Rare survivor of a rare make

One of the extremely rare Arab sportscars, with which the celebrated racing and record-breaking car designer Reid Railton and the famous Welsh engineer/racing driver J G Parry Thomas were associated in 1926 and 1927, when Thomas’s fatal accident in ‘Babs’ caused Railton to abandon the project, is now based in Germany.

It is the Arab which, in 1930, was given a sports-coupé body with unusual windows by A P Compton, for Tim Powell. The Moss gearbox has been replaced by a Meadows ‘box.

In 1983, I drove the Arab, then owned by Brian Demaus; a dozen or so are thought to have been made.