1964 Jacques Coune MGB Berlinette model

Even among classic car enthusiasts the name of Belgian coachbuilder Jacques Coune is not nearly as well known as Ghia, Bertone or Pininfarina.

Writing on the occasion of Coune’s death, in 2012, Classic and Sports Car magazine defined him as: “a man who never gave up, did some lovely things, but never ‘made’ it.” Yet he deservedly has a place in MG history.

In the mid-1950s Jacques Coune ran a workshop in Brussels, where he built up a clientele consisting of owners of exclusive sports cars, and also ran agencies for Abarth and Iso. His ambition was to create his own designs and he constructed a coupé on an MGB chassis in 1963; in other words, earlier than the production MGB GT. The story goes that he met up with Alec Issigonis with a view to persuading BMC to put it into production but the design was rejected as it was ‘too Italian’ in style. This, no doubt, had been Coune’s intention, for the car has been described as ‘a baby Ferrari 275GT’ and, moreover, the craftsmen who built it in the Belgian workshop were mostly of Italian origin. In a vain attempt to keep costs down, some parts from other production cars were used; the front and rear screens, for instance, came from the Renault 8.