Oliver Pickard's Project Mosquito Is An Incredible Machine Six Years In The Making

There is a very tall and strangely accented man building a very small 1960s supercar from scratch in a very old barn in rural France. His name is Oliver Pickard, and the car he calls his Pickard Mosquito GTM. Starting with the scrambled remnants of a weird fiberglass sports car ready for the scrap heap, Pickard has spent the last six years carefully measuring, designing, learning, and developing his own sports car, and with something like 100 hours of video across 170 episodes, it has been a thrilling watch. 

The car is nearing completion, if any car project can ever be considered complete, but with the bodywork really just now starting in earnest, I would be willing to wager it'll take at least another year to complete. The best time to start watching Oli build this mad miniature monster was with the first episode in July of 2020, but the second best time to start is right now. It's truly fascinating to watch every piece of this car get dismantled, reengineered, and built from scratch. It's a bit like Project Binky if those guys actually put episodes out regularly. Head over to his channel to check it out and get lost in your new obsession!

That's why we're taking it upon ourselves to highlight some of our favorite underrated builders in a new series we're calling Wrenchers You Should Know. Not only do some of these people deserve way more views than they're getting, but they're typically the Do It Yourselfer type, rather than the big corporate-sponsored four-figure-horsepower slop that's dominating your feeds. In each installment we'll introduce you to a cool new builder, talk about some of their work, and give you a few reasons why you should be watching their progress. Here we go, it's Oliver Pickard time! 

When this haphazard little collection of car parts on a half-assed cut apart chassis first rolled into the Pickard barn shop, I was already hooked on the concept. The idea even then was to home-build a lightweight and effective sports car. Oliver didn't yet know what drivetrain he wanted to use, or where the suspension would come from, or even its dimensions. It's fair to say that this project has snowballed a little bit since the beginning. I distinctly remember, in the early days, recommending the car get a tiny turbocharged rotary mated to a front-drive transmission mounted behind the driver. He didn't take my advice, and instead decided to go with a Honda K20. Probably the better choice, I admit. 

All these years later and the car has become much wider than before, features Mazda Miata suspension, a custom tube frame, lots of motorsport-inspired custom parts, and the aforementioned Honda transaxle drivetrain. With a proper roll cage and lots of bracing, not to mention bigger and wider wheels and tires and a much more stout suspension, Mosquito will probably end up a bit heavier than the car it's based on, but still significantly lighter than any modern sports car. It's more or less an Ariel Atom with a fiberglass body popped on top, so I'd be extremely surprised if it's a kilogram over 1,000. The Cox GTM this car is ostensibly based on weighed just over 600 kilos when new, so honestly even 800kg would be a stretch. 

Taking inspiration from some of the most beautiful swoopy Italian racing and road cars of the era, Pickard is next going to tackle the bodywork to get it looking right. The wheels are wider than the arches, but rather than just tack on some fender flares and call it good, he's going to cut apart and re-do the entire body to make it a cohesive design. I'm not sure if any of the original parts that rolled into the barn in 2020 will still be on the car when it rolls out again. 

According to Total Kit Car, the Cox GTM Coupe was cobbled together in 1967 by a small car garage in Cheshire, and claims to have been the first mid-engine kit car ever built. The kit was super inexpensive at just 330 British Pounds Sterling (around 5,300 pounds in today's money), and used original Mini suspension and drivetrain parts swapped around for motivation. If you were looking for a quick, dirty, and frugal way to make your Mini go quite a bit quicker and look more exotic, this wouldn't have been a bad move. GTM, as it goes, stands for Grand Touring Mini. 

Only about 700 kits have been produced across the years by a half dozen different going concerns. Apparently you can still, to this day, buy new GTM bodywork and chassis components from whoever happens to have the rights to produce them at the moment. 

These kit cars ended up difficult to assemble, because of the wildly variable quality standards of glassfibre reinforced plastics manufacture. Perhaps because of that, they never really took off in the way that some of the Volkswagen-based cars did. Or perhaps because handling was never really the problem with the already lightweight BMC Mini, and moving the engine to the back didn't change the fact that it was powered by an anemic Austin A-series. 

I will admit, I really like this car. It's a good looker, it's tiny and lightweight, and even a frugal person with a good wrench hand could built it. Given the work involved in stripping the car down to its component parts and starting over with a mid-engine platform, however, I probably would have gone for the much more popular and successful (though admittedly much uglier) Mini Marcos rebody, which retained the front-engine design. 

Does a guy building his own weird British/Japanese hybrid sports car in the French countryside also drive an interesting car in his everyday life? How about a pair of Citroën? Between the incredibly quirky 2CV and the even quirkier Dyane, Oli's got them in spades. 

I've been watching this channel since the beginning, and have found Mr. Pickard to be an easy and relaxing watch. Tuning in to this channel is like having a sleepy mid-summer Sunday afternoon cup of tea described to you in a book. It's just so calm and relaxing. There's no all-caps "What's up YouTube?" or Mister Beast-style thumbnails. It's just a smart guy working on a couple of weird little cars, and that's that. Isn't that why we watch videos on YouTube anyway? Maybe you'll learn a thing or two, and you'll get to relax a little. Throw it on and enjoy, you're in for a treat.

And if you get through this car project series and decide you want more of Oli and his family, check out the Pickard Home sister channel. I particularly loved his videos on the installation of a full 21-panel solar system on the roof of his old disused stone masonry barn. The videos don't come quite as often on this channel, but when a big project crops up on the farm, the family Pickard grabs the tools and hops to work in the same methodical fashion. Give them a watch, you probably won't regret it. 

If you have suggestions for some lesser known builders on social media, please feel free to drop them in the comments section as well. I'm always on the lookout for folks out there doing cool stuff. It doesn't have to be just cars, either. While I'm well apprised of the car and motorcycles building scenes, I'd love to get deep into the nitty gritty of some more niche topics. Do you follow some cool folks building snowmobiles, jet skis, or DIY fighter jets or something? I want to know about it.

And yes, you're welcome to do some self promotion in the comments as well. Let everyone know where they can follow your build and what you're up to. If it's unique or good, we'll feature it on the blogs.