The Quest continues

More about Quest 80

I haven't had much time for blogging lately as the show season is now in full swing. Last Sunday I was back at Gaydon for the truck show, but I'm not going to do a full review this time as it was the same deal as the last two years. My star of the show last year was B.R. Whorton's near-unique Quest 80 tipper, and this time they went one better and had both of them in attendance. That meant what is probably the world's entire population of Quest lorries were in one place, and a chat with the gentleman looking after them for the weekend revealed some more information so I can add extra detail to my original piece about Quest 80.

Every Quest lorry in existence in one photo

The other Quest, registered WNT 502Y, has a much longer wheelbase than its tipper-bodied sister D166 FHA but started out even longer when it was built as a dropside, as Brian Whorton cut off much of the rear overhang and fitted a box body for delivering carpets. The excess weight of the chassis would be less of an issue with these bulky but relatively light loads, so unlike the tipper this one actually had a fairly decent working life of nine years, which is about average for a truck. The body was removed a long time ago and is now used for storage in the yard, and the chassis needs a large concrete block permanently chained to the back to balance out the weight of the cab and stop it faceplanting!

Very scruffy but still saveable

Both Quests are now in a fairly sorry state after decades stored outdoors, with faded paint, missing parts and rusty chassis, but they appear ro be runners and are definitely still saveable. It seems Mr Whorton may have finally been persuaded to restore them in the near future, or at least move them into covered storage before they deteriorate further. WNT appears to be in worse condition than FHA, probably because the latter saw hardly any use, and at one point its custodian leaned on the rear light bracket and broke it off as it was so rotten! I can't think of any other lorries more deserving of preservation than this unique pair and they always attract massive amounts of attention, so hopefully they will get the care they need before it's too late and will one day be restored to their former glory.

A Matador flanked by a very odd pair

It has been suggested that not a single one of the 700 trucks ordered for assembly in South Africa was ever actually built, and there have been no reports of any operating in that country. I have my doubts whether Quest were even capable of building such a large quantity, given that they produced less than 70 bus and coach chassis in three years. The chap from Whortons did suggest one may have been exported to China but this seems a bit unlikely as it would have been the only left-hand drive vehicle they ever made. The number sold in the UK is now said to be just three rather than five, which along with an extra cab that also ended up with Whortons was almost certainly the entire production of trucks by Quest 80. I really do have to question the sanity of Quest's management, who were presented with this appalling design and signed it off for production.

The bumper on FHA is from a Mercedes and replaced the damaged original

Another reason for the slow sales of the J-type, overlooked in the original article, was that Jonckheere's UK importer who had commissioned this model, Roeselare Coach Sales of Northampton, coincidentally also went out of business around the same time as Quest 80 themselves. Construction ceased immediately, leaving a number of vehicles in various states of completion in the hands of the administrators, which were ultimately acquired by Jonckheere's own in-house UK dealership set up as a result of Roeselare's collapse. The J-type project was abandoned as the chassis manufacturer was already defunct by that time, and the complete vehicles eventually found buyers but the bare chassis were never bodied by Jonckheere and were sold off, ending up in Cyprus.

Many J-types remained unsold for two or three years thanks to the collapse of both chassis manufacturer and supplier

The origin of the five extra VM chassis given to Excelsior still remains a mystery. I have no proof but my theory is that they were built speculatively in anticipation of a repeat order from Excelsior that never came, although Whortons' spare truck cab was supposedly originally fitted to one of these chassis so this one was presumably used as a testbed. It seems there were no repeat orders at all as not one of Quest's many customers ever went back for any more after receiving their first delivery, which in most cases consisted of just one or two vehicles, so that says a lot about the quality of the products. The list of PSV chassis available on buslistsontheweb.co.uk containes a large number of gaps in the chassis numbering sequence. This suggests that numbers were perhaps allocated when the order was received and these missing numbers all belonged to cancelled orders that were never built.

Excelsior only ordered 20 VMs so where did those other five chassis come from?

Even with the extra information I have gleaned since writing my original article, Quest 80 remains a very enigmatic manufacturer. There is still a lot of misinformation and unanswered questions, and it has been more than three decades since the company disappeared without trace so the full story will probably never be known. Over the years I have been very fortunate to see and photograph most of the Quest products still in existence: the sole surviving VM, possibly the only J-type and now both of the trucks. I hope the pieces I have written here go some way towards preserving the memory of this disastrous manufacturer, and provide a warning from history as much as anything else!