All about the Queen Manx
First, some background...
The Dune Buggy was first conceived by Bruce Meyers in California, in the early 60`s, having grown up surrounded by surfing, drag racing and hanging out on the beach. Bruce's first projects were small light weight catamarans and other fiberglass boats, including the well known California series which be worked on during the war.
Once back from the war, and back on the beach, Bruce became fascinated by dune buggies, but these machines were crude and heavy so Bruce took it upon himself to design a lightweight version that would be fun on the beach or in the wilds of Baja. After modifying a Kombi bus with wide rims (called "Little Red Riding Bus") Bruce used his expertise in boat building to design the first fiberglass bodied dune buggy.
Starting in 1964, the first twelve cars produced were monocoque bodies that had their own integral frame with VW engine and transmission (Bruce has restored and now drives "Old Red", the first of the Meyers Manx dune buggies). These cars were expensive and difficult to produce so Bruce re-designed the body to fit on a VW shortened floor pan. As a result, the Meyers Manx started the off-road revolution resulting in sales of 5,280 Manx kits followed by several hundred Manx II's - a total of nearly 6,000 Manx kits.
The performance of the Meyers Manx was amazing! It handled better than any other off-road vehicle and was much more fun to drive. The Manx won numerous slalom events and the Pike's Peak Hill Climb (beating Corvettes, Cobras, and most open wheel sprint cars). It set the record for traveling the length of Baja in 34 hours and 45 minutes (driven by Bruce and Ted Mangels) and beat the motorcycle record by more than five hours).
Click on the Manx logo for more Meyer's dune buggy history & photos...
The Thomas Crown buggy (Queen Manx) is born...
In 1967, after Steve McQueen won his favorite lead role as Thomas Crown in the original production of the United Artists film The Thomas Crown Affair, for which he earned $750,000, and apparently aware of how well the Manx dune buggy performed on the beach, decided he wanted to use a souped-up Manx buggy in the beach racing scenes with co-star Faye Dunaway (who bravely remained seated at his side), rather than a Jeep as the script called for. The film was released on June 18, 1968 and aside from the Academy Award-winning song "The Windmills of Your Mind", it helped further boost the dune buggy industry as all of the driving scenes and stunts were done by McQueen himself in the buggy he had customized, known as the Queen Manx (which indeed started out as a Meyers Manx kit purchased from B.F. Meyers & Co.).
Click on the movie poster to view the trailer, courtesy of New York Times
Note the mounted filming cameras in both of photos below taken at Crane Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts
McQueen contracted with Con-Ferr Manufacturing in Burbank, California to produce his Queen Manx and the conversion was finished in eight weeks and included:
● A 4-barrel 140 HP Corvair engine (since the Porsche engine he had originally specified was proclaimed to be too expensive)
● Engine adaptor made by Ted Trevor to mate the swing-axle VW transaxle (with a flipped ring & pinion) to the Corvair engine
● Special extra-wide rear wheels cast by American Racing that were produced to accommodate the Firestone racing tires from Andy Granatelli's STP Special (#40) turbine car (which almost won the 1967 Indy 500)
● Very unique headlamp scoops that accommodated the smaller 5¾" DOT approved 12-volt headlamps
● Marine-style windshield fabrication and rails
● Custom waffle stitched Naugahyde seats and interior trim by Tony Nancy using Datsun Fairlady seat frames
● Elongated side panels to eliminate the need for side pods; Bruce Meyers never incorporated this feature, since it prevented the bodies from being stackable
● A Con-Ferr nameplate on the hood replacing the Meyers Manx badge
One offshoot of all of this activity was the Meyers Manx-Vair, which were basically Corvair powered Meyers Manx buggies. Con-Ferr teamed up with B.F. Meyers & Co. in 1968 and produced the chassis for Manx-Vair kits, which had special body modifications to accommodate a complete Corvair rear end (engine, transaxle and suspension) and could be ordered for either Corvair (CC serial numbers) or VW (CV serial numbers) front suspension configurations.
Manx-Vair chassis
Con-Ferr subsequently produced one or two more Corvair powered replicas of the Queen Manx and, as evidenced in the brochure shown below, they did attempt to market their kits as well, pairing each modified Meyers Manx body with a chassis that was fabricated in-house, rather than with shortened "used" VW floor pans of unknown origin.
For those looking for information on incorporating Corvair power into
VWs,
check out these pages from Crown Manufacturing Company's
Catalog
#18.
Getting back to the Thomas Crown buggy, here is a quote from Steve McQueen...
"Crown Lives at the beach, and he has a Sand Dune Buggy. I helped them design it, so I'm kind of proud of that. What it is, it's set on a Volkswagen chassis, with great old wide weenies - big wide tires on it with mag wheels. Corvair engine stuffed in the back, and a semi reclining position, somewhat like my formula 1 car. It's very light, you know, I think we are around about 230 horses, and the vehicle weighs about 1000 pounds."
