, much higher. Then I had to find in the piece of E body panel, the section where it changed, where they had filled in the old panel. So then I grafted the E piece into the new body and then hand made the radiator opening.

On the C the windshield is up much higher, there’s a lip, a ledge at the bottom so all that had to be dropped, because the top of the dash followed right through to the screen This was hand made and taken off an F body. The front alone tells a huge story but once we got it to this point, then we could identify the line that they made the original bucks off. We then made moulds of the B body and then cut all that stuff off, put the D mounted pieces in, then made the A fenders by basically cutting, fiddling around, and adding pieces on. All you have to do, is say, why did they do that and then reverse engineer it all.

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