African Muscle Cars - Forum

There are so many cars that seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Among them I have often wondered what happened to the first Perana "officially" built, namely the Cortina. This car was raced successfully by, amongst others, Bob Olthoff and the car was then sold to Koos Swanepoel who also raced it with some success. Where is it now? I have a picture of Koos's car taken by me at the motor show held in the Parow Civic Center in 1969.

Not only that, what has happened to the road going versions of this car? If one could get one's hands on something like the Cortina Perana, how much would a car like that sell for?

Interesting question, apparently according to another forum member the orginal Olthoff Cortina Perana that was later raced by Koos is sitting derelect in Guateng somewhere, the car is but a shell and in incredibly poor shape.

The road cars, well thats an interesting question esp as Gunston used some as reps cars, what I suspect happened was the gearboxes were the weak link, guy I know owned one and the gearbox was forver breaking.

But yes I agree why there are so few left I dont really know, one of the members of this forum has one that he is restoring.

Who remembers Pat Sonnenshein's Ford Zodiac Mk111? What about Eddie Keizan's Ford 20M (Taunus) that was almost unbeatable at Kyalami?

The same as what happened with so many other specials, they were thoroughly pulled through the bum and broken up for motors and things that could be used many times for stockcars which was one of the routes to their grave.

Here's one.

http://www.africanmusclecars.com/forum/ ... p?f=9&t=69

Killarney Racer wrote: Who remembers Pat Sonnenshein's Ford Zodiac Mk111? What about Eddie Keizan's Ford 20M (Taunus) that was almost unbeatable at Kyalami?

I have seen a pic or 2 of the Keizan 20M, seemed like a very quick car in its day.

Another strange race car of the time was Libero Pardini's Valiant.....

Interstingly enough is that one of Basil Green's first converstions was on a Valiant Barracuda! That must have been very interesting in it's day.

Hi-Fi wrote: Interstingly enough is that one of Basil Green's first converstions was on a Valiant Barracuda! That must have been very interesting in it's day.

Correct it was a conversion undertaken with Atkinsons and there were 2 stages, I have the road test somewhere...

That barracuda road test is on the main site http://www.africanmusclecars.com/BasilG ... acuda.html, its originally from the moby site.

I think there are more of these cars around than we all suspect. They are standing in peoples backyards because they are not treated like the icons that they are. People tend to drive around and show off with their big V8 cars - but the others "suig die agterspeen". Hopefully more of them will start surfacing.

FairmontGT wrote: That barracuda road test is on the main site http://www.africanmusclecars.com/BasilG ... acuda.html, its originally from the moby site.

I think there are more of these cars around than we all suspect. They are standing in peoples backyards because they are not treated like the icons that they are. Hopefully more of them will start surfacing.

Agree they are definately around and was speaking to my dad about this the other day, he remembers quite a lot of them being sold back in the day. They make great projects, but the general problem is that in SA we have two type of muscle car lovers: Ford or Chev!, there are very few people that really appreciate Chrysler...

There's a bit more on the Ohlthoff/Swanepoel Cortina Perana here on my Perana forum: Team Gunston Cortina A201

And one of the pictures there has Keizan's 20M in the background.