This mind-boggling MGF is a piece of British motoring history – a fully functioning and road legal gas turbine/electric vehicle. And in the best of British traditions, it was built by a bunch of talented amateurs on a relative shoestring. This is how it happened.

Words & Pictures: Simon Goldsworthy

Quite frankly, I am amazed that Adrian Bennett has not been locked up in a sanatorium. After all, this is the man who strapped a Rolls Royce Viper 102 jet engine to the back of a Daihatsu Hi-Jet pick-up truck, an engine that was formerly used to power a Jet Provost fast jet training aircraft. Not content with that, he also sat astride a mini moto motorbike with his knees around his ears while a model aircraft Wren XL200 jet engine blasted it down the drag strip at Shakespeare County Raceway. He even squeezed an Air Research JFS100 into a Sinclair C5 of all things – and that is a 100Hp gas turbine that previously saw service as a starter motor on the A7 Corsair attack aircraft.

I could go on, but I am sure you get the picture – Adrian is not as other men! Thankfully, though, Adrian has not been locked up. Instead he continues to come up with the kind of hare-brained project that wouldn’t occur to the rest of us before we’d sunk at least six pints of Old Speckled Hen. The difference with Adrian is that whereas we would have forgotten all about our crazy scheme long before the hangover kicked in, Adrian goes out and turns it into a reality. I think it’s because he doesn’t see such schemes as being crazy in the first place.

‘I can’t help it, I just love jet engines,’ he says by way of explanation. ‘When I was a kid, I used to be into rockets. I remember when I was about 14, my mum sat me down to talk about what she had found under my bed. For most teenagers, that would have meant a lecture about porn mags, but my mother said: “I don’t mind you making your own rocket fuel, but could you please keep it in the shed?” She had a point, as there was probably enough there to destroy a small housing estate. That’s when I thought that rockets were a bit dangerous, and I turned my attention to jet engines instead.’

None of this is too comforting when you are sitting besides Adrian in his MGF as a jet engine is spinning rapidly up to 52,000rpm just two feet behind your head. But, I have to keep telling myself, he appears a perfectly normal chap. Very personable, in fact. And he has a full complement of limbs, digits and ocular organs. Perhaps after all he is just your archetypal British eccentric, the mad professor who discovers time travel in his shed using nothing more sophisticated that an old boot lace, a microwave oven and a few bits and bobs picked up from a car boot sale at NASA.

Well, he has not discovered time travel yet, but he is most certainly upholding a fine British tradition of the eccentric genius and he owns what is believed to be the only electric/gas turbine car in private ownership, not just in Britain, but the entire world. And best of all, he built it in the proverbial shed with help from a group of friends, each with a particular area of expertise, for an approximate outlay of £20,000. It is completely road legal, too: it has a valid MoT certificate and a tax disc with a Nil rating that testifies to the electric drive. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, it is an MGF.

To read more about this MG see the December 2011 issue of MG Enthusiast on sale now - available here.