Bentley at Windsor

If the hallmark is cars you’ve never seen before, Windsor’s Concours matched Pebble Beach. Nobody knows who commissioned the Art Deco body on the Jonckheere Rolls-Royce Phantom I, with its circular doors, because the Belgian coachbuilders’ records were lost in the War. I’m not sure it is entirely successful, despite winning the 1935 Prix de Cannes at the Riviera Concours. The judges must have loved the huge fin, but as a period piece with a puzzling past it is exquisite. I do not recall ever even seeing a photograph of it, yet Thorough Events managed to include it in an astonishing array in an inner courtyard of Windsor Castle. Once the morning mists have blown off the beach and the Pacific is a shimmering blue, the 18th fairway at Pebble Beach is splendid, but the battlements of Windsor have their own grandeur.

Lalique splendour on a Bentley prow? The catalogue made no mention of the Lalique-style mascot on the Maharajah of Jaipur's 1930 Speed Six. THE COMLETE BENTLEY ebook

Sloping cliff on the Jonckheere Art Deco created by who knows whom? Rolls-Royce probably did not like the  lean-back of its famous radiator shell. An astonishing car.

I don't think I have ever seen a Fiat 8V outside an Italian museum and this 1953 Ghia 'supersonic' (it probably wasn't) was a star exhibit at Windsor. The BMW 507 (opposite) was the same as one Ruth and I took on a Guild of Motoring Writers Classic. TOP PHOTO: The history of the 1938 Embiricos Pourtout Coupe is well documented in

The Complete Bentley

(Dove Publishing).

Phantom Phantastic

Rolls-Royce sold more cars last year than ever; 3538, a third more than in 2010. The previous best was 3347 in 1978,which makes 2011 the best in 107 years. Great achievement. Scarcely expected in times of hardship. More surprising for cars with the aerodynamics of a house-brick costing between £200,000 and £300,000.
Anybody shopping for a Rolls-Royce should go for a 1998-2002 Silver Seraph. You could probably get a decent one under £50,000. By the 1990s the V8 felt lumpy and the first fruit of the BMW relationship was a V12 as silent as a Rolls-Royce should be. Well proportioned and dignified, the Seraph was the last Crewe Rolls-Royce. Only 1,570 were made.

But where the Seraph was graceful and sleek, the Phantom is big and square, with mean-looking rectangular headlights. The 6.8litre V12 is supremely quiet, immensely powerful, the interior magnificent as ever it was under the old regime at Crewe. Yet old Rolls-Royce made a virtue of understatement and there is nothing understated about the Phantom. It is big, slightly vulgar, with trick features like rear-hinged rear doors emplying electronics to prevent them being opened into the path of oncoming cars. Why would you want rear-hinged doors? They allow Phantom owners to make graceful exits on to red carpets, displaying limbs or whatever else to paparazzis’ flash bulbs.

Chairman and chief executive Ian Roberston shares a rear door with new owner of the 3000th Phantom.
Rolls-Royce thought it smart to have the RR logo on wheel hubs made so it was always upright. They didn’t whirl round when the car was moving and always stopped right way up. I thought them tasteless even though perhaps they suggested Rolls-Royce still had a sense of humour.

Graham Biggs’s sense of humour failed when he read Scotland on Sunday on 28 May 2006. He was Rolls-Royce PRO and got po-faced when I compared them with a flash kids’ fad for big shiny wheel discs. These were aftermarket stick-on accessories that didn’t rotate when the car was moving. They made it look as though the wheels were stopped. Once the car did stop the plates kept spinning so it then looked stationary with the wheels still going round. Most people thought it funny.

Rolls-Royce kept 100LG for the press car. The first one I drove was Silver Cloud III in The Motor road test of August 21, 1963 (above). There was trouble when I almost set the brakes on fire: “both fade tests showed the brakes in a poorish light,” was all I was allowed to write. Rolls-Royce was very sensitive about its brakes. Below is a later 100LG, a Silver Shadow with a young Mrs Dymock at the wheel.

