Rare Pooper makes first Goodwood appearance since 1998 | Goodwood Revival

This American-made Anglo-German combination proved a successful recipe; when the one-time US Porsche importer was unable to procure a Porsche 550 Spyder, they built a Pooper and quickly started beating the 550s. Porsche quickly supplied a car on the proviso they stopped racing the Cooper.

Of the four known cars, two are based on Formula 3 chassis and two are Bobtails, like this one. Cameron Healey owns one of each, and has been racing the former in the States for 21 consecutive seasons, making him the man with the greatest seat time in such a machine.

His experience with the Bobtail car, which he keeps in the UK, is rather more limited. He has completed one test day at Brands Hatch and, prior to the 2024 Revival, had driven it around an industrial estate. A wet Goodwood Motor Circuit would mark his competition debut in the car in the Madgwick Cup, where he finished 14^th.

Cameron is a Porsche man through and through, and bought his first Pooper after racing against another. “I was already racing an early ’50s Porsche 356 in the mid ’90s and Denny Acre was out there with this red Pooper. I’d watch him lap me driving it almost two tyres to around corners and I said, ‘Wow that is the coolest’.”

It would take until September 2001 before he was able to finally drive the car for himself, and the Pooper that appeared at Revival was a more recent purchase for Cameron. He bought it in need of restoration and took it to Essex-based Pro Porsche Classics for the work.

“It was in a semi-restored state when we got it,” says restorer Andy Prill. “It’d been to Germany and the people who were doing it didn’t do their homework. Coopers have asymmetric chassis and that [didn’t] really compute with [them]. So there were a few things they’d done that had to be corrected.”

With the chassis squared and bodywork restored and painted, Pro Porsche Classics also attended to the car mechanically, barring the engine rebuild which was subbed out to a German company.

While Revival is Cameron’s first competitive outing with this car, Andy has driven it here before. He came to the 76^th Members’ Meeting in 2018, which was the year it snowed. “I’ve never been more scared in my life,” says Andy.

The car has 182PS (134kW), “but it weighs nothing. In first, third or fifth it would still spin the wheels. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in a racing car when we went out for the warm up lap in the slush and you could actually follow the wheel tracks left by the car ahead.” Thankfully, there was only rain to contend with at this year’s Revival.

Cameron takes up the story of this car’s history: “This one was owned by the Dupont family. A woman named Kip Kelso Bowden had a horse racing team and a motoring racing team. She was talked into buying a Cooper T39 Bobtail with a Climax engine that had raced in Sebring 12 Hours in 1956 and ‘57.” In 1958, the mechanics acquired the four-cam Porsche engine and gearbox and converted the Cooper. It had a lot more power and it became a Pooper at that point.

“It was campaigned in all the East Coast races in that era of the late ’50s and early ’60s and had a number of notable drivers including a guy named Bruce Jennings, who was a famous American privateer known as King Carrera. He was national champion for two or three years in SCCA [Sports Car Club of America] with a four-cam Speedster and also then went on to race a 911, but he was hired to drive this car.”

Lex Dupont, the cousin of Kip Kelso Bowden, was another driver, and a former World War II pilot also had the car for a time, earning numerous wins with it. The car then moved to South Africa before switching to continental Europe and finally ending up in the UK, making an appearance at the 1998 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Cameron eventually bought the car in 2010 and that’s when the aforementioned restoration began.

The longer you chat with Cameron, the more his passion for these cars shines through. He had been hoping for a dry track to get a real feel for the Pooper’s dynamics, but that didn’t transpire. Regardless, he summed up: “I’m having fun no matter what.”

Photography by Nick Wilkinson.