I too had that very book as a teenager. It's a small world - when I was at uni I was hired to build a website for someone. Their friend then asked me to build them a site and I recognised their name from the caption of a photo of a couple of schoolboys on the back page of that very book. Turns out they built the car at school and went on to build an automotive company.
Amazing, the author was a DT (design technology) teacher at a school just down the road from where I grew up. They would build these in a club at school.
