Owner Allen Grant isn’t your typical bottomless-pocketed monolithic collector you’d catch nonchalantly nodding millions away at a Ferrari 250 auction. Far from it, in fact. In Allen, the MK6 GT prototype finds a custodian close to home. He is a veteran of Shelby’s and Ford’s racing programs, having followed Daytona Cobras and Ford GTs around the globe both in an engineering and at times a driving capacity.
Allen found the MK6 under a cover at the Ford Advanced Vehicles compound in Slough in 1965, when Lola cars were sharing a warehouse with the Ford GT squad with which he was working. It was as simple as Allen making an offer and Broadley accepting, albeit on one condition: that the car be gone before the next time he came in, for fear of backing out and keeping it for himself.
Allen bought the car, moved on and lived his life. The car was broken up and stored and it wouldn’t be until 50 years later that it would be meticulously restored and reassembled as was at the 1963 London Racing Car show. It’s as close to unmolested as you could hope for any historic racer, let alone a forgotten piece of history such as this. The original plexiglass rear window, soft silver hue, bespoke magnesium wheels complete with the original Dunlop green-spot tyres and the 260 CI single four-barrel Weber-carburetted Ford 260 engine – all are miracles of preservation or replication in service of its original form.