Life Cycle - the unlikely story of a tricky 1994 Ginetta G33 rescued from the jaws of bankruptcy

Rescued from a bankrupt Ginetta, this wild V8 roadster has tested the mettle of two passionate owners.

Words SAM DAWSON

Photography IAN SKELTON

Tricky to live with, sublime to drive – a Ginetta G33’s life story told

1995 – Malcolm Pinder realises his long-held dream of becoming a Ginetta owner

‘When I was 19, I went to the Motor Show at Earls Court, saw the then-new Hillman Imp-based G15, and knew then and there that I wanted a Ginetta one day,’ says Malcolm Pinder. ‘At the time I couldn’t afford one, but in 1995 I was in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery, picked up a car magazine from the table and found a road-test of the new G33 roadster – and this time I could afford one.’ The new V8 was just under £20,000. But there was a hitch.

‘It must have been an out-of-date magazine, because when I phoned the Ginetta factory in Scunthorpe, the voice on the other end of the line said that the firm was in the process of going under. “But I know where a G33 is being built…”, he said.’

‘My first drive in it was unregistered, uninsured, in the snow, with no roof’

Amid the chaos of the end of Ginetta’s Martin Phaff-led era, one plucky G33 managed to escape receivership in 1995. ‘When the receivers were called in, what would be my car was just a chassis at the time,’ says Pinder. ‘It was little more than an asset to the receivers, as was its chassis plate of 95160. This was, as I understand it, a practice at Ginetta to have chassis plates available because of the need to build chassis quickly and get them out of the door for their various race series, which often needed parts at very short notice. This is why the 95160 falls into the usual series of numbers for G27s, rather than G33s.

‘It wasn’t possible to register a new chassis at this time because of the situation at the factory and the receivership, so it was agreed to assign 95160 to an unfinished G33.’ Ginetta engineer David Baines then took it on himself to complete the car at his home in suburban Scunthorpe using whatever parts he could get from factory stock. Ginetta put Pinder in touch with Baines, who built the car to the specification of its first owner. ‘He’d already chosen the colour – yellow – although this suited me.

‘When David was finishing the car, I asked him to fit a tonneau for it. I never thought G33s looked right with their hood up, because there’s an odd relationship between the edge of the windscreen and the top of the door frame, plus it’s difficult to get in and out with the roof up. I reasoned that as long as you’re driving you won’t get wet, and figured I could put some black towels over the leather on the sills to absorb any rainwater that got in.

‘David had also revised the design to lengthen the cockpit because the G33 as designed didn’t have much legroom. But I’m quite short and the pedals didn’t adjust in the way they did on a Marcos, so I had to have adaptor blocks fitted to the pedals.

‘I picked the car up from David in Scunthorpe in early January 1996,’ says Pinder. The Ginetta wasn’t registered yet, so I went up with a trailer behind my trusty Austin Maestro turbodiesel with the intention of towing it back. And it was snowing.

‘I arrived at David’s house, put the unregistered G33 on the trailer and started driving back to my house in Gloucestershire. But as I was driving through snowy rural Lincolnshire, a wheel fell off the trailer, the axle having sheared at the bearings. I called the RAC, but they refused to recover a trailer. ‘So I had no choice. My first drive in the G33 was unregistered, untaxed and uninsured, in the snow, with no roof, from Lincolnshire to Gloucestershire, using minor roads to avoid gritting lorries spraying stones at it and salt getting on to the chassis.

‘When I got it home, I kept it in my next-door neighbour’s garage. Obviously, given the nature of the car, it was never going to be a daily driver. I started out by taking it to one or two classic car rallies, but I had no friends with Ginettas so was usually the only one there, and it felt a bit lonely. So instead I used to take my son out in it to kit car shows at Stoneleigh, and Ginetta events at Mallory Park in Leicestershire, when the owner of the circuit at the time – Chris Meek – raced for Ginetta.

‘But even then, it couldn’t win the owners’ concours events because of the way that it had been built. It had an engine that had started life in an automatic-gearbox Range Rover and as a result looked older than the car when the bonnet was raised. It just wasn’t possible to clean it up to the same standard as the rest of the car.

‘I only did, on average, 500 miles a year in it,’ Pinder continues. ‘I kept the chassis Waxoyl’d, and only took it out in good weather. Generally it was reliable, but it did let me down once. Thankfully David Baines was still alive at the time and could advise me, but it suddenly stopped on the A38 towards Tewkesbury. I got it towed home, and found that dirt had got into its fuel injection system – Baines hadn’t fitted a filter – and three relays had blown in the injection management system. It wasn’t expensive to replace, but the underbonnet packaging made it difficult to get to.