Four Great Jaguars

Not many people in the 1960s ran to more than one Jaguar. A day at Oulton Park with four of them was a heady prospect, especially when they were all such landmarks in Jaguar history. This Autocar jacket celebrated Jaguar’s first post-war sports car, first Le Mans winner, TKF 9 Jim Clark’s Border Reivers’ D-type, and the latest E-type.
Bryan Corser of Shrewsbury had an XK120, a C-Type, D-Type and a 420G, replaced with an E-Type for a memorable test day. Archetypal Jaguar PRO, the matchless Andrew Whyte arranged it. Corser’s enthusiasm was boundless and Andrew knew he would trust us with his cars for a day, so long as he could join us. Corser, I wrote, was not collecting Jaguars for profit. Not then anyway. “Selling them never entered his head. You don’t expect to make a profit from your Hardy rod or Purdey gun or Dunhill pipe. You expect to fish with it, shoot with it, or smoke it*. Bryan Corser’s pleasure in his Jaguars came from driving them. They were all taxed and used on the road, the XK most often.”

From the original Autocar feature of 20 June 1968, reproduced in Sports Car Classics Vol2:
Each (of Corser’s cars was) in keen mechanical trim, faultlessly maintained and polished to the hilt – everything is polished, burnished, painted or chromed. Even the hydraulic piping on the D and the screen wash jar top gleam with chrome. But the cars are no museum pieces.
The XK 120 is, if you can apply the words to a car in such superb condition, a perfectly ordinary XK 120. Its only divergence from standard is 2in SU carburettors instead of 1½in, and XK150 tail lamps which are slightly too big. Otherwise it is much like the original XK 120, introduced 20 years ago to test public reaction to a twin-overhead-camshaft 6-cylinder engine. Jaguar thought this might be a useful engine for their Mark VII if people liked it. The sports car was to gauge reaction but created such a sensation that the initial plan to run off a modest 200 was quickly abandoned. The first cars had aluminium bodies but Pressed Steel was quickly recruited to make lots of steel bodies for the orthodox box section chassis. It seems almost a quaint idea now that you could remove an XK’s body, laying bare a sturdy frame that kicked up over the live back axle. The front independent is by torsion bars and the steering Burman recirculating ball.
The heart of the XK 120 is the thread that holds this Jaguar story together - the XK engine. Six cylinders, twin-overhead cams, a seven bearing crankshaft, 83 mm x 106 mm and a curious stroke-bore ratio of 1.28:1. This was probably on account of the change from the original XJ design, which suffered from poor low speed torque as a 3.2litre and had the stroke summarily lengthened. Capacity was 3442cc, the bhp 160 at 5200 rpm and you could specify 7:1 or 8:1 compression. It was a sophisticated power unit for Pool petrol. Rationing was still in force when it appeared. Polished cam covers came only on racing cars and125 mph was for aeroplanes; yet here these were on sale at £988.
Nine hundred and eighty-eight pounds. If you could reintroduce it as a reproduction antique today, you might be in business.

