Historical anomaly

Speculation again over Jaguar reviving Daimler. Cars UK says the Chinese prefer something three-boxier than the XJ. Mandarins apparently like to sit in the back and the XJ rear is too cosy. Makes sense. Jaguar acquired Daimler in 1951 on being forbidden to extend its old factory at Foleshill, leased Browns Lane a wartime shadow factory still making Ferret armoured cars, so the move occupied most of 1951. This is me on the turret of 8 (Alma) Field Battery Royal Artillery's Ferret some time ago.

Daimler was an historical anomaly. Set up in England in 1893 by FR Simms to develop designs by Gottlieb Daimler, its Coventry Radford factory made Panhards based on Daimler’s patents, so British and German Daimler companies had little in common except Gottlieb Daimler as a director until 1898. After the Prince of Wales bought one in 1900, British-made Daimlers remained the choice of royals for the best part of half a century, despite the smokiness of Knight sleeve-valve engines. The Knight licence and overreaching itself financially were Daimler’s downfall and in 1910 it had to be rescued by Birmingham Small Arms (BSA), among whose directors was F Dudley Docker. One of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sponsors (an upturned lifeboat named after him housed the expedition’s survivors), Docker’s interests ranged from firearms and motorcycles to railway rolling stock.

Daimlers of the 1930s were staid and not very fast but easy to drive, thanks to Wilson pre-selector gearboxes. Post-1945 the Conquest Century gave a good account of itself in saloon car races, a tribute to chassis engineering rather than power. The royal connection foundered following BSA chairman Dudley’s son Sir Bernard’s behaviour, and the gaudiness of Lady Docker’s limousines (Golden Zabra below) at Earls Court Motor Shows of the 1950s. The last straw was plastic-bodied SP250 sports cars of the 1960s, with a V8 designed by Edward Turner of Triumph motorcycles. He nearly developed an association with William Lyons in 1942, but the cars were not very good and renounced after the Jaguar takeover. Only the V8 engine survived.

Daimler independent production ended in 1968, lingering as Daimler versions of Jaguar saloons until the 1990s. Only the splendid DS420 limousine, based on a stretched Mark X remained, styled like the Docker Daimlers and a 1950s Empress Hooper. (Saloon below)

Browns Lane was given over to making Jaguars, the Radford factory survived until the 1990s but now both are gone and Jaguar is at another ex-wartime shadow factory, Castle Bromwich. Set up alongside an aerodrome by Morris Motors’ Nuffield Group in 1936 it made Spitfires and Lancasters. Control was quickly passed to Vickers-Armstrong and after the war it was taken over by Fisher and Ludlow, bombed-out of its own factory in Coventry. As Pressed Steel Fisher it became part of British Leyland, making bodies for Jaguar, which took it over completely in 1977. The aluminium XK is made there and it wouldn’t take much to make it a bit more upright, with a crinkly grille and a woody interior to match anything coming out of Stuttgart. The Chinese like their Deutsches Daimlers, so there is every reason to suppose they would take with equal enthusiasm to latter-day Dockery Daimlers.

Skoda Octavia

You can’t get away from class. We were a Wolseley family. The Vanden Plas Princess and the Armstrong Siddeley came later. We slipped downmarket with the Austin Sixteen in which I passed my driving test, but that was bought in 1948 or so, when cars were hard to come by. It was replaced by a Wolseley Six-Eighty. Not a notable success; its single ohc was unhappy with teenage over-revving but it looked classy with an upright radiator and wood facia. Wasn’t up to next-door’s Rover 14 maybe, but it was better than Austins, which were, by and large, bought by people who believed the Dependable slogan and were NQOC. Austins weren’t stylish but they were well made. Father was in steel and his metallurgist chums said Longbridge was fussy about the steel it was buying for gearboxes. He found that convincing.

Austin, Armstrong Siddeley, Vanden Plas and Wolseley; all, alas, gone. Yet class distinctions in cars remain. When I was road testing it helped make up your mind about cars once you had identified likely buyers - easy with BMWs. People who bought BMWs buyers got other BMW owners (like me) a bad name. Racy and aggressive they demanded cars that were fast and handled well. BMW buyers were fusspots so you set the road-holding bar higher for BMWs.

