A great British sports car no one is talking about

In a world of four-wheeled white goods, it is left to the likes of Pembleton to be a beacon of light...

I’ve worked at PistonHeads for more than a decade and been hanging around these hallowed pages for many more years than that. I like to think I know a thing or two about cars – especially what comes out of the factories and industrial units of Great Britain - a stint at Caterham certainly teaches you that. But we’re a modest bunch as a nation, and much like anything else that involves genuine craftsmen toiling away in sheds, there is amazing work going on that we simply never learn about.

When my neighbour told me he was selling his Ferrari 355 to fund a British-designed and built Pembleton T24, I was taken aback to discover a brand I’d never even heard of. Especially when all I could think of was a Peel - and why the hell would you sell a 355 for one of those?

The puzzled look on my face must have confused him as much as this ‘new’ company did me. While their cars look decades old, Pembleton is actually of a similar vintage to PistonHeads, having been established in Worcestershire in 1999 to solve a problem that most of us wouldn’t think twice about.

Good thing founder and former National Hill Climb champion Phil Gregory doesn’t think like the rest of us. While researching a cycling trip to Ireland, he noticed that motorbikes and tricycles could travel on the ferry for free. Would that apply to a three-wheeled cycle car? Surely this is Man Maths and procrastination at the most extreme – building a new car entirely from scratch to avoid paying for the ferry. Genius.

It’s easy to see why others fell in love with it and wanted one to build themselves. Phil initially sold kits to enthusiasts, with almost 500 Pembletons eventually finding homes around the world. When his son Guy joined the business in 2015, the company began its transition towards fully assembled cars, introducing the V-Sport in 2018 and the four-wheeled T24 in 2020.

And it’s still growing. What started in converted stables in rural Worcestershire has now moved into a purpose-built facility on the same site, allowing Pembleton to increase its capacity without losing the hands-on approach that makes its cars so unusual. Every chassis is fabricated on site, while the aluminium bodies are formed and riveted by hand. A T24 contains no fewer than 870 hand-pulled rivets; the V-Sport has 822.

The V-Sport and T24 are the sort of cars that make you stop scrolling and stare. Both employ V-twin engines and four-speed transmissions, while weighing so little that the usual rules of performance car equations go straight out of the window. The V-Sport weighs just 298kg, while the T24 is around 356kg. Of course, that means there's precious little else like them available today. Which is precisely why companies like Pembleton matter.

The kind of passion and workmanship on display there is not exclusive to Pembleton, yet witnessing it firsthand is to reflect on how increasingly rare it is. The car industry, by virtue of mass production, safety legislation, cost implications and electrification, is becoming ever more homogenised, ever more complicated and, more often than not, crushingly dull. Rather inevitably, that means there is something wonderfully refreshing about a tiny British company building cars because it genuinely believes they should exist almost for their own sake.

And perhaps that’s the most important bit. You don't have to want a Pembleton. You don't even have to understand why anyone would sell a Ferrari 355 to buy one. But if cars are to survive as interesting, invigorating products, then companies like this must survive, too – companies that are still designing, engineering and hand-assembling in Britain because someone, somewhere, still thinks that sounds like a good idea.

Your time would be wasted by me telling you what their cars feel like to drive, so I’ll leave that to someone who does it full-time (watch this space). Though I will say the appeal of owning something that looks a century old but has modern-day reliability is strong, and you can’t help but smile in the presence of cars like this - whether it’s from behind the wheel or from the pavement.

Having turned 40 this year, I increasingly find myself more attracted to older cars, be they ’90s icons or pre-war veterans. Perhaps that's simply part and parcel of reaching a certain age - but I'm inclined to think that it is also symptomatic of the direction the industry is heading in. There simply isn't as much to look forward to as once there was. Let's put it this way: I could very much see myself adding a T24 to the garage at some point in the future, in a way that I couldn't for so many current-day models.

I'm sure I'm not alone. So if there are other small British manufacturers we should be shouting about - i.e. ones that currently operate beneath the radar - then, please, by all means let us know in the comments.

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Markytee

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100 months