WHEN the Marcos Mantula was launched in 1983, British automotive publications rallied round Jen Marsh’s attempt to revive Marcos Engineering, which has been a strong player in the kit car industry.
Kit cars are vehicles that are sold as “kits” and completed at home as an assembly project. This is comparable to model planes that take up a teen boy’s valuable time.
Parents are generally agreeable to their boys assembling scale models as it means that their son will become unattractive to the opposite sex. That is just one less thing to worry about and one less difficult subject to broach.
As we grow into adulthood, find a life partner and have children, most men will discover that their “sugar and spice” will turn into “claws and fangs” the moment we suggest the idea of buying a fun car or anything with less than four wheels.
They will try to skew the conversation towards children’s education and remind us that our eldest son is doing well in school and has shown interest in taking up medicine as a career path.
What our wives are, of course, trying to say is that having a sports car or motorcycle is a stupid idea. They also question where you are going to find the money for your “stupid” hobby and your son’s expensive medical school tuition fees.
However, if you were to suggest to her that you are interested in trying to build a Chippendale armoire from plans you buy off the Internet, she would nod quietly.
Please understand that she does not think you have the skills to nail together boards, let alone put together a bookshelf.
She knows that this project will involve trips to the hardware store where you will need to buy expensive table saws, large, noisy and expensive bench top planers, routers and router bits, as well as clamps and power tools.
In the end, both the car or bike are cheaper options than converting your garage and buying enough tools for a small furniture factory. It may even mean that your son cannot go to medical school, but she would not put up much of a fight over the matter.
She is happy for you to spend hours on weekends and end up with a wonky cupboard because she knows that being a do it yourself (DIY) enthusiast is better than buying a sports car.
Much like the boy who becomes unattractive to the fairer sex, once the former get caught up in scale models, grown men will grow beards and wea unattractive clothes once they take up DIY. That means she has to worry less about her husband doing something stupid every time he walks out of the house and bump across anything that moves.
For hundreds of years, British women have perfectly trained their men to like sheds, and to this day, British men sometimes get misty eyed talking about sheds where they can tinker stuff. The shed is the ultimate women repellent.
It is an important defensive strategy for defending the British family institution, because foreign women, especially Americans and Singaporeans, find the English accent irresistible, even when there is an acne outbreak involved. And London is full of them.
Marcos Engineering was founded by Jem Marsh and Frank Costin. His brother is the Cos bit of British automotive engineering firm Cosworth, the other half being Keith Duckworth.
The name Cosworth is the perfect homage to the spirit of DIY, which, at a glance, has similar qualities with the preoccupation of nerdy teen boys and how they like to merge their names as possible band names, computer software name or something like that.
When I was a teen boy who had just caught the car bug, I spent my allowance on buying the Autocar magazine every week and when saving up for Road & Track and Car And Driver.
When I saw the name Marcos, I started thinking about how delicate the Filipino barong looks and I figured it has something to do with the fragility of the clothes’ pineapple leaf fibers.
My mind would drift to questions of why they decided to make life difficult by using the material and not cotton.
Images of the country’s former president, Ferdinand Marcos, and his wife, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, would jump into my mind and I would start wondering why anyone would need 500 pairs of shoes or whatever number of fancy footwear that she used to keep.
I would ponder on her beehive hair and why wealthy women like their hair to look like a protective helmet.
I never found the answers to them and other life questions.
Before I knew it, hours had passed and my friends were standing around me trying to resuscitate me with sugar water and biscuits.
The Marcos Mantula was a fantastic distraction. This is because Marcos and Costin, who loved sheds, combined their name which had the unfortunate outcome of having their company linked to the Philippine dictator.
And that’s how I write 900 words about the Marcos Mantula without ever mentioning anything useful about the car.
The Marcos was a Rover V8 powered Marcos GT and it was offered as a completed car by Marsh in his attempt to revive the company.
According to some reviewers, the Marcos was a proper man’s car because it had too much power and used oil drilling rig girders as its chassis.
Before driving the vehicle, Marcos owners used to prepare themselves by going to the gym and working their arms for weeks. Some even wore adult diapers, just in case.
The Marcos was outrageous. It is a fantastically overwrought and wonderfully British kit car, and in essence, it deserves to be a classic.
You know what? It almost is.
The Marcos deserves to be awarded the “Order of the Pineapple”, the highest order never bestown on foreign individuals by the Philippine government.
The kit car should get the award for its services to British families.