Sunday 28 June 2020


'Type my name in, you'll find nutters'

A year ago, Giles Chapman was knocking the work of quirky car designer Barry Stimson. Now he says the man was a childhood hero. What's going on?

Good fun: Barry Stimson and the Sting 

I was relieved to hear that Barry Stimson had a bad back. That way, he'd be less likely to punch me in the face.

A year ago, I included one of his car designs - the Stimson Scorcher - in one of my books and, after seeing it, he wrote me a letter. Trouble was, the book was called The Worst Cars Ever Sold in Britain, and so while his missive appeared to be tongue-in-cheek, I couldn't be sure he wouldn't get me in a headlock until he received the choked apology he deserved.

After all, only 30 Stimson Scorchers, incredible three-wheeled fun cars resembling playground horses on wheels, were sold, and I'd never even seen one much less driven (or ridden) one.

Barry, wearing an expression of well-suppressed agony, and a jogging top, was sitting in a cream armchair when I arrived at his house overlooking a marina at Port Solent. He immediately launched into a lament on the sameness of car design, and work in general.

"You either work to make a living by designing exactly what people want, or you go a stage further by being a bit different and you have no market," he sighed. "Boring makes sense. We all have identical cars. They're boring. We're boring. The only thing that matters is marketing, not design. Our kids wear clothes where the labels are the most valuable part. It's stupid."

Barry was, I now realise, a childhood idol of mine. As a car designer, he was responsible for some of the vehicles I used to admire in magazines. Cars such as the Scorcher looked like Hot Wheels toys made real, a million miles from anything my father would ever own. Now here he was sitting in front of me, aged 62, like an ageing rock star sporting shoulder-length, chocolate-brown hair and tinted glasses.

The modern cult of the car designer would have difficulty accommodating Barry. For one thing, he never went to college to learn how to draw cars. Describing his Portsmouth art school as "a finishing school for girls, where a term's project was to design a poster advertising toothpaste", he told me how in 1957, aged 16, he and a friend set off on motorcycles for Durban, South Africa, on the love-lorn trail of a pretty girl. They only got as far as Italy before they had to pawn the bikes for food money, and ended up living with some kindly Valetta prostitutes on Malta for three months.

Bohemian life gave way to work as an exhibition and theatre set designer back in Britain in the 1960s. "I always had the ability to draw," he recalls, "and I loved working out ways to improve things."

Then, on a trip to Canada in 1968, Barry met the creator of the Volkswagen-powered Beach Buggy. "I loved it," he says. "It was an absolutely new type of car, so refreshing, not a sports car and not an off-roader - just fun."

He resolved to come up with something similar back home, but using cheap and plentiful Mini parts. Hence the 1970 Mini Bug, a doorless, roofless two-seater with a one-piece plastic body and a steel spaceframe chassis into which all the mechanical parts of a decrepit Mini could easily be bolted. Oozing the social liberation of the late 1960s and with reptilian headlamps lending a cheeky charm, Barry had a hit on his hands. The Mini Bug became one of Britain's best-selling kit-cars.

Indeed, it could have been even more popular had things gone to plan, for British Leyland was interested in selling it through its Unipart division. Barry well remembers the meeting with the company's po-faced managers.

"They wanted to know all about the stress tests we'd put the car through," he chuckles. "I said we had a fat friend and we got him to bounce up and down on the chassis; if it bent, we welded another strut in. My partner kicked me under the table and the Leyland people were not amused. We never got the deal."

Barry's new designs, however, came thick and fast, including the six-wheeled Safari Six, also relying on Mini parts, and the Scorcher. The latter could accommodate three people in tandem and caused a furore with the DVLC, which couldn't decide if it was a car or a motorcycle. The engine jutted out at the front and it could do 100mph if you were brave or foolhardy enough to try.

Mention of the Scorcher makes Barry mildly exasperated: "It's the worst seller of all my cars, but the most famous - I find that weird."

Still, aficionados have elevated the three-wheeled Scorcher into a motoring icon, with websites devoted to it and the few survivors changing hands rarely. "People tell me more about myself on websites than I actually know," says Barry. "Type the name Stimson in and you'll find loads of nutters."

He is unsure how many vehicles he's designed - "A hundred maybe; anyway, ever such a lot" - and so is his 15-year-old son, Tom, a budding travel writer and keeper of his father's official archive. The Stimson portfolio includes such diverse projects as a German-built coach, a speedboat with a built-in sundeck, another craft using an integral ski to propel it through water, an amphibious car that could reach 30 knots, a horsebox that comes apart and is easy to hose down, a roadtrain in the shape of a crocodile for a theme park, a hospitality unit for an Arab ruler - the list goes on and on.

There are also lots of motor caravans. In fact, designing motor caravans is how Barry has managed to weather an incredible 35 years as an independent - as

long as Giorgetto "Mr Golf" Giugiaro, but with a fraction of the acclaim. It's still an uphill struggle: "Yeah, I'll read how clever I am, but in fact I'm not worth a light," he says. "What I'd like to read is what a total prat this bloke is but he's laughing all the way to the bank!"

The Mini-based Trek, a sort of high-riding, open-air city car of the mid-1980s, was seemingly Barry's kit-car swansong, but now he's back with two new designs, the Stimson Sting and the Stimson Storm. Like the Scorcher, these are three-wheelers. The Sting has two wheels at the front, a swooping, two-seat roadster body, a steering wheel and the hind-quarters of a 1,200cc Suzuki Bandit motorcycle sticking out of its pointed tail. The Storm has two wheels at the back, four seats, and the Bandit front wheel and forks sticking out of the front, steered by handlebars and covered by a fairing. Both are fast and fun.

"I took the Sting to the Donington kit-car show and couldn't believe the attention it got," he says. "Then again, the kit-car industry is full of clones: you've got the Caterham Seven and loads of others that look like it, the cheaper the rougher.

"One thing we did notice, though, is that with a steering wheel on a sports car, people ask what happens when the weather's bad; with handlebars, they just ask how fast it goes. So I guess the Storm will be the bigger seller, although I've got five Sting orders already."

Barry's other new project is a pint-size motorhome based on the Citroen Berlingo. Called La Parisienne, he's managed to pack in an elevating roof, two beds, a cooker, a toilet and, yes, even a kitchen sink. It starts at £15,645 complete or £7,050 for the conversion to your own car, and interest has already been strong; even Citroen likes it.

If Barry has his way, La Parisienne should soon be a familiar sight at campsites all over Europe. If not, he'll think of something else. And he didn't even give me that bloody nose I deserved for my Scorcher slur. For which, along with his contribution to this increasingly bland car world, I can only thank him.

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