Queen Manx
interior shot from Hot Rod Yearbook #7
( note the cutting brakes)
Click on the image to view the entire article
Pete Condos, test driving the first
Queen Manx in the hills surrounding Burbank, prior to delivery to Steve
McQueen
McQueen and Faye Dunaway plowing into a flock of birds
ouch!!
courtesy of the First Steve McQueen site
Jon Harting reveals more details [clarified by Dan Adkins, based on feedback from Bruce Meyers]:
"I helped build the Queen Manx dune buggy that Steve drove in the Thomas Crown Affair. I worked as a mechanic at Con-Ferr Mfg. Co. from 1967 to 1968. It is gone now, but was at 300 N. Victory Boulevard in Burbank, CA. We manufactured 4-wheel drive accessories and sold new Toyota Land Cruisers with new Chevrolet engines. Somehow we were tasked by Pete Condos, the owner, to build this dune buggy. "
"I bought a 1966 Corvair engine from a wrecking yard and brought it back to the shop and steam cleaned it. We attached it to a VW transaxle that was in a VW chassis. The body was custom [
builtmodified] in our shop. I remember Steve coming by to look at its progress on two occasions. Both times he drove a red Maserati roadster. He was real nice to all of us there. After the movie came out, we built similar [probably Manx-Vair] dune buggies for Connie Stevens and Dick Smothers. Dick even came every day and watched us build his."
Click on the image below to view a great article by Tim Barton, courtesy of Kit Car Builder [April 2005]
Click on the image below to view more
archive photos by Tim Barton, from an unknown French magazine article
Note the date on the decal ~ 1967
Note camera mounted over the hood as
McQueen and Dunaway
prepare for a beach scene at Crane Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts
Great archive video clip of McQueen and his Queen Manx at Crane Beach during filming
Above photos, courtesy of MGM Studios
Movie Review by Rich Watts
An utterly stylish and compelling runaround heist movie, the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair finds Steve McQueen nonchalantly living up to his epithet as the “King of Cool.” McQueen plays a bored tycoon for whom careering about in a dune buggy, hand-gliding above an adoring female companion and riding horseback for a speedy game of polo are not enough. Instead, he becomes the mastermind behind a bank heist. Though not in need of the money, the adrenaline rush of the crime propels Thomas Crown through his otherwise “normal” life until insurance investigator Faye Dunaway turns up on the scene and compromises the scheme with romance.
The Thomas Crown Affair is a sumptuous movie, containing the kind of cinematography and attention to colour that Steven Soderbergh successfully acknowledged in Ocean’s 11 (and 12). From the start, as the striking lyrics of “Windmills Of Your Mind” introduce the credits, The Thomas Crown Affair exudes a confidence and class that immediately suggest a world centred around one individual—a man in control of the film’s every detail and every possible outcome.
Throughout The Thomas Crown Affair we also have split screen images which, amongst other functions, captures the pace and excitement of a heist, offering different perspectives as well as propelling the action from location to location. The technique encapsulates the excitement Thomas Crown himself must be experiencing whilst he plans his crimes and outwits the chasing police. The split screen also offers blurred frames, which represent the intrigue engendered by Crown’s actions: what motivates him is far from clear. Slowly, it is hoped, things will come into focus; in this case, hoping is all that can be done for the man at the centre remains an enigma throughout.
McQueen is recorded as having said: “In my own mind, I’m not sure that acting is something for a grown man to be doing.” Presumably, driving fast cars and flying aeroplanes were more the activities he had in mind for grown men to be concentrating on. As Thomas Crown, McQueen followed the playboy lifestyle on-screen many in the audience suspected he actually lived. Debonair, handsome and exceptionally cool, Thomas Crown epitomised the alpha-male, the kind of man that can make—of all things—a game of chess a fine technique in seduction.
It is fitting, of course, that under the supervision of Die Hard director John McTiernan, Pierce Brosnan took over the role of Thomas Crown for the superior 1999 remake. For what better individual could fill the boots of a charming playboy than the man who had already filled the boots of the ultimate charming playboy, James Bond? The only difference between the two being that 007 was the Good Guy. Yet Crown is hardly a criminal; indeed, one suspects the men in any audience wouldn’t mind being Thomas Crown whilst the women, to continue the saying, wouldn’t mind being with him. Whichever the preference, it is a fair reflection of the super cool hero that was Steve McQueen.
Click to see a slide show of Queen Manx scenes on the beach
Click to proceed to the Hunter Dune Buggy
Add this site to Your Favorites
click to join the "Thomas Crown" Dune Buggy Fan Club