Once it was fixed, though, it was fine. I did have to replace the starter motor afterwards, using a reconditioned item from a Rover SD1 – I’d worn the original out trying to start it with the injection fault.’

Pinder does look back on his ownership of the G33 with a tinge of regret. ‘I took it to Prescott once, and I wanted to hill-climb it, but didn’t – it was just for show. ‘I didn’t use it to its full potential, which is why I sold it in May 2011. But it doesn’t matter because I now have a 5.0-litre V8 Ford Mustang and a Cupra Leon that’s tuned to 370bhp!’

2011 – Lez Dix buys the G33

‘Ever since I first saw a Ginetta G33 back in 1991, I thought, “Yes please!”’ says the G33’s current owner Lez Dix. ‘Twelve years ago, my daughter had just left university and I felt I could justify spending the money on one. My wife Ali has had a Fiat Coupé VIS from new and I wanted a midlife crisis car too.

‘I was surprised to find three G33s for sale as soon as I started looking, in April 2011. There was a burgundy one for sale in Cheltenham, which was one of the two G33s that had been sold from new in kit form. There was a beautiful example for sale in Bicester, finished in British Racing Green, but it was out of my price bracket, having been bored out to 4.5 litres and making 300bhp – so it would have been a proper handful to own anyway.

‘But this one was just beautiful, just right. I didn’t know of its unusual history when I went to see it. Malcolm Pinder hadn’t advertised it particularly heavily – just a tiny small-ad in a car magazine, with no photos – but I shook hands on it there and then. It was perfect.’ Or so it seemed.

‘As I drove it home for the first time, the brakes seized on,’ Dix recalls with a smile. ‘The problem was, Malcolm hadn’t been using it. Although over the whole course of his ownership he’d averaged 500 miles a year, in the last few it had only been 200 per year, and lack of use is the biggest problem with a car like this in terms of reliability.

‘When I got it home, I had to replace the valve springs, because they’d gone soft. A month later, the brakes seized on again and caught fire – they needed a new master cylinder after that. The discs had lipped and the only replacements I could find were from a Ford Sierra – but with 4mm machined off the edges so they could clear the Fondmetal alloy wheels.

‘Four days after buying the G33, Ali phoned me up and said, “I’ve just seen another one!” It turned out that the only other yellow G33, registered G33 MPH at the time, was local to me, owned by Mark Thompson, a specialist who can remap the Rover V8’s ECU. We swapped cars one day to compare, and he remapped my ECU for free. By contrast, his car had side-exhausts and softer suspension.

‘My first few years with the car were spent sorting out bits and bobs. There was a bit of damage on a sill consistent with it clipping a kerb, and I treated the chassis with Dinitrol, but otherwise it was in very good condition – Malcolm had looked after it well. ‘Once sorted, it became purely a fun car, to go out for runs with and take part in Ginetta events. After the brake fire it never let me down again – in fact, it’s been near-bulletproof. The Rover V8 engine is easy to deal with. Some people change the LT77 gearbox because it’s not the best but I find it okay.

‘But by that point, the shows had started. Ali had signed me up to the Ginetta Owners’ Club before I’d even bought the car so I could get advice on buying it, but I took it to classic and performance car shows primarily to promote the Ginetta marque – people often didn’t know about Ginetta, especially back before their race series were televised as part of the British Touring Car Championship coverage.

‘The first show I took it to was at Warwick Castle, on Father’s Day in 2012. Ali phoned Warwick Council to ask if there were any speed humps in the town centre around the castle, because the G33 will beach itself on some of them. They said there weren’t any, and we drove into Warwick with no trouble at all. But then we went through the gates of the castle and the first thing we saw was a speed hump! It made it over but only just, and my eyes went straight to the oil pressure gauge – I once had to replace the sump after driving over a rock on my drive.

‘But without Mark Thompson I wouldn’t have got it to the show in the first place. The stepper motor controlling the idle failed just before the show, so Mark took his off his car and gave it to me so I could go to Warwick. I repaid him by making him a set of quarterlights like the ones I have on my G33.’

It’s not the only detail improvement Dix has made to the G33. ‘I realised the Momo steering wheel boss had the same dimensions as the bottom of a yoghurt pot I was eating from one morning, so I measured it and it was identical! So I cut the bottom off the pot, stuck a Ginetta badge over it, coated it in clear lacquer and attached it to the centre of the steering wheel. It looks bespoke!

