Elfin is a little known sports car company – certainly outside of its home territory of Australia. The company was founded by Garrie Cooper in 1959. Cooper was a successful racing driver locally and decided to build his own racing cars from facilities in Adelaide.
Over the years he build around 250 pure racing machines for Formula Ford, Formula Vee, Sports racing and even Formula 2 and Formula 5000. Most of the cars were raced in the Southern Hemisphere and the company is credited with being the most successful Australian race car builder with 29 championships to its name.
Although Cooper died in 82, the company continued to build cars until it was acquired in 1998 by Nick Kovatch and Bill Hemming, both of whom were avid historic racing enthusiasts. They launched the Clubman Type 3 as a kit or rolling chassis and expanded into road cars.
Then in 2001, Mike Simcoe of Holden’s design group contacted the company. Simcoe had penned the last Monaro model and was a successful designer. He wanted to get involved and design a new car for them. So the company allowed Simcoe to draw up some sketches and as they liked what they saw they engineered a new chassis for the design. The original idea was to drop in a 1600cc 4 pot but Holden’s team suggested that with a little modification it could fit a V6 or V8. The V8 was chosen as the standard. So the MS8 and MS8 Streamliner were born.
2006 saw Elfin absorbed into Walkinshaw Performance, a conglomerate owned by Tom Walkinshaw who also owns HSV. Walkinshaw made his name by winning the precursor to the British Touring Car Championship and campaigning Jaguars in various categories including Le Mans.
In 2008 Elfin announced an all new car – to replace the MS8 – and the strategy is to make it suitable for a wider range of drivers (size wise) and to drop it into the Nissan 350Z price range. The current models are up around the Honda S2000 / low end Porsche and SLK price band. Despite being cheaper, the new car (called the “Type 5”) will still provide huge performance from a small lightweight body and a General Motors sourced 2 litre turbo unit.
Go to www.elfin.com.au to see the current models.
Last updated: 02 Jan 2010