Memorable moment: The author drives TKF 9 for Autocar's feature.
Re-registered SVM 972, Bryan Corser’s XK120 was built in the early part of 1953. He is the fourth owner and has fitted a brake servo, modified the cooling system, overhauled the suspension, rewired it and “tidied” the engine “with a little chrome”.
Climb aboard the XK and you are surprised to find such a low car really has quite a high floor. One is unaccustomed nowadays to sitting on top of a chassis, with your legs stretching forward horizontally to long thin pedals on stalks, which come up through the toe-board. The enormous wheel is close to the chest, the right arm overflows the cutaway door and one realizes what a revolution the unitary hull has created. By contrast, the hump for the gearbox seems modest, because most of it is decently buried in the chassis. The shallow boot is testimony to Jaguar’s indifference to the baggage needs of sports car owners, which persists even with the open E-type. Here the reason is different, the rear axle of an XK needs space to bump up and down; it is the bulky independent rear on the E that steals the volume.
When you think that the XK120 was conceived half a generation ago, it is chastening to reflect that you can almost reach the limit of speed laid down by our legislators, without getting out of second gear. Third is good for 90mph (144.8kph), which came up easily on the back straight at Oulton. The acceleration is progressive rather than swift. A contemporary magazine’s 0-100mph time on a new XK120 was 27.3sec, its top speed 124mph (199.6kph), and standing quarter-mile 17sec.
At Oulton the steering felt heavy. You were almost glad about the closeness of the wheel so that you could pull from the shoulders and there was some kick-back reaction from the road. Elegant “long arm” driving positions arrived only with much lighter steering than this. Likewise the brakes need a firm push although they pulled the car up well. The axle is firmly located—it doesn’t jiggle over bumps. Even accelerating hard in second round Esso Bend, it sticks to the ground without spinning the inside wheel. There is little body roll, perhaps emphasised by the (for a sports car) comparatively high driving position. With such basic understeer, you can poke the back round with the throttle, although it is not the sensitive modern sort of car you can set sliding and catch when you want to. The borderline between keeping on the rails and a sharp, rapid breakaway was close. The ride is firm but fairly level; there is very little pitching, and the structure feels stiff with hardly a suggestion of scuttle shake.
Mercifully, the old gearbox has been abandoned. Drive an XK and you wonder how it survived for so long. You need the old Jaguar ‘pause-one-two’ between changes to prevent clashing the gears. Not because the mechanism was worn but because the constant-load synchromesh was never very strong. The clutch helps compensate, with a light, short travel. Drum brakes may have been a weakness of the car and the addition of a servo seems to have helped matters. They stood up well to some fairly brisk work at Oulton; smelt a bit, but that could have been due to the linings having recently been renewed.
Start up the XK 120 and there is no mistaking what it is. The characteristic ‘thrum’ must have helped create the Jaguar mystique. It is not high-revving and in XK 120 form the power won’t jerk your head back, but it does produce energy all the way up the range.
The XK 120 was a classic. Elegant and gentlemanly, the flowing lines were spoiled with the XK 140. The 150 restored some of the panache although the crisp silhouette had gone. It was well mannered, docile and quite, quite unlike the car that really established Jaguar as a racing marque, the XK120C.
Bryan Corser’s was the last production C-type to leave the factory. It has chassis number XKC 050 and (like the 120) was completed in 1953, to be followed only by the 1953 Le Mans cars. With 220bhp and those historic disc brakes Rolt and Hamilton won, raising the race record by 9mph and making the first ever 100mph race average. Moss and Walker were second, Whitehead and Jimmy Stewart (Jackie’s brother) fourth behind a Cunningham… Continued in Sports Car Classics, a full length reproduction in Part 2; Jaguar to Yamaha

Kindle ISBN 978-0-9569533-1-5. £4.80
Ebook ISBN 978-0-9569533-2-2. £4.80
*Hardy, Purdey and Dunhill appeared in an advertisement for the AC Ace in 1961, under a heading, “Yes, there’s a best in everything.” It declared “He smokes a Dunhill pipe, fishes with a Hardy rod, shoots with a Purdey gun and drives an AC car.” The implication was that an AC was suitable for nobility and gentlemen of impeccable taste. I used the phrase again later, changing “Purdey” to “Holland and Holland” on Jackie Stewart’s say-so.

