Ginetta brought their ex‑Graham Hill G4 to Revival

There are a few cars at Revival that were raced by Graham Hill, but is there another one here that was built by him? This G4 was.

Together with the Walklett brothers (Ginetta founders), Graham built the little coupe as a magazine feature for Cars and Car Conversions, the '60s tuning bible. Then he raced it. The things F1 world champions had to do then!

At Revival, the pretty pale blue racer is taking pride of place in Ginetta’s marquee in the Over the Road exhibition area. Ginetta have had cars running at Revival in previous years – and are a regular with their LMP3 car at FOS – but never before have they had their own exhibition space. 

The ex-Graham Hill G4 is the pride of Ginetta’s heritage division, though as Ginetta’s Hayley Hickmore says, the focus at Ginetta Cars these days is less on heritage and more on the modern cars and racers… and especially its first bid for outright honours at Le Mans in 2018 with its first-ever LMP1 car.

The teams and drivers for the car are not yet known. While Ginetta hasn’t competed in LMP1 before, its boss Lawrence Tomlinson has: he co-drove a Zytek with Nigel Mansell a few years ago.  

The LMP1 car isn’t on the stand – a model is currently undergoing wind tunnel testing at Williams Engineering – but the firm’s popular road racer, the G40 GRDC (Ginetta Racing Drivers’ Club) is. 

With road cars that come with a fully supported racing programme all the rage, Ginetta's GRDC package makes for a tempting proposition: an everyday useable road car (with roof and air conditioning) that’s track-ready with 135bhp and all-up weight of 900kg. Buy one and it comes with eight races over four weekends, all for £42k all up – including even your race licence.

It’s much too new for Revival of course, but that ‘60s G4 would make a splendid sight on the Motor Circuit. “It raced at Goodwood a few years ago but has done nothing recently,” Hayley tells us.

Probably about time that changed! 

Photography