John Nash is a founding member of the Kent Kit Car Club and a car builder by passion.
We first met John at the 2024 Heritage Transport Show in Detling, while attending the event as a member of the club. Most of the cars were sitting outside on the green, including the Cobra. John’s car was inside the building.
I was making photographs of some of the cars when I got to John’s. His car stood out and immediately got my attention, but so did John’s friendliness and patience in answering my questions about it. That was my first contact with him.
Since then, I left the club and rejoined again. Initially, I joined for insurance purposes — being part of a car club offered a 15% discount on the historic vehicle’s premium. But I was also interested in the possibility of socialising with other car enthusiasts and, mainly, getting some advice when it came to solving mechanical problems with the Cobra. The reality was that work commitments left me with little or no time to attend the club’s activities, and I ended up leaving.
Time passed, and I am now developing the PIAFEIRA Touring Cap, inspired by solving the problem of driving an open car while wearing a cap — and improving the driving experience. As part of the development of the cap, we created the Run Trials, where drivers test our prototypes independently and come back to us with their findings.
We approached the Kent Kit Car Club by email, presented the Touring Cap and asked if they would like to participate and suggest one of their members to do a Run Trial.
The club suggested John Nash.
And John Nash has delivered.
John enters the PIAFEIRA archive through a natural connection — the Cobra led to the club and, at a different moment, the Cobra led to the Touring Cap. Both led to John Nash.
But let’s step back for a minute and look at John and his car.
Before building the JNS Special, John completed an engineering apprenticeship and worked producing technical drawings for the Central Electricity Generating Board, later illustrating operations manuals at Dungeness power station.
The JNS Special took five years, around 7,000 hours and £5,750 to complete. It began with a pair of Renault 5s, one of them a Gordini Turbo, bought for £200. John designed and fabricated much of the finished car himself, making the moulds and fibreglass body panels and adapting components from wherever they did the job.
The JNS Special is a beautiful car, inspired by the pre- and early post-war Grand Prix era, and has even been mistaken for an Alfa Romeo Tipo 159 “Alfetta”. John drives his car everywhere, if the weather is good he will be out and about. He has driven the JNS Special to Le Mans and back with no issues.
John’s background in drawing, engineering and understanding how things work is visible not only in the car he built for himself, but also in his commitment to our Run Trial and the quality of his feedback. He clearly understood our project and gave us so much that we are still processing what he delivered.
John drives a car with practically no windscreen, so he immediately recognised the problem. Long before we approached him, John had already tried to solve the same problem himself, by making holes in ordinary caps and attaching a cord.
John has kindly offered to donate one of what we like to call the Touring Cap “primitives” — a Kent Kit Car Club merchandise cap with a string running through the eyelets to hold the cap under his chin while driving.
We met John again at Kent’s Classic Car Show, at The Friars, with the intention of collecting the Touring Cap prototype after a month of testing.
John’s commitment and contribution have become important to PIAFEIRA. There is something in the way John approaches making that we recognise in our own work: things begin with use. A problem is encountered and understood, something is made or changed to solve it, then used again — and that use is allowed to change the solution.
The JNS Special came from that way of thinking. So did John’s improvised caps. The Touring Cap began in much the same way, from driving the Cobra and trying to solve a problem that came with it.
During the Run Trial, John also showed us movements we were not expecting. Rather than undoing the buckle, he showed us how he could simply slide the Touring Cap’s chinstrap over his chin. He also folded the “primitive” caps in three before putting them away, small enough to fit into a pocket or the side compartment of the car.
These were things we had not asked him to test. They came from using the objects.
These are some of the reasons we agreed that John will continue to test the Touring Cap for an indeterminate period, continuing Run Trial 002 and, hopefully, bringing new findings about our design.
The prototype was supposed to come back with us that day.
John kept it.
