See, Dodd may have been able to keep the Rolls-Royce grille if he kept The Beast under the radar, but that didn’t happen. I say it’s reportedly a Merlin V12 as Dodd was a bit of a storyteller.
To start, it’s no longer supercharged and has been converted from a dry-sump oiling system to a more traditional wet sump. II reportedly sits a 27-liter Rolls-Royce Merlin V12 from a Boulton Paul Balliol training aircraft that’s seen some modifications. No matter, a new engine, new shell, new everything but the chassis itself went in and the reborn Beast Mk 2 became even more of a legend.Īt the heart of The Beast Mk. Sadly, the Mk 1 version of The Beast suffered a catastrophic fire in 1975 while returning from Sweden. It even had a Rolls-Royce radiator grille to go with the Rolls-Royce engine, which would eventually land Dodd in quite a bit of hot water. A bodyshell that looked like a Ford Capri transforming into The Incredible Hulk was fabricated up, and the whole thing became a demonstrator of sorts. However, Dodd got more than he bargained for when Jameson offered up the whole car. That’s where John Dodd comes in.ĭodd specialized in automatic gearboxes and figured out a way to make a torque converter automatic play nice with the slow-breathing Meteor motor. Allegedly, Jameson had a rolling chassis and an engine, but no gearbox or bodywork. The original concept for The Beast came from Paul Jameson, a man who envisioned building a car with a 27-liter Rolls-Royce Meteor V12 normally found in machinery like the Cromwell tank.
I’m talking in excess of 180 mph in an era when the production car speed record stood at just under 180 mph for the Lamborghini Miura P400S, and a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most powerful road car in the world. The Beast is a monument to excess in every sense of the word and it’s coming up for auction soon.īut wait, what is The Beast? Well, this custom car drew the ire of Rolls-Royce and the amazement of nigh-on every British schoolboy in the 1970s because it was one of the fastest, most outrageous things with number plates. Displacement? Roughly equivalent to four Dodge Challenger Hellcats and an Audi Quattro combined. Forward-facing lamps? Eight of them should do just fine.
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