WELSH RARE BIT

I’ve been in the motoring publishing world for almost 25 years and I thought I had a fairly wide general knowledge about the market; I’m certainly not an expert on every car, but I thought I knew a bit about most of them. Or not, as it turned out, because I’d never even heard of this car before lining it up for a feature.

It’s a MkI Gilbern Invader. Gilbern Sports Cars was formed in Wales by Giles Smith (Gil) and Bernard Friese (Bern) back in 1959. They started production with the Gilbern GT, followed by the Genie and then the Invaders in MkI, II and III guises. Car production ceased in 1974. Only 78 of the MkI Invaders were ever manufactured between 1969 and the start of 1971, so in my defence this car is pretty rare. Only three of those were automatics, and this is one of them, so it is in fact not just pretty rare, but extremely rare – and that’s my excuse for not having heard