We are family – Sidewinder Buggy

The 1970s have a lot to answer for - flares, prog rock, Raleigh Choppers and the winter of discontent, to name but a few. It's a decade that I remember as being great, mainly because I spent most of it making go-karts and finding porn in trees, but if you were a bit older than me in the '70s and were into cars, there's a fair chance you might have had a Beach Buggy, even if you didn't have a job or were on strike. If you didn't, there's a fair chance you'd have lusted after one as the Beach Buggy craze swept the country like wildfire during that decade. Custom Car magazine was the car mag of the '70s and, from its very first issue, featured the fibreglass fantastics that you could build at home on a shoestring. Hell, the staff even built a couple themselves, which proves how easy it must have been! If you believed the pictures in the magazines, owning one made you an instant love god, bikini-clad girls rushing toward you at every opportunity like bees to a honey pot.
So, was it really that easy? We asked Jim Pemble, the father of the family who, between them, built the wicked Sidewinder Buggy here. The reason we asked Jim is because, like so many others, Jim had a couple of Buggies in the past, including the British classic - a metalflake Mk1 GP. "It was a bit different back then, there were plenty of Beetles in breakers yards and you basically just kept it as a standard Beetle underneath. There's certainly more companies doing production stuff to build them these days... and you can spend a lot more money on one nowadays. I think my first one cost a couple of hundred pounds. This one didn't!" Buggies obviously run in the family though, for son Ryan - now working as a technician for the police - also used to own a Buggy, back when he was a teenager. "There's always been Buggies here and there," laughs Neil, the other of Jim's two identical twin sons, "Though I've never owned one myself, I've always been into them from looking at pictures of the ones Dad and Ryan had."
Once they'd made the decision to build a 21st century Buggy, Jim, Ryan and Neil had to make some further decisions - what body to go for, and should they buy one and rebuild it or start from scratch? Their research led them to Mel Hubbard, one of the UK's main Buggy enthusiasts and proprietor of Manx Buggies in Wisbech, Cambs. While there are certainly others out there who know a lot about Buggies, there ain't a lot Mel doesn't know about the whole process of building one, having put his first one together in 1974.

For the full story on this car make sure you pick up a copy of the Summer 2010 issue of VolksWorld

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