When the Avro Arrow program was cancelled in February 1959, many of the engineers were rendered jobless. Ross Ferguson, found himself looking not only for work, but for a project into which he could channel his untapped ingenuity.

He found the former at Northern Secondary, teaching machine shop to tenth-graders; and the latter in a sports car he’d already started building from scratch.

As it turns out, a lot of the skills Ferguson honed as a machinist developing tooling for the planes could be directly transferred into the design and fabrication of a Le Mans-inspired homebuilt roadster. 

He had planned this build for almost a decade, but in 1959, its construction began in earnest. Eight years later, in 1967, the garage of their little bungalow in Downsview had parked in it a car unlike any other.

The windshield is a Vauxhall rear window flipped around, but the bubble-style side screens are Plexiglas, heated up in the family oven and formed by his wife standing on the molds. (The headlight covers, which carry the body lines through their length, were similarly molded.)

He ordered the Fairlane-spec K-code 289 a 271-hp unit with a four-barrel carburetor, date-coded May 1967 – from the manufacturer in the U.S., via a Canadian dealer. Or at least, he tried to.

 “The first two engines didn’t make it across the border—they were stolen, because these engines were so sought-after,” explains his daughter Lesley. Fed up with Ford’s failed deliveries, Ross eventually crossed into the States after work one evening to pick up the third V8 himself.

Then one day in 1967, the eight-year-long project was complete, the Ferguson Super Sport, resplendent in its metallic green, sharing space in the driveway with Ross’ new 1967 Ford Mustang. It wouldn’t be long, however, before this rolling testament to one man’s ingenuity would be hidden away.

Ross continued to occasionally drive the Ferguson, but by ’69, he’d resolved to take advantage of changes to Canadian aviation regulations and pursue the pilot’s license that his use of eyeglasses had kept him from his entire life. 

By the mid-’70s, the workshop behind the Ferguson house was being used for its intended purpose—a space for Ross to build his own airplane.

The Super Sport was basically abandoned. 

“It would sit on blocks, and then it rusted out,” says Lesley. Maintenance on a one-off car isn’t easy, so a thousand little fixes piled up until after the plane was finished in 1983. “He pulled it out of the garage, and after over a decade, it was a mess,” she recounts. “He had to strip the car down, the seats had to be redone, the engine had to be overhauled.”

The restoration was but a brief reprieve for the Super Sport. In 1988, perhaps nostalgic for his work on the Avro Arrow’s turbojets at Orenda, Ross got the itch to engineer a warbird from scratch—a two-thirds-scale replica of a Second-World-War-era Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane, powered by a Buick-Rover automobile V8.

 That is to say the Super Sport was neglected yet again until the Spitfire saw its first flight in 2003, save for a second refurbishing in the late ‘90s. The one-time head-turner was became a dusty relic mired in myth.

It found a new owner in 2020 after Ross died

https://driving.ca/feature/the-ferguson-super-sport-was-a-homemade-sports-car-built-from-the-avro-arrows-ashes

Thank you Terry!