Background
Frank Costin made his name helping to develop one of the most effective military aircraft of the Second World War, the de Havilland Mosquito. Built from wood to avoid the metal shortages besieging Britain at the time, it was so fast it didn’t actually need any defensive armaments, as nothing could catch it.
After the war Costin formed a new company in 1959 with fellow engineer, Jem Marsh, the two men using the first three letters of their surnames to come up with the name – Marcos.
Costin is now remembered as one of the most influential engineers of the era, and with Marcos he applied lessons he learned while working on the plywood Mosquito fighter/bomber.
The men developed a 386 part plywood chassis for the new car that was bonded together to form a complex, rigid, and lightweight three dimensional shape. The car was fitted with a glassfibre body, a four-cylinder Volvo B18 Amazon engine with an overdrive gearbox, independent front suspension, and a De Dion rear end.
The original Marcos prototype had been nicknamed The Flying Splinter, the same nickname used for the Mosquito during the war. Later Marcos cars would share this nickname and despite people’s reservations about a car with a plywood chassis, it proved highly competitive in the British club racing scene.
The Marcos GT was first introduced as the Marcos 1800 in 1964, with a wooden chassis and a Volvo P1800 engine. Later models had a steel chassis and commonly Ford engines although others were also available. The majority were sold in kit form.
The car was out of production from 1972 until 1981, when small scale kit production recommenced. The original GT continued to be built until 1990, being developed into its altered Mantula form. This was further developed into more powerful and aggressively-styled designs, culminating in the 1994 LM600 (which competed in the 1995 Le Mans 24-hour race).
Plywood was relatively cheap, but it required significant man-hours to bond it all together, and as a result the company soon developed a welded steel box section chassis and made some changes to the internal body structure to match.
These new steel-chassis Marcos GTs were introduced later in the 1960s and most the surviving cars are fitted with it, resulting in the earlier plywood chassis cars now being highly sought after by collectors.
