Ginetta G12 Petit

The Ginetta G12 Petit, known as the G12P, was a special bodied Ginetta G12 designed and built by Richard Petit, an American designer at the Ford headquarters in the United States. He was seconded to Ford in England in 1966, a few miles from the Ginetta factory, and chose the G12 as the basis for a project towards his Masters degree. Ginetta supplied a rolling chassis with a Lotus twin cam engine and Hewland transaxle, which went back to the United States. There Petit, helped by his cousin David Conley, a Ford clay modeller, produced a styled sports coupe from fifty separate mouldings over more than two years of after hours work. The Ginetta Owners Club says the moulds later reached the UK, where several replica bodies have since been made, and that the original G12P is now in Japan. The Ginetta Owners Club of Switzerland dates the car to 1967 and says very few were built.