Daimler SP250

They must have sold SP 250s at knock-down prices. I can’t think of any other reason for the Metropolitan Police buying 26 of them. The best you could say of the gawky plastic-bodied Daimler sports car was that it had a decent V8 designed by Edward Turner. He was such a good engineer he nearly joined William Lyons at Jaguar back in 1942.
Turner’s engine was a 2½litre with a short stroke, a stiff, 5-bearing crankshaft and a single camshaft operating inclined valves in hemispherical combustion chambers. It was compact, light, made of aluminium with a cylinder head that owed something to Turner's splendid Triumph motorcycle engines.
The car, alas, was unworthy. The chassis was a lash-up, with cross-bracing and underslung half-elliptics at the back. It drooped to a crinkle-cut Daimler grille in front and swooped to tail fins at the back. Daimler was strapped for cash and while a new model was desperately needed, had no money to make a decent job of it. The SP250 was swift enough in 1959 but the body was poorly finished, the plastic creaked and rattled, doors tended to fly open as it flexed, and although later versions were better buyers did not much like acting as development engineers for what was quite an expensive car.
Jaguar bought Daimler in 1960 for £3.24million and even though the SP250 was no competitor for the E-type, it was not the sort of car Lyons wanted to make. The engine survived in a saloon, based on a Mark 2 Jaguar, continuing until October 1969.
An SP250 is coming up for sale by Historics at Brooklands on Saturday October 22nd. Call 0800 988 3838, e-mail: auctions@historics.co.uk, or see the website, www.historics.co.uk. Historics promotes it as a, “police chase car with all the bells and whistles,” bought to curb the enthusiasm of what the Daily Mirror (who else?) called, ‘road hogs and ton-up hooligans’.
This one was delivered on 1st November 1962. “Recognising that its normal patrol cars were no match for speeders and getaway cars of the day, police drivers relished the performance of their new, foot-down acquisition.” Well, one wonders. Why did the Met not buy Austin-Healey 3000s at £1326. The Daimler was £1423. An E-type was only just over £2,000. An MGA Twin Cam was £1283; not much slower than the Daimler and much nimbler.
Scotland Yard took delivery of what Historics calls, “a powerful law enforcement weapon of its own, 670 ELL, a sleek, jet black, right-hand drive, 130mph soft-top Daimler SP250.” A bit optimistic there, The Motor could only get it to do 123.7 with the hardtop on to improve the aerodynamics.
After retiring from the police in 1967, 670 ELL was an official course car for 13 years at the Goodwood Revival in the hands of the present owner, who had it for 32 years. It has had a continuous programme of restoration, maintenance and improvement and is still remarkably original, says Historics, with a re-trim and excellent paintwork. Police equipment includes the chromed Winkworth police bell.
They expect lively bidding up to £30,000 - £35,000.
But not from me. Had I been a police driver this is the view I would have preferred.


When Jaguar acquired Daimler in June 1960 it made cars, military vehicles and buses. There was a a 23-acre factory and 1700 employees at Radford Coventry, which was given over to the group’s other manufacturing while Browns Lane assembled Jaguars. The firm also acquired Lanchester and Daimler’s coach building affiliates Barker and Hooper, so in 1961 what came to be called the Jaguar Group included Guy Motors of Wolverhampton with 20 acres of production and 825 employees. Makers of trucks, tractor units and buses, Guy was bought from liquidators for £800,000. Daimler’s truck business was transferred and on 7 March 1963 Jaguar took over Coventry-Climax Engines with 428,572 new voting shares, reducing Lyons’ personal shareholding. In 1962 Jaguar received the Royal Warrant of Appointment as Motor Car Manufacturer. More expansion followed in 1965 with the purchase of Henry Meadows, engine maker since 1919, from Quinton Hazell. The £212,500 deal included 90 acres of adjacent factory space. In April 1964 Jaguar embarked on a 50/50 joint venture with Cummins, the American engine manufacturer, but due to insoluble technical problems sold its share back in 1967. Co-operation with BMW was rejected once Lyons realised that the Quandt family held 14 per cent of rival Mercedes-Benz. A takeover of Italian sports car maker Maserati was declined.

Historics at Brooklands Press Office
Contact: Chris Hodges
Tel: 01491 411777
Mobile: 07812 051886
E-mail: chris.hodges@mph.co.uk
For the full consigned list of vehicles, visit
http://www.historics.co.uk/buying/online-catalogue.aspx.

