HOUSE OF GEMS
Inside ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ motor museum with 54-inch microcar & bizarre amphibious vehicle that’s an hour away for Brits
One miniature model in the collection appeared twice on national TV
THIS is the 'Aladdin's Cave' of a motor museum, featuring a 54-inch microcar and a bizarre amphibious vehicle.
The 'weird and wonderful' site is only an hour away from many of the UK's major cities.
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Boasting over 500 of the most unusual and admired vehicles from throughout automotive history, the Isle of Man Motor Museum is a mecca for petrolheads.
The museum, which opened in 2015, is the product of three decades of careful curation, with the collection lovingly put together by Denies Cunningham and his son Darren.
Darren told : "We like to have cars in our collection that visitors will not have seen anywhere else, and to offer that to everyone there has to be a really wide variety."
And that it does, with the exhibits including motors from some of the biggest manufacturers out there and some rare classics, as well as many brands you might not ever have heard of before.
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Limited edition cars from Peugeot, Citroen, Ford and Ferrari all feature.
The museum, which is on the doorstep of the world-famous course of the island's TT motorcycle race, houses everything from an ultra-rare Ferrari 612 Scaglietti to a 1955 Ford Thunderbird.
But it's some of the more obscure and, frankly, whacky machines that catch the eye.
These include a prototype DeLorean DMC-12, the model made famous by 1985's Back To The Future, as well as the unusual 1970s three-wheeler the Bond Bug and a 1929 La France fire engine.
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There are even a pair of limited-run amphibious cars, the Gibbs Aquada and Amphicar 770, designed to run on both land and water.
Amphicar even managed to build 4,000 770s, so named because they could manage 7mph on the water and 70mph on solid ground, between 1960 and 1965.
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Sadly, amphibious cars never really took off and only a handful of the bizarre machines remain.
Perhaps the centrepiece of the collection, though, is the Peel P50, one of the island's most beloved motoring exports.
Built by a Manx company and named for its second-largest town, the P50 made its debut in 1962.
It is, admittedly, a very tiny centrepiece, measuring just 54 inches long and 39 inches wide, making it one of the smallest cars to be road-legal in the world.
Jeremy Clarkson, who lived on the island for a time, even reviewed the P50 in series 10 of Top Gear, hilariously driving it through the BBC's offices and was even caught in the background of a live news broadcast.
The car was originally discontinued in 1965 but was revived by a pair of businessmen in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, in 2011 after they won funding for the project on Dragon's Den.
The company still produces replicas of the original P50 to this day.
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The good news for motor-mad Brits is that the Isle of Man is just an hour's flight away from major cities including London, Manchester and Birmingham, so you can go and take in the Cunninghams' collection for yourself.
It comes after we gave fans a glimpse inside Aquaman and Baywatch star Jason Momoa's priceless motorcycle collection - including a £28,000 electric Harley
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