Shed Links - Revcounter

By: Guy Allen

Date: 17.12.2022

On owners and weird connections

It has become by far the greatest part of this job – shed-diving. That’s when you wander the countryside, amble into other folks’ garages and poke around to see what they’re playing with. With their permission, of course.

The last couple of months has been epic as we’ve done our best to wear out a few cars in the rush to see people in scattered parts of the country, from Adelaide, to Sydney, back to Melbourne and on to Hobart. More, further, soon, with a bit of luck...

The winner of the biggest surprise of the year was the car above, kindly modelled by long-time staffer Uncle Phil. It is of course a Shelby Cobra, a real one, and a very rare variant. Phil is grinning like a Cheshire cat because he was entrusted to move it around for the photo session for this issue and was clearly very happy to be reacquainted with the series. I left before the end of the shoot, in part so I could deny any involvement if he suddenly took it into his head to bolt for the sunset with the thing.

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For us, shooting this gem put a nice punctuation mark on 60 years of Shelby American and the epic cars it produced. You kind of wonder about an owner’s thought processes when they’re lending out treasures like this. Surely there’s a temptation to double-lock the doors and deny everything when you see people – particularly our motley crew – marching to your door bearing tripods, cameras and other weird instruments of torture.

Much depends on your perspective. In owner Joe Calleja’s case, he has an enviable fleet of vehicles and takes the view that it’s good to share them. At least so people get to see and smell them close up. Great to see.

Speaking of shed links, we mentioned last month we’d recently visited Canberra to see a tribute build of a rally Hillman Hunter – specifically the car driven to victory in the epic 1968 London to Sydney Marathon by Andrew Cowan. 

Well that brought up a weird connection, which is with another long-term staffer – Mark Higgins. A Hunter featured on the cover of Wheels magazine the year before the event (1967) and guess who’s driving? Paul Higgins, aka Mark’s father. It’s a small world...

From Unique Cars #473, Dec 2022

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