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

A trucking good Easter

For most people, Easter Sunday is a time of rest and relaxation. Not for me though as I headed to Jacks Hill Cafe near Towcester for their annual Vintage Truck Gathering. Having never been before, I was expecting a small event featuring a couple of dozen vehicles, but was amazed to discover around a hundred trucks in attendance, covering all eras from pre-war to the early 21st century, along with a lot of motorbikes and a handful of classic cars and light commercials. The event started at 9am and I arrived around 11 to find cars parked all along the verges and the place teeming with people and vehicles.

Trucks everywhere as a Ford Transcontinental squeezes out

A futile Quest

Quest 80 and the U-drive

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the failures of the motoring world so much more fascinating than the successes. So much has already been written about the most celebrated and popular vehicles that there is nothing new to add, but those that failed to make an impact are far more worthy of study and raise so many interesting questions. Why did they fail? Could they have succeeded under different circumstances? And in some cases, what the hell were they thinking?! Today's subject tends to fall in the latter category: unsurprisingly you may never have heard of Quest 80 buses and coaches as they went out of business more than thirty years ago after building just a handful of vehicles, but their claim to fame (or should that be infamy?) was a notoriously cumbersome and inefficient drivetrain that frankly defied engineering logic. Read on to find out more about this strange and forgotten manufacturer and their range of blunderbuses.