Ford buyers – difficult to avoid stereotyping. They were always cost-conscious high-mileage reps. Jaguar buyers went for style, refinement and prestige. They are no longer the same as the Jaguar buyers of our Wolseley years – Jaguars then were much too, well flashy really, like Uncle Bob, who had had Vauxhalls and then a black Jaguar with huge headlights and too much, so my mother thought, voluptuous curves and showy chrome.

Hyundai and Kia buyers now are connoisseurs of the long-distance warranty and born-again Austin buyers, looking for good metallurgy and unpretentious quality, buy Skodas. Dependable, regular, no nonsense solid worth, Skoda’s styling is derivative but the customers want it like that. Nothing radical; good proportions are more important than pretendy avant garde.

Skodas look modest just like Austins looked modest. They were styled by the unlikely Dick Burzi. Born in Buenos Aires, Ricardo Burzi joined Lancia in the 1920s. “Styling” was only beginning and he augmented his income drawing cartoons for newspapers, only to get into trouble for drawing some of the emerging Duce, Benito Mussolini. You couldn’t do that in Italy and Burzi had to flee.

Fortunately Vincenzo Lancia chanced to meet Herbert Austin on a liner, recommended him, and so the Italian-Argentinian joined Longbridge in 1929. His reponse to challenges proved variable. He was partly responsible for the splendid 1940s Sheerline and Princess, based on chief executive Leonard Lord’s Bentley, but he made 1945 Austins look like 1930s Chevrolets. His big solo effort, under instructions from Lord, was the ill-starred Austin A90 Atlantic.

Skoda (Octavia press launch above - my BMW behind) has avoided such flights of fancy. It knows its place, unlike the flagship VW Passat, which has got longer and sleeker. The cards in the Skoda pack have been shuffled, taking the Octavia a bit up-market and making it bigger, to accommodate the Rapid in a lower slot. Octavia is on VW’s MQB platform along with the Audi A3, Seat León and Mark 7 Golf and is temptingly priced at around £20,000, unless you specify lots of bells and whistles. It rides, handles and drives well. It isn’t fast, 11.5sec to 60mph, it is quite economical at about 45mpg without being super-frugal and qualifies as thoroughly worthy. Not faint praise for those old solid sensible dependable Austin customers.

Pedestrian Passengers


So, patsy hacks have tested the Jaguar F-type from the passenger’s seat. It really won't do. Jaguar’s step-by-step PR will be successful because there is so much interest in the car. Giles Smith of The Sunday Times and Jamie Merrill of the Independent on Sunday could scarcely say no to the invitation. “Come to the Gaydon test track,” it trilled, “you can look and ride in but not drive.” I had invitations to be driven by show-off test drivers and invariably turned them down. Sometimes a manufacturer didn’t want to risk a bad report. Sometimes it only had the one car. I would not imagine this applies at Jaguar. It just wants to raise awareness while production gets (maybe slowly) under way.


I went to the Gaydon test track in 1968 for British Leyland tests, principally for the Austin 3 Litre and the MGC. The Austin felt designed by the truck division, even though its code-name ADO61 made out it had come from the Austin Drawing Office. It rolled and wallowed on corners and was ungainly, badly proportioned and clumsy. Cash strapped Leyland couldn’t afford a fresh set of doors so it used those of the 1800. In fact almost the entire centre section was ADO17 except for a huge transmission tunnel. ADO17 was transverse-engined and front wheel drive. ADO61 had a 3 litre C-series 7-bearing engine in-line under the long bonnet, driving the rear wheels. It had independent suspension with trailing arms at the back and Hydrolastic interconnected springing. Self-levelling pressurised by an engine-driven pump added to the complication.


Poor Raymond Baxter, who had taken over as director of motoring publicity, had an impossible job. Lugubrious was all you could call it. BL introduced a Morris 1300 Mk2 and some Mini options at the same event, as well as the MGC. This suffered, like the 2 Litre and most BL creations of the time from understeer which, as the late Jeff Daniels who crops up in several of my pictures described it, “of a most determined kind”. I re-tested an outgoing MGC later, modified by University Motors, from which a lot of the understeer had been banished and it was not at all a bad car.


