Twice as Nice

John ‘JohnO’ Oakley was already re-living his youth in fine style with a concours GT, but he couldn’t resist adding to the fleet by masterminding the restoration of this stunning 1970 example.

- Jeff Ruggles

Anyone who’s owned more than a couple of cars will have a clear favourite. Some will still be lucky enough to own theirs, but for the rest of us it’s a case of the one that got away. For John ‘JohnO’ Oakley, that car was a Blaze 1971 1275 GT wearing Dunlop D1 alloys, owned in the late ‘70s and used to ferry a teenage JohnO and his fellow rugby playing mates all over the country.

JohnO was and still is a keen biker, and spotted the GT by chance. “I went into a motorcycle shop to see my mate who was a mechanic, and in the back of the yard was a lichen-covered orange GT with Dunlop D1 wheels,” he recalls. “To cut a long story short, I bought it for £600. That was a lot, but the engine had been Cooper-ised and it flew. We went everywhere in it; I’d often have some big units with me, centre-halves, props, goalkeepers and all sorts, and it never let me down.”

Sadly, the GT was written off in 1979. JohnO was at home minding his own business with his folks, when a guy who’d had a Christmas Eve skin full in the pub ploughed his errant maroon Daimler into the Mini and wrote it off. “Before that I had a Minivan, called Snowy because it was white and had the registration ‘SNO’, but I don’t know where that went, and an Aqua 998 Clubman before the van,” JohnO remembers. “I must have been mad because I always stuck with the BMC brand. My first car was an Austin 1100 that when I took to see an old girlfriend, it blew up en route...”

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