Silk Purse From A Sow’s Ear WANTING TO COME OUT AND PLAY WITH THE BIG BOYS, BRYCE DECIDED TO BUILD HIMSELF A FALCON, AND HE MADE A BLOODY GOOD JOB OF IT WORDS: SHANE WISHNOWSKI PHOTOS: AARON MAI
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uring his formative years, Bryce Hogg’s dad Jonathan was busy building a Lotus 7 in the shed. Given Dad’s passion for building and racing circuit cars, it came as no surprise that Bryce and brother Gareth followed in his footsteps. Once the Lotus was finished, the driving duties were shared about, and Bryce got his first taste of going fast on a racetrack. He was instantly hooked, and the rest is history. The rapid open-topped Lotus wasn’t the only car to be built in the Hogg family’s sheds over the years. Two BMW track cars started their lives in family sheds: Dad’s is finished and racing, while brother Gareth’s is still a work in progress and, once finished, will join the grid and race alongside his family’s cars. But, long before their current builds, Bryce and Gareth found themselves behind the wheel of a Mazda MX-5 and raced in the MX-5 Cup winter and summer series. For eight years, Bryce was happy pedalling the small Japanese sports car around racetracks, but the desire to go a bit quicker was always at the back of his mind; he just needed to work out how he was going to make that happen. He acquired another MX-5 and began chopping it up, but quickly realised that the cost to build it to
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Auto Channel Issue #41 November 2021
have some real fun in wouldn’t be a cheap exercise, and the classes that he could run it competitively in were extremely thin. So the decision was made to build something a bit more masculine. “My dad and brother had built classic race cars, so I thought I’d join in the fun,” he says.
What he’d thought was going to be a relatively quick build was starting to look like a mission However, selling the MX-5 wasn’t an option, as there was a fair bit of sentimental value attached to it — Bryce proposed to fiancée Alice at the track during a test day; the claimed “gearbox issues” were just an excuse to stop racing so that he could pop the question. So, rather than park the car permanently, Alice found herself behind the wheel and has been a track regular since the end of lockdown in 2020. .
