AHEAD BY A NOSE

The world was very different 40 years ago. When Spike Anderson, who created the Super Samuri road and racing Datsun 240Zs, married his second wife Clara in October 1981, he was given an appropriate send-off from the Register Office.

‘There were eight Super Samuris parked outside, and the ensuing race to the reception, some 15 miles away, was nothing short of bloody dangerous,’ he recalled in his autobiography. ‘Someone from the [Silverstone] circuit was standing at the Daventry junction on the A5 and, having witnessed this, reckoned it was more spectacular than a Modsport race. As a matter of record, Ron Collins, in his G-nose Super Samuri, was declared the winner.’

So our feature car does have race history, of a sort. Collins was a Bedfordshire farmer and an Austin-Healey racer who commissioned this one-off Super Samuri – the only example from 74 cars built that features the longer ‘G-nose’ fitted to rare Nissan 240ZG variants – and became a good friend to Anderson.

‘He did like his drink, did Ron,’ says Spike Anderson down the phone from Spain, where he has lived for 28 years. ‘He was a very sociable character who could often be found in the Silverstone Clubhouse bar. One night he reckoned he’d had a bit too much to drink