16 January 2009 - 11:00
Special delivery
Top Gear has a dream. A dream of blasting down the Mille Miglia, warm Italian wind in our hair, slightly pervy-looking leather driving gloves on our hands and a glamorous continental beauty on our, er, passenger seat. In our dream, the car looks rather like this.
This is the HB Special, a retro roadster from dutch brothers Tino and Paul Huet.
It may have a name like a pencil, but it's far more technically sophisticated
than that. OK, a bit more technically sophisticated. Actually, it's pretty much
exactly as technically sophisticated as a pencil.
Built on a modified Triumph TR6 chassis, the HB Special is powered by a
bored-out version of the TR6's original straight-six, bumped up from 2.5 to 2.7
litres. It'll be available in power outputs of 160bhp, 180bhp, or a heady
supercharged 210bhp, which we'd imagine will give it more than enough pace to
keep up with a base-spec Vauxhall Corsa.
We mock, but we like the HB Special. The Huet brothers created it as a one-off
to compete in a handful of European classic motoring rallies, but customer
demand has encouraged them to put the HB Special into limited production.
The price? Tino and Paul will build you a 160bhp Special for 67,000 Euro, but
it'll cost you 80,000 Euro for the full-fat supercharged version. No word on
whether the Gulf paintjob will cost you extra. But whatever the price, surely
it's worth it?
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