Neither the MG, billed as a replacement for the big Austin-Healey, not the Austin 3 Litre survived long. Symptomatic of BL indecision, the Austin was designed with twin headlamps, but pre-production focus groups thought the car so ugly they were replaced by the rectangular ones in my pictures. By the time production began the twins were reinstated. Three years and 10,100 cars later the awful Austin was quietly dropped, unmourned. A smart test driver at Gaydon might have been able to disguise the understeer. I drove it and was able to warn readers in time.


Passing fancy


Last Lexus LFA, Jaguar won’t make the C-X75. What’s happening? It’s the end of dreamland for supercars, that’s what. Let’s see how many Ferrari Enzos, McLaren P1s and Porsche 918s they sell if these go ahead. There’s nothing wrong with the cars and there are still people with half a million quid or so to buy them. We’ve seen it all before in difficult times, like the fuel crises of the 1970s when driving luxury gas guzzlers was embarrassing. It’s like managing directors turning up in limos to make half the workforce redundant. It’s a phase. The stupid 200mph things will come back.

Jaguar said it would not build the C-X75 supercar (right) because of, “global economic pressures.” And now Lexus has made the final 4.9litre V10 (below). Last week a white LFA with what was known as a Nürburgring Package left Motomachi, marking the end of production. Chief engineer, Haruhiko Tanahashi lamented, “I’ve lived and breathed supercars for the past decade, specifically the LFA. Very few people have the opportunity we had, to create a world-class supercar from a blank sheet of paper.” Some 170 hand-picked workers made about one car per working day for two years.

Jaguar said it would build 250 C-X75s, selling at £900,000 each, but, "After a thorough re-assessment of near-term market conditions, the company's view is that the global economic landscape does not currently support the introduction of a supercar.” Common sense really. Jaguar thought it might get away with it by adding a bit of greenery. Announced as a concept at the 2010 Paris auto show with four electric in-wheel motors, it had two micro turbine engines. The turbines were dropped and the car converted to being a plug-in hybrid, with a 1.6litre petrol engine. It still claimed over 200mph with a low fuel consumption and CO2 emissions below 99g/km. Maybe not all at the same time. Jaguar formed a partnership with Williams Formula 1 to develop a carbon fibre chassis, hybrid technology and aerodynamics to keep it from flying off.

Realism will out. Lexus says, “Learning from LFA engineering will directly influence new Lexus products. Production knowledge of carbon fibre components will be applied to future Lexus vehicles.” Adrian Hallmark of Jaguar said the technology showcased in the C-X75 wouldn't be dropped. "We have achieved an incredible amount and will continue to test and develop these technologies, which are highly relevant to Jaguar Land Rover's sustainable future".

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.

Poor Adrian Hallmark.

The Jaguar brand director introduced the F-type in Paris against the backdrop of an E-type. Not good. Shows it is impossible to make any car as graceful ever again. Good proportions are incompatible with regulation bumper heights, crush zones, and using as much of an existing platform as you can. Beside an E the F is dumpy and blunt.
I’m sure it will be great to drive, but it is probably just as well I don’t have 55K spare to replace my ageing BMW. I would save myself 10K and buy a Porsche Boxster.
The basic V6 F-type will start at £55,000. The V8 much more. But a 3.4 Boxster S is £45,384 and weighs 1655kg (3648lb). A lot of the Jaguar is aluminium, like the V8 XK at 1635kg (3604.5lb), so they have taken 35cm off the length and 13cm from the wheelbase to lighten it a bit yet it is still 10cm longer than the Porsche. The F-type will have, “A joystick-shaped SportShift selector controlling the eight-speed transmission.” No manual. Porsche at least gives the option, with a six-speed stick shift appropriate for a sports car. There will be three F-types. One a supercharged 3litre V6 with either 340PS or 380PS, and one 5litre supercharged producing 495PS, which will reach 60mph in 4.2 seconds and a top speed of 186mph.
The ordinary 2.7 Boxster is only £37,589, like the bargain basement E-type half a century ago. You used to wonder how Jaguar did it at the price. Now Porsche is the price winner since they have started producing Boxsters in the VW plant at Osnabrück in Lower Saxony. It made the 914 from 1969 to 1976 and 968 from 1991 to 1994, so it knows what it is doing. Osnabrück made the rear end and side components for Stuttgart Boxsters.
So like the cherished E-type, the Boxster has the style and charisma of a classic. Do not sneer at retro - it looks like quite a lot of small splendid mid-engined 20th century Porsche racers and I would love one. Lana Del Rey (above) can sing Burning Desire to the VIP audience at the Musée Rodin in Paris all she likes, but it won’t bring back the exquisite perfection of the E-type.
You can only get perfection in concepts, like Jaguar’s studies of E-type replacements of a dozen years ago. See Dove Publishing's ebook, JAGUAR.

