Have You Ever Heard Of – The Towns Hustler?

The Mini perhaps deserves a little bit of sympathy from the world around it. There aren’t many cars more prone to being refitted or kitted out to the extreme, often to results that range from the glorious to the egregious. Which slot the Hustler fits into is surely a matter of taste. With a shape similar to a poorly cut block of cheddar, a mass of bronze-tinted glasswork and a subframe built of two Minis, it was about as wedgy and straight-edged as it got. Indeed, the car was designed to be simple enough to assemble in developing economies, so almost every plate and panel was folded rather than pressed.

Me, personally…not a fan. I like my cars curvy and soft-featured rather than looking like they could slice through a pedestrian if the angle and velocity were just so, but if I’d have been around on launch I’d have been in the extreme minority because the moment William Towns premiered his origami vision, it was lauded. Simple, easy to assemble, easy to customise, and offered in just about the barest of bones, it was a low-slung, eminently customisable kit car that could cut it with the best of them—and perhaps that’s what the modern eye misses.

The fact is that Mr. Towns had a remarkable understanding of brutalist lines and effortlessly chic angles that just smashed through the zeitgeist (leaving a particularly square hole, no doubt) and demanded attention. One of his best-known projects is the Aston Martin DBS of ‘67, which already felt remarkably sharp-faced and muscular compared to its predecessors, but this was only a gentle taste of the man’s talents – no, far larger, bolder, dare we say ridiculous cars were due.

The Minissima

In ‘72, he designed the infamous and fearlessly futuristic Minissima, a concept to replace the Mini for British Leyland, which was… something. Then he designed the equally futuristic, almost DeLorean-baiting Series 2 Lagonda for Aston Martin, which is now often regarded as one of the ugliest cars ever to leave the marque’s production lines, as well as one of the most expensive and technically troublesome—harsh, if not understandable.

Aston’s esoteric Lagonda

Not to be outdone, he then got to work on the ridiculously sci-fi-centric Microdot…

Microdot

And suddenly the Hustler really does make sense.

It seems that above all else, William Towns was an ardent futurist, experimenting with what a car might look like in the future painted by EPCOT. Almost every single one of his projects seemed to carry that theme of trying to break free of old design language and try something sharper in every sense of the word, and do you know, it’s with the Hustler that he achieved it.

Compared to many other kit cars of the period, the Hustler felt modern, and refined, perhaps even erring on the sophisticated. The well-to-do were as eager to get their hands on them as the bloke in his garage with a little extra change in his pocket from the sale of his dad’s battered old Jag. Point is that the Hustler was big.

William Towns and his Interstyl studio soon embarked upon making the Hustler one of the most varied platforms in motoring. In came the unglamorously named ‘Hobo’ pickup, a beach car, a flatbed truck, a camper, and even a six-wheeler – which, rather than extending the wheelbase, gained an entire set of wheels and a longer rear bay via bolting another sub-frame to the cavalcade. A sort of funeral parade of Mini carcasses with a big, hollow doorstop on top.

As interior demands grew, so did the Hustler’s ambitions. Soon the cars were carrying overhead consoles like they’d been raiding Boeing’s back catalogue, leather-trimmed facias, and eventually, the ‘Hustler in Wood’ premiered. This was arguably the most ‘80s thing to ever exist. Premiering at the 1980 British Motor Show, this car looked ten times more luxurious, ten times more like a vintage bit of marine hardware, and no longer had to be shipped with body panels – indeed, the concept was mostly focused on customers with basic joinery skills making their own choice of wood grades and finishes at their cheapest DIY store.

Suddenly, the Hustler was as difficult to assemble as a garden shed or a barbecue, and it looked rather classy – if still undeniably brutalist – doing what it did best – rationalising, simplifying and enabling more wood-be (har-har) tinkerers to get stuck into this odd, angular world.

Things only became more bonkers though. In came the open-top off-road Hellcat, an eight-wheeler Amphibious car, and work was even undergoing on a Ford Cortina-based round-snouted design. 1985 saw the Highlander 6, an absolute lump of insanity powered by the 5.3-litre Jaguar V12. Apparently, it only saw 8 sales, no doubt due to customers valuing their lives too highly to get immersed in a 12-cylinder pile of plywood.

The Hustler story came to an end in 1989, when Towns embarked upon the ill-fated Railton F28 and F29 – which, as you’d come to expect, looked utterly bizarre, with slab-sided facades and big, flat overhangs. Ultimately, how does one look back at Bill Towns and his age of increasingly odd stylings? We think, even if we consider the majority of them to be unpleasantly angular, it’s impossible not to respect his adherence to his own policies – even if the only place they ever seemed to truly take hold was in a pair of bolted mini subframes with a fibreglass shell.

The Hustler came from an age when kit-cars were at their peak, and they carved out a respectable little niche for themselves. As to whether that niche still survives? Who knows. We can’t say we’re particularly clamouring to pick one up, but your mileage may vary. Different strokes and all that…