The world's fastest MGB

In 1968, a Queensland doctor and a pharmacy student built a race car under a Brisbane house in six weeks. British Leyland's own competition department later called it the fastest production-sports MGB in the world. This is the Super Bee, and it's one of the great lost stories of Australian motorsport.

Dr Iain Corness had visited the MG factory at Abingdon the year before, meeting works driver Bill Nicholson and returning to Australia with a suitcase full of Stage 6 competition internals — steel crank, oversize forged pistons, high-lift cam. He and co-builder John Campbell shoehorned it all into a fire-damaged MGB shell, fitted fibreglass panels, reverse gull-wing doors, and a single-piece Perspex windscreen, and turned up at Lakeside Raceway. The car was immediately quick.

British Leyland noticed. In 1970, Corness was recruited into the factory-backed Young Lions team. The car was repainted in BL blue and white and renamed Super Bee II. Then things got truly wild. Engineer Col Vaughan conceived a DOHC conversion using an MGA Twin Cam head on the B-Series block. Ivan Tighe made it work — solving misaligned oil galleries, welding ruptured water jackets, and fabricating a crankshaft drive for the overhead cams. The pistons were custom-made by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in Port Melbourne. With dual 45mm Webers and Repco-Brabham cam grinds, the Super Bee III made around 200 horsepower at 15:1 compression.

It set a 61-second lap record at Lakeside that stood for eight years — eventually broken only when class regulations expanded to 3.0 litres, letting Alan Hamilton's Porsche in. Corness's wife Carole had co-driven the earlier versions and competed at Bathurst, but the Super Bee III's power was beyond what she could physically manage.

The car was retired in 1972 when MGB production ended in Australia. Corness sold the shell two years later but kept the Twin Cam engine. In 2008, Queensland enthusiast Ian Rogers found and restored the car to its 1970 Super Bee II specification. It still competes in Historic racing today — more than fifty years after it was built under a house in Brisbane.