When you’re doing a bunch of yardwork, there’s certain things you expect to find: roots, bits of rock, the remains of your neighbor’s Pomeranian you forgot to feed for a week and told them ran away, maybe some old bottles. What you don’t expect to find are the rusty remnants of a 1949 Daimler Consort, but that’s exactly what this British family found.
The Ward family lives on the island of Guernsey, and were digging up a rocky part of their yard when they hit something that sure sounded like metal.
At first they thought it was a tractor, because that just seems a more likely motorized vehicle to be buried in a yard than a stately British luxury automobile, which is what they found.
The car appears to be the remains of a 1949 Diamler Consort. According to the manufacturer’s plate found, it even had the “self changing gear box,” which would have been a Wilson pre-selector transmission. The Consort had a 2.5-liter inline-six making about 70 horsepower, though in its current condition its likely it would dyno a good bit less.
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The Consort was quite a classy car, far classier than what one normally finds buried in yards.
Nobody is exactly sure why the car was buried there, or even when it was buried, but the considerable state of the car’s decomposition suggests it’s been down there a very long time.
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Much of the chassis is still there, as is the long straight-six engine block.
It sort of looks like the cylinder head has been removed, suggesting that perhaps this was an in-progress project car that someone got frustrated with and disposed of in the most laborious manner imaginable.
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The family has not been able to contact the property’s original owners to figure out just what the hell was going on. Burying a car is a lot of work, and for a car like this, a pretty unlikely fate. There has to be a good story here, somehow.
Or, maybe this was just the result of some experimental Lucas anti-corrosion technique. I’d believe that, too.