“It was imported into our hometown of Warsaw, Ind., by Stanley ‘Whacky’ Arnold,” laughs Green. “That was his name. He would actually import Bristols, MGs and other cars and sell them in our hometown and also Chicago back in the day.
It is a bit tight rowing thorough the gears, but it is manageable.
“My father bought it in 1964. There are only five we know of here in the United States, and there’s only 15 of that style, the convertible, that we know of worldwide. I’ve got a second one of them in the garage at home that I am restoring, so I own 40 percent of them here in the States! [laughs]… My dad traded an Econoline van and cash and the guy gave him this back. He just liked it … I have no clue [what he planned to do with it]. At the time my dad was a manager at KFC, and their building was painted red and white-striped, and the car was painted red and white-striped with the Colonel on the door … I’ve got pictures of it, too. It was the KFC-mobile. That was up on the East Lansing campus, Michigan State.”
Given that so few were produced during an ever-changing production run and unstable company ownership history, it’s no surprise that Friskys in the United States were not easy to keep running. The local NAPA store was a little thin on Friskysport parts, and your best bet to get some mechanical work done was either learn it yourself, of find an adventurous motorcycle mechanic with time on his hands.

And so, while Green and his dad did their best, their little machine spent plenty of time out of commission over the years. “The clutch went out of it back in I’d say the early ‘70s, so it sat until 1980 when I pulled it out of the garage and took the engine out,” Green recalled. “It’s a motorcycle engine, so I tried gluing cork back onto the disc. We got it running for a while. But the float had holes in it, and you can’t find a float for the carburetor because it’s a Villars motorcycle engine built in England. I had it running again for a while, then the clutch went bad again and it basically sat in the garage until the Internet came along and we were able to find more information on what we needed to do to it.”
The 324cc, two-cylinder, two-cycle engine that powers the Friskysport.
Green gives much of the credit for the condition of his Frisky these day to John Meadows, the grandson of company founder Henry Meadows. John has become the unofficial custodian of the company’s history and set up the Frisky Register to keep track of the surviving cars and help owners network.
“He’s got about all the data on them that you could ask for,” Green says. “He sent me stuff on what to make for it and how to build it, and I also made parts and sold them back to him.”
“In 2015 we actually went over to the national microcar rally in England and stayed with [him] and had a great time over there. They treated us like royalty. It was a fun trip.”

A GRAND LITTLE PLAN

The Meadows Frisky could just as easily wound up named the “Flower Frisky” if history had been only slightly different. It was Captain Raymond Flower, a race car driver and head of the Cairo Motor Co. in Egypt, that originally hatched the idea for the car. He had hoped to produce a tiny commuter a car in Egypt, but the pieces never fell into place and Flower eventually turned to Henry Meadows Ltd., a supplier of car and marine engines and parts in the U.K.

A prototype vehicle called “The Bug” was built in 1956 at the Meadows plant. It had room for two, four wheels, a fiberglass body, gull-wing doors and a two-cylinder 250cc Villars motorcycle engine. The car was chain-driven and featured a narrow stance in the back end and Dynastart reversing system “where you shut the engine off, push the key in and there is a reversing solenoid that will change the power from one set of points and coils to the other side so it will run backwards and go in reverse,” explained Green.
The Vignale coachbuilding company of Turin, Italy, was tabbed to produce the bodies for the cars, but before they could ever deliver anything more than a pair of test bodies a major design switch scrapped the gull-wing doors in favor of rear-opening (i.e. “suicide”) traditionally hinged doors.

The whole corporate backstory gets a little hazy and complicated from there. In 1957, Henry Meadlows Ltd. was the official parent company of the Frisky brand, but a year later the Flower Group headed by Raymond Flower acquired controlling interest. A year after that, Henry Meadows was bought out by the Marsten Group of companies and the brand was renamed Frisky Cars Ltd. That same year a hardtop coupe was added to the Friskysport convertible and two other models, the Family Three and Frisky Sprint, were also announced. The Family Three was similar to the existing two models, but with just a single wheel in back. The Friskysprint was planned as a lightweight racing/sports car that could top 90 mph. Alas, nothing more than a prototype of the Sprint ever materialized.
The ownership juggling act continued in 1959 when another owner, C.J. Wright, took over operations. The change coincided with the debut of the Frisky Family Three Mk2 model, followed by the Frisky Prince, another three-wheel model. By 1960, the Frisky brand had seemingly used up all its lives and disappeared for good, but not before it blessed the collector car hobby with a small fleet of tiny machines that have found a loyal following of fans.

The Friskysport that wound up in the Greens’ driveway was one of a small number of left-hand-drive cars that were imported into the U.S. It carried a 324cc, two-cylinder, two-cycle engine with a steel tubular chassis and roller chain transmission. The cars were reportedly capable of squeezing 60 miles out of a gallon of gas and could hit 65 mph if the driver kept his foot to the floor long enough. A vinyl top provided minimal protection from the elements.
Not surprisingly, the Friskys never caught on in the U.S. They had their share of design and execution flaws — including a fuel tank corrosion problem. Mostly, though, they were just the wrong car at the wrong time for the U.S. market. Americans were not thirsting for tiny three-wheeled motorcycle-type vehicles when there were rivers of chrome, high-rise tail fins and big, powerful V-8 engines to be had.