
For the first time since The Beast saw the light of day in 1972, the family of its creator John Dodd has put it up for auction on Car & Classic with the bid window closing on 16 March 2023 at 22h30.
As of the time of writing, the 27-litre, one-of-one amalgamation has racked up 43 bids with the leading offer standing at £64,500 (R1,421,000).
Once named the most powerful car in the world, and the survivor of many court cases initiated by the company that built its engine, the oblong Beast has a rich history and it was driven by Dodd until the day he passed in 2022 at the tender age of 90.
A brief history of The Beast
According to The Beast’s auction listing, the car started life in 1966 as a bespoke rolling chassis with no shell, and Dodd was, in fact, not the original owner.
This honour was Paul Jameson’s, who built the chassis himself using box-section steel with the front suspension pulled from a Wolseley and the rear from a Jaguar.
Jameson also bolted a 27-litre, V12, Rolls-Royce Meteor engine to the frame that came directly from a tank, and this is where his path crossed with Dodd’s.
Dodd was a transmission specialist and was tasked with building a gearbox for The Beast, however, before he was finished, Jameson decided to sell the un-bodied, non-running vehicle to Dodd instead.
Shortly thereafter, the naked foundation was sent to a body shop to get a new skin made and, because its engine was from a Rolls-Royce, it also saw fitment of the marque’s legendary Pantheon grille.
When all was said and done, the Frankensteinian creation was given the name The Beast.
Dodd and The Beast regularly traveled from their home in Britain to other countries, though on one faithful trip back after attending a motor show in Sweden, misfortune struck and the first iteration of the vehicle was wrecked in a fire.
The dark cloud had a silver lining, though, as Dodd decided he would improve the original rather than retire it.
Again, he sourced a mammoth 27-litre, V12, Rolls-Royce Merlin engine but this time it came from a Spitfire fighter plane, and that became the powerplant that’s still in use to this day.
It still had a Rolls-Royce grille, too, which the automaker itself, unfortunately, had an issue with.
Rolls-Royce launched a court case to have Dodd remove the famous fixture from his non-Rolls car but instead of complying with the huge company’s demands, Dodd simply emigrated to Spain and took The Beast with him.
A few years later the law sadly caught up with him, and begrudgingly he had to change the grille to what it is today.
Still, despite the ups and downs, The Beast’s official registration papers in the UK (yes, it actually has those) still have it listed as a Rolls and it’s still road legal.
How much power does The Beast make?
The Beast is an utterly bespoke creation and was never formally subjected to testing on a dyno.
The original motor as it was installed in the Spitfire plane had a supercharger on top and made an easy 1,119kW.
There was no space for forced induction in the road-legal Beast, and the car is therefore speculated to produce anywhere between 560kW to 708kW, with an estimated 1,030Nm of torque on tap.
The massive power is delivered to the rear axle only via a three-speed automatic transmission that was personally adapted for use in The Beast by Dodd, and in 1973 after receiving the new driveline, the 2.25-tonne car clocked an officially-verified top-speed run of 295km/h.
Since then, the original Jaguar running components have been swopped out for a heavy-duty Currie rear axle from the US of A that can handle the grunt a bit better than the 50-year-old dampers, and the suspension was linked and tied into the chassis for improved handling.
The vehicle was heavily used over the years to travel all across Europe and the UK, and during its lifetime, the current configuration has racked up over 17,000km on public roads.
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