MARCOS "THE STORY OF A GREAT BRITISH SPORTSCAR"
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MARCOS "THE STORY OF A GREAT BRITISH SPORTSCAR" |
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Ronald McLeod `s 1970
Mantis
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Ron McLeod’s Marcos Mantis P8/5858 I bought the car new from the factory in late 1970. I was living in England at the time, intending to return to Canada in 1971, and planned to bring a car back with me. There was picture of the Mantis in the Guardian newspaper one morning – as soon as I saw it, I decided that this was the car for me. I placed my order with a dealer in Chester, and over the following several months, made a couple of trips down to the factory to see the car being built. I had them build it to North American specifications – left-hand drive, reversed windshield wiper sweep, right-dipping headlights, etc.
Took delivery in early 1971 – the U.K.
registration was RJO 208J. Managed to put some very enjoyable miles on
the car around England and on the Continent. On the German autobahn it
would do a steady 120 mph, and felt rock-steady – no floating or
lightness at all. On the English B roads, which are lovely narrow
twisty sports car roads, I had no trouble keeping up with Porsches and
the like. As you might expect, there were some disadvantages to driving
a LHD vehicle on the “wrong” side of the road – overtaking was a
challenge, even with a very trustworthy passenger. However, the one
great compensation was to see the double-takes by oncoming drivers when
they saw my passenger (sitting in what they thought and expected was the
driver’s seat) calmly reading the newspaper as the Mantis tooled down
the road at high speed!
I had a few teething problems,
probably because my Mantis was one of the very early models. Early on,
I managed to run the front wheels up over a curb. This caused the tops
of the shock absorber towers to go from a flat to a pent-roof profile,
lowering the front end by about 1.5 inches. I took the car to the
factory, where they flattened the tops of the towers and then welded
thick steel plating up the sides and along the top of the towers. It
doesn’t look very elegant, but I’ve had no further problems. The rear
suspension looks fairly conventional – live axle, trailing arms, and
coil-over shocks. However, there is a rather complicated central
linkage – a 12” x 12” link, fabricated from 1” square steel tubing,
whose leading edge pivots on the chassis above and in front of the
differential. The trailing edge pivots on a triangular link whose apex
is attached via a ball joint to the bottom rear of the differential.
This gives a very low roll center, but the square link is subject to
significant shear forces, and it broke several times. Later models of
the Mantis had a much simpler mechanism – the square link was replaced
by a triangular link that attached directly to a ball joint at the top
of the differential. This kind of evolution (also known as having the
customer do your beta-testing) explains why it’s difficult to find two
identical Marci.
In the autumn of 1971
I brought the car to Canada, and for the next 15 years it was my sole
transportation as I moved around from Quebec to Ontario, to New Jersey,
and back to Ontario. It was a great summer car, but a terrible winter
car. The heater wouldn’t generate enough warm air to keep your toes
warm, never mind keep the windshield free of mist on the inside or
freezing rain on the outside.
Fifteen years of winter snow and salt
and summer sun, as well as couple of minor encounters with errant
motorists, left the car looking rather tired. It was time for a
restoration. I put the Mantis in the garage, and started to tear it
down. I made good progress, and was ready to take the body off the
chassis, when I changed jobs. The new job required a lot of travel, so
I had little time for the car, and it languished in the garage in its
disassembled state for almost 10 years.
By 1994 I had figured out that either
the car would sit in the garage in pieces until I retired, or I could
get some professional help to get the car back on the road while I was
still young and limber enough to actually get in the machine and drive
it. I chose the latter, and had it all hauled off to a local shop.
Over the next two years, they completed the disassembly, and then put it
all back together. The 15 years of exposure to winter snow and salt had
taken its toll – 84 feet of square steel tubing in the chassis were
badly corroded and were replaced. Fiberglass repairs and new paint
brought the exterior back to like-new condition. The interior was
re-upholstered in dark blue vinyl with light blue suede on the seats and
door panels. Mechanically, the Triumph 2.5PI engine and transmission
were sound – indeed, the engine, after sitting for almost 10 years,
started up and ran after a few shots of ether in the intake manifold.
The car was back on the road in the fall of 1995.
Since then, the Mantis has been
reserved for sunny summer weekends, going to British Car shows in
southern Ontario, or just blasting around the largely deserted back
roads. Of course, like any Marcos, it attracts a lot of attention
whereever it goes. Most popular questions are “Is it Italian?”, “How
old is it?”, and, from the under-20 crowd in their Hondas festooned with
go-faster bolt-on bits and paint schemes: “How much does it cost?”.
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