AC 2 Litre Buckland open 4-seaters on show at Goodwood Revival. (photograph Eric Dymock)
From Sports Car Classics Vol 1 ebook £8.99 Paperback £15.00
Almost as though nothing much had happened since 1939, in 1945 AC Cars at Thames Ditton restarted remanufacturing the same sort of car as before. Its aluminium single overhead camshaft 1991cc wet-liner 6-cylinder, designed in 1919 by John Weller, had been shown at the London Motor Show following The First World War. The AC 2 Litre had half-elliptic leaf springs, a stout chassis and was largely hand-made using old machine tools. It was perhaps just as well the car-starved market after the Second War was not choosy.
It said a great deal for Weller’s engine it that it lasted so long. It remained in production until 1963 although the first rather lugubrious saloon in which it was installed could not remain long in the automotive mainstream. The headlamps were sunk into the wings and the radiator grille curled rearwards, otherwise there was little to distinguish it from 1930s counterparts. It held its own only so long as cars remained in short supply and by 1956 the markets returned to normal and it was no longer competitive.
AC had been essentially a sports car manufacturer so, with the 2-seater market once again in view, responded to an approach from John Tojeiro whose designs for sports-racing cars worked well in British amateur racing. His formula was simple, not to say simplistic, owing something in conception to BMW’s 328 of the 1930s. Tojeiro’s ladder-type frame was an H, with two 3in (7.6cm) diameter parallel tubes joined by a cross-tube in the middle and independent suspension on welded fabrications at both ends. The body style was cribbed, without much alteration and certainly no acknowledgement, from the contemporary Ferrari 166M Barchetta for the Tojeiro-Bristol commissioned for and raced successfully by Cliff Davis. The result was the AC Ace.
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Cliff Davis replaced a Cooper MG with LOY500, the prototype AC Ace. (photograph Eric Dymock)
It was a success at once. The frame was stiff, the handling spectacularly good for 1953 - it would still be commendable ten years later - and a coupe version, the Aceca was added in 1955. By a process of steady evolution an excellent, intuitive design improved. When disc brakes became available, they were included; this was not a preserved undeveloped design, although a top speed only just over 100mph (160.1kph) did not make the best of the exemplary road holding. As an alternative to the old 102bhp Weller engine, in 1958 in a further recognition to the 1935 ground-braking sports car, AC offered the Bristol (née BMW 328) 2 litre that Davis had used with 125bhp. This gave both Ace and its coupé development the Aceca well over 115mph (185kph), taking it into the connoisseur class.
The Ace-Bristol lasted until 1961. Bristol, perhaps unwisely, discontinued the engine and as an alternative AC offered a rather unsatisfactory modified Ford Zephyr pushrod of 170bhp. It had scant refinement, great weight and was unworthy of a hand-made premium priced, well-proportioned 2-seater. Its only virtue was to keep things going until something better turned up.
Help was at hand. Led by the colourful Texan Carroll Shelby the prototype AC Cobra of 1962 was basically an Ace chassis altered to accommodate a Ford V8 engine. It had stout wheel arches to cope with wider tyres coping with more than twice the horse power of the Ace Zephyr.
For sheer bravura, few cars could match a well-tuned Cobra. There were two models, one with a 4.2 or 4.7 litre V8; then from the middle of 1965 a 7 litre giving up to 345bhp in road trim and a top speed around 145mph (233.3kph). It could manage a standing quarter-mile in under 13sec.
Such performance made demands on the chassis so more changes were wrought. One of the first was rack and pinion steering. Up till then there had been a tendency of racks and pinions to lock-up inconveniently, so until that was curbed designs carried over from the 1930s often continued with steering drop-arms and drag links. The Cobra’s suspension was brought up to date as well, combined coil spring and dampers with wishbones replacing Tojeiro’s transverse leaf springs.
Carroll Shelby, at Laguna Seca 1989 Aston Martin celebrations. (photograph Eric Dymock)
Cobras went under a lot of names. Sometimes AC was dropped altogether and it was known as a Shelby Cobra, a Shelby American or sometimes a Ford Cobra. AC engaged Tojeiro again in 1958 to design a space-framed, de Dion axled car for racing. There was a stretched Cobra, for which Frua produced a lookalike Maserati Mistrale, calling it simply the 428. It was fast, around 140mph (225.3kph) stylish but not very successful. Only 86 were made, a survivor AC Cars’ exhibit for years at the London Motor Show long after production ceased. The design had really outgrown its proprietors, the staid deeply conservative rather dour Hurlocks, who had bought the company in 1930 and neither understood nor really quite approved of the cult status the Cobra achieved. It had not been what they had in mind at all. All that noise and speed was scarcely gentlemanly.
Determined to carry on however, help was required and somebody must have briefed the Hurlocks on polar moment of inertia. They felt obliged to make a mid-engined coupe, finding a one-off design exercise in 1972, drawn up by Robin Stables and Peter Bohanna. This Diablo had an Austin Maxi engine and transmission cleverly adapted to drive rear wheels instead of front. Athwart the frame, the overhead cam engine fitted neatly behind the seats of a compact if somewhat lumpish reinforced plastic body.
It took eight years to put on the road. The first oil crisis made the sports car market uncertain and development for production difficult. The Maxi engine proved unsuitable, so a 3 litre Ford Capri V6 was used instead with a 5-speed gearbox made by AC using Hewland gears. Just as the 3000ME, as it was known, reached the market the second oil crisis struck. Instead of the 40 or so cars a week that seemed possible at the beginning of the decade, AC made three in a good week. The project was wound up and rights to it were bought by a Scottish entrepreneur who, it turned out, could do no better.
AC Cobra Eric Dymock tested at 180mph for The Motor in 1963. Le Mans class-winner with Ninian Sanderson and Peter Bolton. (Photograph Eric Dymock 1990)