Austin-Healey WSM 9059 MY

WSM started life in 'Delta Garage', Leighton Buzzard, under the guidance of Douglas Wilson-Spratt. The garage was a successful dealership, running Austin, Vauxhall/Bedford and Volvo franchises. He had spotted a market for selling tuning parts for Austin-Healeys, and with Donald Healey’s blessing ran a sizeable tuning business out of the same premises.

In 1963 a customer crashed his Austin-Healey Sprite and between the customer, Douglas Wilson-Spratt and body builder Peel coachworks, they designed and built a very attractive streamlined coupe body. This was to be the forerunner of a number of "WSM" cars as they were to become known, based mainly on Spridgets, but also on an MGB, an Austin 1100 and of course the one-off Austin-Healey 3000 seen here.

Bodied by Peel, the WSM 3000 was perhaps the ultimate development of the WSM and was built for Malcolm Bridgeland (then owner of Malaya Garage) following a shunt at Silverstone in 1965 in his Austin-Healey 3000, registration number 9059 MY. The finished car looked absolutely beautiful, with hints of Ferrari GTO and Aston Martin in the styling.  It was also fast, and with its 3.1-litre engine was timed at over 140mph.  It featured in several magazine articles of the period which were glowing in their praise.  Alas it disappeared from the scene until the late ‘80s when it was tracked down to the South Gloucestershire area. Its long term owner died last year and as a consequence this unique, beautiful and potentially very quick car has come onto the market for the first time in many years.

A previous owner modified the car for rallying purposes by shortening the passenger's door to allow the exhausts to be raised in the style of the works Healeys.  The car remains intact and looks to be substantially complete with the exception of a few engine ancilliaries.  Its aluminium bodywork shows little sign of corrosion, however the car does need a full restoration.

The DVLA report that currently no record of the registration number is held on their system, which would indicate that the car has not been used since the late 1970s when the local registration system was centralised.  The vehicle does not carry a chassis plate and the chassis number is not known.

Once completed, this car will unboubtedly cause a sensation wherever it appears, just as it did back in the mid-'60s.  This is a unique opportunity for the serious Healey collector to own a period, alloy bodied competitive sports racer which will no doubt be considered for a huge range of international events.  Cars like this do not come along very often!