Duncan Hamilton


Duncan Hamilton was not so much economical with the truth as reckless with it. Jaguar historians don’t believe his story of how he and Tony Rolt won Le Mans in 1953. It is always a shame to let the facts stand in the way of a good story, but it seems the infraction that caused all the trouble was during Thursday practice not, as Hamilton tells it, the day before the race.

The ever-trustworthy Andrew Whyte noted that Lofty England “doesn’t go along with Hamilton’s version … of the incident,” and published a photograph showing that there were indeed two Number 18s in front of the pits during practice, - no big deal but against the rules. Sir William Lyons had to pay a fine for the infringement.

Norman Dewis, the Jaguar test driver told biographer Paul Skilleter how Lyons summoned Jaguar public relations executive Bob Berry in the small hours after Thursday practice, to compose an apology to the Automobile Club de l’Ouest. Lofty spent Friday sorting things out. So whatever prompted Hamilton and Rolt to “go on a bender” the night before the race, it wasn’t the threat of disqualification, which had been lifted.

Nevertheless Hamilton’s version prompted a review of the reissued book, which I have included in the new ebook Eric Dymock on Cars 1991, available to purchase on Amazon at an introductory £1.27.


The Sunday Times 20 January 1991

Racer who lived in the fast lane


DUNCAN HAMILTON is not so much economical with the truth as reckless with it. In an introduction to Touch Wood, his father’s reissued autobiography, Adrian Hamilton cheerfully acknowledges that when first published in 1960, “it just didn’t matter if in places it might be less than nitpickingly accurate — it captured the flavour of a bygone age in which sporting achievement alone was never enough without fun along the way”.

Duncan Hamilton’s idea of fun might not have been everybody else’s even in 1960. Boisterous to the point of delinquency on his own admission during service in the Fleet Air Arm, his high-spirited, perilous career continued after the war in motor racing.


He drove Talbots, ERAs and HWMs with great vigour and his victory at Le Mans in 1953 became the stuff of legend. Partnered by Major A P R Rolt* in the official Jaguar team, his car was disqualified the night before the race on a technicality and, in Hamilton’s own words, they “went on a bender”.

Reinstated the next morning, their only cure for a substantial hangover was the “hair of the dog”. They not only survived one of the world’s most arduous motor races, but won at a record speed, nearly 10mph faster than the winning Mercedes- Benz the year before and for the first time more than 100mph.

On a more practical note, the AA’s books on guiding motorists around Britain have set their own high standards. The latest series, Britain on Country Roads, includes one that helps drivers avoid main roads and encourages them to explore places bypassed by motorways and trunk routes. It describes 96 mini-tours of 50 to 90 miles, illustrating places of interest, and includes careful route directions. The maps are clear and the quality of production is exemplary.

*Anthony Peter Roylance "Tony" Rolt, MC and Bar (1918 – 2008) was more than a motor racing hero. Awarded the MC as a Lieutenant in the Rifle Corps in the defence of Calais, he was taken prisoner and after a number of escape attempts was sent to Colditz, where he planned to escape by glider. Hamilton’s book gained collectors’ status, the AA books have not. Some second-hand bookshops refuse to stock them; they take up so much space. So many were sold and then languished, mostly unread, on bookshelves throughout the land to accumulate on house clearances