‘In 2015, the car started feeling like something wasn’t right. It drove as though it had an open differential – a single rear wheel would spin when pulling away from the lights. Admittedly it didn’t help that the tyres were 15 years old by this point, but they’d only covered 3000 miles. They looked perfect and I only ran them at the correct 19psi, but they gripped about as well as charcoal! But either way, it just wasn’t driving the way a car with a limited-slip differential should.

‘After being beaten away from the traffic lights by one too many Ford Fiestas, I took the Ginetta to a firm called Arden Automotive, which sells all sorts of interesting kit – and the owner has Mini Cooper chassis 002. They also build kit cars for people struggling to get them finished and through IVA [individual vehicle approval, a test that all completed kit cars must pass in order to be road-registered]. Justin Temple, an ex-TVR guy on the team at Arden, knew the Rover V8 very well and advised me on which of their differentials to fit to solve the problem.

‘Also, one of the pieces of received wisdom with Rover V8s is that their exhaust manifolds can eat as much as 10bhp. Ever since buying the G33 I told myself I’d replace the exhaust system front-to-back with something in stainless steel. The manifolds run backwards on a G33 in order to clear the chassis members, and it took 20 years for them to rust sufficiently for me to consider replacing them. In the end, I got a local bloke-in-a-shed operation to fabricate something for me.

‘In December 2015, I went up to the Ginetta factory in Garforth for the Pistonheads Sunday Service meeting and a factory tour. It was a very early start from Oxfordshire and I ended up delayed by a traffic queue, but when I got to the factory I drove the G33 straight under the lowered car park barrier. Ginetta boss Lawrence Tomlinson greeted us personally, and had his G10 there as part of the show.

‘I’ve done three track days now with the G33.

They’re entertaining, but I’m very precious about the car. I was with my son on a wet track day at Silverstone once; we’d put Rain-X on the windscreen and had decided to go for it. Luffield always looks like a corner you take flat-out when playing video games, and we were watching from the pits as a Honda Civic Type-R came into Luffield flat-out, went left, right, left again, and hit the pit wall so hard it nearly came over it. We still went out in the Ginetta, though. Another time at Silverstone, we were hammering down the old start/finish straight and were coming to the first corner when my son shouted, “Yellow light!” I hadn’t seen it, but a Caterham had spun up ahead. Track days can be scary things.’

Since then, Dix’s Ginetta has starred on the Pride of Ownership display at the NEC Classic Motor Show in 2022. ‘Everyone knows that I’ll turn out for the opening of an envelope – any excuse to get the car out and about,’ says Dix. ‘In 2021, a friend had his yellow G32 on the Ginetta stand at the NEC, and told me that the show’s organiser likes yellow cars and that I ought to have a word. I did – and, lo and behold, I was invited to show the car!’

But what of the future? ‘I was writing my will the other day, and my kids asked me whom the Ginetta would be left to. I said, “Actually, I’d rather you sold it, to be honest”, which surprised them.

‘So I asked my son, “If I gave you £20,000, what would you buy?” and he said a Honda S2000. So I said, “Well, there you go then”.

‘The G33 isn’t an easy car to own; it’s one you have to re-engineer as you go along. I’ve had to put an alloy big-bore radiator in it because the Sierra Cosworth item it came with wasn’t up to the job, for example. But when someone comes up to you at a show full of expensive supercars and says, “That’s the best car here, mate”, it suddenly all seems worth it.’

‘A friend told me the show organiser likes yellow cars and I should have a word’

2018: flat out at Silverstone track day — no flying Hondas.

2021: the G33 meets its designer, Mark Walklett.

Lez is honest about the G33’s future – his kids are to sell it.

Owning a car like this needs a keen handson attitude.

2021: at an overcast Sywell for the Pistons & Props event.

2022: gunning the throttle at Beaulieu Supercars.

Lez created the bolt-on quarterlights himself.

2018: the Ginetta arrives at M-B World Brooklands.

2015: on the parade lap at the Silverstone Classic event. 2011: at Warwick Castle, having negotiated speed humps. 2012: With Mark Thompson and the ‘other’ yellow G33.

2015: having driven under the barrier at Ginetta HQ.

Tonneau was specified because Malcolm didn’t like hood design.

2018: GOC get together for Ginetta’s 60th Anniversary.

Steering wheel featured yoghurt pot redesign 2011: Malcolm Pinder hands the Ginetta over to Lez Dix.

1996: on David Baines’ drive, awaiting collection.

2000: Malcolm Pinder parks up in his new double garage.

With 3.9 litres and less than a ton, the G33’s a wild ride.