A breakthrough!
I had a call completely out of the blue from Dave Howarth tonight who had been speaking to our own Chris Spratt about my car and its history. Anyway, Dave was out one day driving his DeLorean round his local area when by complete coincidence he bumped into a bloke who claimed he knew someone who used to have 2 of these cars... Went by the name of Brian Mcfall the owner of the salvage company my car came from!
It turns out Mcfall's had a car in their possession that had ended up in a minor front end impact when it was transported over from Belfast for a promotional event in Liverpool in 1981. The driver of the transporter was only a few miles away from his destination when he had to make an emergency stop. The force sent the car forward causing it to hit the front end of the trailer!
Realising the car couldn't be used now for the promotion, it was sent over to Mcfall's to be kept in storage until the factory could recover it. Trouble was the factory refused to pay Mcfall's to keep it in storage, so Mcfall's ended up saying they would keep the car. Their plan was then to sell the car on to probably try and make a tidy profit from it. Trouble was, the car had no VIN plates, meaning they couldn't register it, thus making it unsaleable! They eventually managed to track down a car in the Dover area that had been scrapped recently... Can anyone guess what the VIN of this car might have been?...
That's right, it was VIN 11777!
Anyway, it is believed they simply swapped the vin plates over, so they could sell what was effectively a brand new car. However, they apparently had notorious problems with the gearbox so never got to the point of selling it (sounds familiar).
So there you go, my car is effectively an early car (vin unknown) badged as a Middle Eastern so it could be registered! Other than that though, there doesn't appear to be any other parts obtained from VIN 11777.
The bit that always puzzled me was I was convinced the underbody was from VIN 11777, but I could never understand why if they had to rebuild the car by putting a new frame on, why did they not repair the underbody properly whilst the tub was off? Well, clearly now this makes sense that the damage sustained on the other car, was minimal enough at least to repair without doing a frame off. Although, they almost definitely would've had to sourced a front bumper/fascia from somewhere, as these would've been wrecked on both cars!
Can anybody shed any further on this? From what I understand, no cars were released to the UK press at that time?! It still doesn't explain about some of the other odd parts (scrap doors, plain rear screen etc). Could the factory have simply thrown together a car for promotional purposes using anything they could lay their hands on?
Certainly fascinating though!