Hey, I haven't been writing about the Butterfield Musketeer for some time now (5 years to be exact, way too long). And we wouldn't want to have this lovely if not mysterious model fade into obscurity completely, don't we?
That's just when this lovely picture was flashed over to here by Simon Greatham, supposedly taken at the circuit of Brands Hatch where Christabel Carlisle famously (?) drove the Musketeer against a whole force of Lotuses. She spun the car in the race, thus ending the sporting career for the Musketeer.
There's no doubt this is the red car driven by Carlisle there, which was in fact the aluminium bodied prototype made by Williams & Pritchard and rebuilt with a Cooper 1000 engine for the race and registered '292 MJH' at the time. Is it also her standing behind it here? Together with the other two fibreglass bodied Musketeers, this car seems to have vanished from the earth since that racing day now more than 60 years ago. Let's keep hope in finding at least one of them back one day.
Butterfield Musketeer at Brands Hatch in 1962. Is that Christabel Carlisle behind it?
Picture courtesy Simon Greatham