This is the 1966 Volkswagen Radcliffe Green Beach, it’s a British dune buggy from famous automotive sculptor Benedict Radcliffe, and if it looks familiar that may be because we featured its orange-sister buggy on Silodrome a couple of weeks ago.
This buggy, named Green Beach, is by far the quicker of the two, it has a high performance engine and a Freeway Flyer transmission that means it has no problem at all keeping up with modern highway traffic.
This buggy, named Green Beach, is by far the quicker of the two that were made, it has a high performance engine and a Freeway Flyer transmission that means it has no problem at all keeping up with modern highway traffic.
History Speedrun: Benedict Radcliffe
Benedict Radcliffe is a British artist and fabricator whose signature work is a full-scale “wireframe” sculpture series of everyday objects and, most famously, cars reduced to their essential lines in steel. Radcliffe’s work looks like a three-dimensional drawing – they’re technical, precise, 1:1 scale, and usually very brightly colored.
Radcliffe studied at Glasgow’s Mackintosh School, then leaned hard into making things with his own hands as much as designing. Early on, he worked in commercial fabrication including interiors and furniture alongside sculpture, and his pieces are typically jig-built, welded, and finished more like engineering prototypes than traditional sculptures.
Perhaps his most important early project was a personal exhibition piece titled Modern Japanese Classic, it was a 1:1 wireframe Subaru Impreza P1 made shortly after he graduated in Glasgow. This piece set the template for much of what followed – automotive icons rendered in steel rod (or tube), then painted or powdercoated so they pop against their backgrounds.
Over time Radcliffe’s work has won him global recognition, and it now includes subjects like a London taxi (a Heathrow Terminal 2 commission), and the aforementioned Lamborghini Countach, Ferrari F40, Lancia Stratos HF, Porsche 934, and even a full-scale excavator.
His process is always hands-on – technical drawings and photos are distilled into a set of lines, then cut, bent, welded, and finished. Radcliffe’s sculptures have now been displayed at some of the world’s most prominent galleries and museums, and many pieces have been sold into major private collections.
The donor car was a 1966 Beetle, it was converted into a tubular-chassis beach buggy in 1975, when British buggy conversions were at their peak. Radcliffe bought it five years ago, and rebuilt it into the car you see here today – with an eye-catching green and yellow paint scheme.
The 1966 Volkswagen Radcliffe Green Beach Shown Here
Most Volkswagen beach buggies run a lightly warmed flat-four on a shortened Beetle floorpan under a fiberglass shell, a layout pioneered by the legendary Bruce Meyers with his Meyers Manx. This one has neither. It’s powered by a 2.4 liter flat-four with a high-performance crankcase, and it has no bodywork at all, well except for the exposed tube chassis – painted vivid green and left in plain view.
This buggy is one of a matched pair rebuilt by the London artist, sculptor, designer, and fabricator Benedict Radcliffe, and it’s the faster of the two.
The donor car was a 1966 Beetle, it was converted into a tubular-chassis beach buggy in 1975, when British buggy conversions were at their peak. Radcliffe bought it five years ago, and rebuilt it into the car you see here today – with an eye-catching green and yellow paint scheme.
The most interesting part of this buggy sits in the back – the flat-four is built around a Autolinea race case is machined for 94mm cylinders and runs an 86mm counterweighted crankshaft on steel-backed main bearings, with 5.4 inch I-beam connecting rods.
It’s worth pausing here for a moment because those bore x stroke dimensions give a displacement of roughly 2.4 liters, but the current listing for the buggy lists the engine displacement as 1.7 liters while also giving that same bore x stroke.
Drive goes through a 4-speed “Freeway Flyer” gearbox – the usual swap for making a Beetle transaxle livable at highway speed, with upgraded internals, a taller final drive, heavy-duty side plates and a hydraulic clutch conversion.
This engine discrepancy is likely to be a typo, which happens to the best of us, possibly as 1.7 liters might have been the original displacement for the VW that this buggy is based on – and the registration documents were never updated to reflect the new displacement. Though this is just conjecture on my part and would need to be confirmed.
The camshaft is an Engle FK8 running 30mm followers, the heads are CB Performance Panchito big-valve units, and the valvetrain uses 1.4:1 rockers on bolt-up shafts. Induction through a pair of 44 IDF carburetors on CSP bell crank linkage, with a Co-Built Super Competition exhaust poking out the other end.
This engine is fitted with a 32mm oil pump with a full-flow cover and it has an external filter. Behind the engine sit a lightened 8-dowel flywheel and a Kennedy Stage 2 clutch, and ignition is via a Pertronix billet distributor with 8mm leads.
Drive goes through a 4-speed “Freeway Flyer” gearbox – the usual swap for making a Beetle transaxle livable at highway speed, with upgraded internals, a taller final drive, heavy-duty side plates and a hydraulic clutch conversion.
The front suspension is a standard Beetle ball-joint beam with coilover shock absorbers. The rear is independent, with adjustable spring plates. It rides on 16-inch Fuchs-style split-rim alloys built by Voodoo Elie, wearing Toyo tires. Inside there are black Porsche RSR-style seats, a three-spoke steering wheel, and a period-style speedometer with a separate tachometer beside it.
The two buggies were shown together in Italy at the a Nautilus event, held on the grounds of the Jules Verne-inspired Motel Nautilus at the invitation of Federico Fabbri of Motoring Attitude. The green car appeared more recently on the EMPI stand at Classics at the Clubhouse. It shows 31,152 miles, and it’s exempt from UK MOT testing and ULEZ charges on age.
The most interesting part of this buggy sits in the back – the flat-four is built around a Autolinea race case is machined for 94mm cylinders and runs an 86mm counterweighted crankshaft on steel-backed main bearings, with 5.4 inch I-beam connecting rods.
Its sibling is the orange one, a 1961 Beetle converted to a tube-chassis buggy around 1979 and rebuilt by Radcliffe at the same time. That car runs a largely standard 1.3 liter flat-four, US-imported Scheel-Mann front seats in black leather, and chrome mag wheels on BFGoodrich Radial T/As. It’s the relaxed one of the pair. It was sold a couple of weeks ago and we wrote about it here.
Radcliffe’s Green Beach Buggy is now being offered for sale out of London in the UK and you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of Car & Classic
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
