Alex Goffe owns one of the very few Zaporozhets 968s in the UK. Here I caught up with him on the IFA Club (wp.ifaclub.co.uk) stand at the 2022 NEC Practical Classics Restoration Show, where he told me all about his Zappo.
I have driven one of those cars. I used to work for the Satra Corporation, importers of Lada and Moskvitch cars, back in the seventies. There was a number of oddball Soviet built cars and other products around the site in East Yorkshire. You may not be aware there is a tenuous connection with Satra and Panther cars. Panther cars were based in Canada road off Oyster lane in Byfleet, which is where Satra had its original import centre for the Moskvich, which were originally imported by Thompson and Taylor at Cobham.
Ooh, I do like that. Seriously, I do. But perhaps my brain is just wired that way as my pair of daily driven old, weird cars are a gorgeous 1981 Wartburg 353 S and its companion, my even more lovely Auto Union 1000 Universal, a solid, beautifully original RHD 1959 example with a few cheeky wee upgrades such as a water pump and 12 volt electrics. I'm thinking that a Zaporozhets may be akin to a sort of scaled down Tatra 603 in some ways. I need one!😍😍😍😍😍 I'm holding the internet responsible if a Zaporozhets 968 appears on my drive one morning. Porsche 968, meh, not my bag thanks. And imagine what the 968's name would be worth on a Scrabble board, shame it's not allowed.🙂👍
These cars WERE a NSU copy with a V4. The soviets nixed the boxer engine and went with a V4 to get the cylinder heads off the ground to keep the dirt out while doing valve adjustments. 20 years ago they were quite common in Ukraine. They are now more of a cultural icon there like the Beetle is to the rest of the world. Like the Lada, which was a Fiat design, these were built under license. The Soviet motorcycles, Dneiper and Ural we're copies of a 1939 BMW, I don't think built under license, just stolen after WW2 and built till very recent times.