Pelle Petterson and Volvo P1800

At last - recognition for Pelle Petterson. Designer of the Volvo P1800, immortalised by Simon Templar, played by Roger Moore in “The Saint”, Petterson was expunged from Volvo history by president Gunnar Engellau in the 1950s. Now Petterson is exposed as author of the sleek coupe at the Footman James Classic Motor Show at the NEC on November 11-13.
Volvo tried to make a sports car in the 1950s, an open 2-seater built from 1955 to 1957 but only 67 were made. "Not a bad car, but a bad Volvo" according to Engellau. However, he acknowledged the importance of a prestige model to boost sales of saloons and set about a replacement. He didn’t believe Swedish designers could match the flair and style of Italian Carrozzeria. It was trendy to hire Michelotti or Pininfarina or Vignale and Engellau was determined to be up to the minute.
Volvo consultant Helmer Petterson had meanwhile installed his son Pelle at Pietro Frua’s celebrated coachbuilding firm in Italy. Pelle had gained a degree in industrial design from the Pratt Institute in New York, so when four specially commissioned Frua proposals went to Volvo’s board in 1957, Petterson secretly added a fifth, by young Pelle.
Everybody agreed it a winner.
Engellau specially liked it. He had wanted an Italian design, but when he discovered it was really the creation of a 25 year old from Göteborg he was furious. He felt cheated and determined that Pelle would never be recognised as the designer. His name was erased and only readmitted by Volvo in 2009. Engallau died in 1988. Pelle Petterson should have received credit at the time for the distinctive rather high-waisted 2-door coupe sports coupe with the engine, transmission and suspension of the 122 saloon. It could have been the making of a career in car design but instead Petterson made his mark as a boat designer and won Olympic medals in yacht racing.

Three prototypes were built by Frua in Turin in 1957-1958, on the underpinnings of the Amazon saloon, and were used as templates for producing press tools, in a range of tests, at shows, for press work and advertising photo-shoots. All three survive.
Volvo did not have the capacity to make the P1800, even on a small scale. Helmer Petterson tried to get Karmann in Germany to make it but VW forbade it. Two British companies built the car: Pressed Steel made the bodies and Jensen Motors of West Bromwich painted and assembled them. Production got under way in 1960 but there were difficulties with personnel, working methods, quality, suppliers and logistics
In spring 1963 – after 6000 Jensen-built cars – Volvo transferred production to its Lundby factory but it was not until 1969 that body pressings were transferred from Pressed Steel in Scotland to Volvo’s press shop in Olofström. The move coincided with a change of name. First it was badged P1800E, later in 1963 it was known simply as the 1800S, for Sweden. The engine was fuel injected to give it a little more life and it was subsequently restyled to a configuration successfully copied by Lancia and Reliant, a sporting estate car known as the P1800ES. This did over 110mph (177kph) (a little noisily - body drumming was a problem) until withdrawn in 1974.
The production company making “The Saint” searched for an attractive sports car that would suit a gentleman of independent means and after being turned down by Jaguar approached Volvo for a P1800. Volvo obliged. And unlike now, when companies pay richly for product placements, the cars were all paid for by the TV side.
Footman Footnote: This will be the last of the Volvo P1800 50th anniversary activities and marks the end of the 2011 Volvo Cars Heritage event season. The collection of P1800s was at the TechnoClassica show in Essen in April, and in Birmingham a top attraction will be a P1800 from 1961 with an original 2.5 litre DOHC 4-cylinder Aston Martin prototype engine, fitted to the car experimentally by Aston Martin. Although the project never materialised the car survived and is owned and run by Beat Roos of Roos Engineering in Switzerland.

AC Cobra

The electronic time trap credited me with 183mph. I was at the wheel of the Le Mans AC Cobra 39PH. It was 1963 and it felt quick. Alas The Motor’s technicians pooh-poohed electronics, their slide-rules calculating that the change in axle ratio, described in the feature published July 17, rendered it more likely to be about 170mph.
Click to enlarge

Peter Bolton and Ninian Sanderson had just driven 39PH to seventh place at Le Mans. The following week I met Sanderson by chance, outside Harrods. I knew him through my association with Ecurie Ecosse and he suggested AC might lend the car for test. My colleague on the road test staff Roger Bell, later editor of The Motor and an accomplished saloon car racer, joined me at the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA) test track. We did just short of 140mph, about 22.5mph per 1000rpm, through an electronic trap on the banked circuit, so at 6,500rpm it might have managed 146-147mph. On the Le Mans axle it was doing 160mph on Mulsanne at 5,500rpm, or around 29mph per 1000rpm, so had it been able to pull 6,500rpm with its rather blunt aerodynamics, that would be 189mph.

