Musician Oliver Baroni has his heart steeped in music and popular iconography. Half Italian, half English and the wayward son of an MGB-owning mother, he is often on inter-Continental tour at the wheel of one of his two beloved classics: his Frontline V8 and his 1966 Chevrolet Impala SS.
I bought the MGB project off the guy who had sold me my Impala coupe. He’d imported the B from California as a rust-free car and planned to put a Ford 302 V8 in it – a fairly common rebuild in the States. I took on the project but sadly his business failed and I ended up with the car barely touched. So then came the arduous task of finding a specialist to take it on. I scoured all of Europe and the UK and happily found Frontline – and there a whole new project was born.
I’m a great believer in a cultural mix. For me the best stuff always happens when different cultures meet and come together. From the Jimi Hendrix Experience to AC Cobras, fashion, music, architecture… And the original MGB fused Italian styling with the Rover V8 (nee Buick). So, my Frontline commission was to be a West Coast racer tribute car: a nod to the decades in which MGs were central to sports car racing in the US. But I also wanted it minimal: no boy racer fest of dials.
Part of that was colour. In the spirit of people like Donna Mae Mims and her ‘think pink’ MGB, we wanted to be bold, but tasteful. My girlfriend was vintage fashion expert and a keen interior designer and we worked closely with Frontline to get all the colours right. I didn’t want too flashy, and the interior needed to meld with the exterior. I wanted distinct and period, but in the spirit of psychedelia and the music of the time. So we went for period racing, rock 'n’ roll and cultural quirks.
A typical quirk is a clock that goes backwards. This because the clock in my Impala has - for reasons unbeknownst to me - always gone backwards. Thus, driving either car is like driving a time machine. And the leather-grip steering wheel, which is a period American speed shop item that came with the car. Frontline got all that. They understood me and the brief thoroughly.
The spec’ing was great fun. It took an immersive day at the Frontline factory. The roll-out took a while – inevitable with a bespoke commission like this – but working with Frontline was a lovely experience. They persuaded me away from a 302 and they fitted a short stroke 4.1-litre Range Rover Wildcat V8 instead. It is about 342 bhp and is hugely fast: as much as I could ever cope with. I love driving it and I drive it a lot – it’s been all over Europe. I love the car...
And I wouldn’t change a thing.
