Colin Chapman's Lotus Seven set the template for the British home-built sports car: strip everything out, chase lightness, hand the driver the road unfiltered. The 1970 Autre Moss Monaco prepa Wilcox now offered in Beausoleil, a short climb from the harbour it takes its name from, comes out of that same kit-car culture but chases something else entirely. Where Chapman's car was an argument about engineering, the Moss is an exercise in costume: a fibreglass evocation of a 1950s front-engined Grand Prix machine, cigar body and cycle fenders, built to look like a Maserati 250F rather than see one off at the first corner.
What Cowperthwaite actually built
The facts are less romantic than the advert. The Moss Motor Company was founded in Sheffield in 1981 by John Cowperthwaite, who produced cars and kits under the Moss name. He drew the whole range himself, and the Monaco was the primitive one, a homage to 50s specials, a GRP shell first sat on Triumph Herald, Vitesse or Spitfire underpinnings and later on a bespoke ladder chassis that took Ford parts. Several hundred were built and many survive, kept going by an active owners' club. The marque itself is long gone, which is one thing the seller has right. The Stirling Moss provenance is where the story unravels. Specialist British kit-car sources treat the Monaco name as, at best, a nominal tribute, with no capital, industrial or sporting link to Sir Stirling Moss documented, meaning the French-language articles casting him as creator or backer are simply wrong.
Drive one and it does what the recipe promises: feather-light, direct, loud, entirely honest about what it is. This example's heart is the good bit. It runs a Wilcox-tuned Ford Crossflow of around 1340cc on twin 40 DCOE Webers, the classic fast-road specification these specials wore when built properly. The listing adds partial leather, a removable steering wheel, fresh seals, period-reissue tyres, and French registration with FFVE papers, the paperwork that matters here more than any romantic backstory.
Before any of that seduces you, the checks are specific. Fibreglass of this vintage crazes and stress-cracks, and because these were self-assembled the build quality swings wildly from car to car, so the shell and the fit deserve real scrutiny. Underneath, the Triumph-derived running gear brings the usual worries: trunnion wear on the vertical links, tired swing-axle geometry at the rear, and corrosion in the chassis outriggers. On the engine, confirm carburettor synchronisation and oil pressure on that hot Crossflow, and treat the "1970" registration and the "one of only 20 factory cars" claim as things to prove on paper, not to take on trust.
About that asking price
A tidy Caterham, the Seven's direct heir, occupies a well-understood market band, and even the best Moss specials generally change hands somewhere between the low thousands and the low tens of thousands. Seventy thousand euros sits far above that, and it rests almost entirely on a Stirling Moss legend the marque's own history doesn't support. Bought as what it actually is, a charming, honest, period pastiche with a lovely little twin-Weber engine, this could be a genuine pleasure. Bought as the legend, you are paying grand-tourer money for a Triumph in fancy dress. Either way, a competent mechanical inspection, a forensic look at the build file, and an independent check of how the car is registered should all come before a euro moves. The Seven earned its myth on the circuit; this one, it seems, borrowed a name at the harbour bar.