On the fresh axle ratio, even at 7,000rpm, 165mph at MIRA was more likely than 180, so discretion suggested that the figure be excluded from the feature. MIRA had a second electronic time trap on the road course, inside the banked outer circuit, on which you could go faster before braking hard for the next corner. Photographer Maurice Rowe took a fine picture of Roger lifting the Cobra’s inside wheel on one. Perhaps the slide-rulers at The Motor (they were usually precise) were not perverse to rob me of my 183mph but that assumes, of course, that all the other calculations were right.

When AC stopped making cars in 1939, they were using an engine already 20 years old. John Weller’s aluminium 1,991cc single overhead camshaft wet liner 6-cylinder was first shown at the London Motor Show in 1919. Production resumed in 1945 with the same engine in a saloon not long for the automotive mainstream. There was little to distinguish it from 1930s counterparts, except that the headlamps had sunk into the wings and the grille curled over. So long as cars remained in short supply it held its own. Traditionally a sports car manufacturer, AC wanted to make 2-seaters so engaged John Tojeiro whose sports cars were doing well in British racing. He had been hired by Charles and John Cooper to plan the front-engined Cooper-MG. Tojeiro’s formula was straightforward, his twin-tube frame accommodated the Weller engine much the same as it had obliged the 4-cylinder MG.

The shape of the AC Ace was cribbed, without much alteration and certainly no acknowledgement, from a contemporary Ferrari Barchetta. It used Weller’s now 34 year old engine and went on sale in 1953 at a premium price. The chassis was simple, a frame of two 3in diameter tubes and independent suspension both ends. The frame was stiff and the handling exemplary; still good in the 1960s after nearly 700 had been made. A coupe, the Aceca (320 made) became a collector’s piece and through steady evolution an excellent, intuitive design improved, although the power was insufficient to exploit the excellent road holding. In 1956 as an alternative to Weller’s 102 bhp, AC offered the Bristol (neé BMW) 2 litre with 125 bhp, providing over 115 mph.

The Ace was a classic, the Ace-Bristol spectacular but in 1961 Bristol stopped making the engine. A modified Ford Zephyr pushrod, of 170 bhp, scant refinement and great weight was unsatisfactory.

Above: AC Aceca In the nick of time the United States Cavalry arrived, led by colourful Texan Carroll Shelby. The first Cobra prototype of 1962 was basically an Ace chassis altered to take a Ford V-8, with wider tyres and body modifications to cope with more than twice the horse power of the Zephyr. For sheer bravura, nothing could match it. There were 4.2 or 4.7 litre V8s, then from 1965 a 7 litre giving up to 345bhp in road trim and a top speed around 145mph. The standing quarter-mile took under 13sec.

The V8 made immense demands on the chassis, and changes were wrought, starting with rack and pinion steering. Like many carry-over designs of the 1930s the Ace continued using drop-arms and drag links, until the tendency of rack and pinion to lock-up at inconvenient moments was curbed. The Cobra's suspension was changed, coil spring and damper layouts with wishbones replacing transverse leaf springs.

Cobras went under a lot of names. Sometimes AC was dropped altogether; it was known as a Shelby Cobra, A Shelby American, and sometimes a Ford Cobra. AC provided it with a Frua body and called it simply the 428, a stylish but unsuccessful model that formed the sole AC exhibit at the London Motor Show long after production effectively stopped. The Cobra was probably the most copied, most replica-ed sports car ever. And when I see 39PH I bask briefly, just a little, in some of its glory.