Michael Scarlett

Testing with Audi, 1980, Eric Dymock (left) and the late Michael Scarlett

You trusted Michael Scarlett with your life. Often. We did thousands of miles together testing cars, spending the hours talking, conjecturing, gossiping. Congenial, memorable, Michael was generous with his knowledge. I owe him many debts for lucid explanations of technical mysteries. His deeply intelligent writing remains his memorial.

We drove with one another because it felt safe. Michael drove beautifully; fast, smooth, adventurous, sometimes mischievous. Wheel to wheel at 130mph with an identical Peugeot, he turned off our air conditioning. He knew how much horse power it was using and we pulled ahead at 133mph, deeply puzzling the other driver. We found our lap times in Ferraris round Fiorano matched as closely as our views on affairs of state, the way cars handled, or the skill of this or that engineer. His joyful, “I couldn’t agree more…” was said with a zest and enthusiasm to which people warmed. Scarlett was pure delight.

His happy conversations, alas, are ended save in those hearts and minds which, like mine, were enriched through knowing him.

VW, Deutsche Post, University of Art, Braunschweig


Electric cars are over-hyped. Hardly anybody buys them. Hybrids with engines that charge batteries are practical; some such as the Toyota Prius sell quite well. But the whole industry is too excited about Evs, and is only preparing itself for the day when politicians outlaw petrol and diesel.
Back in November 1991 California legislature demanded that, “by 2010 seven cars out of ten will be electric”. It hasn’t happened and despite desperate efforts by the motor industry to persuade the world it is green, it won’t. Not yet anyway. You can’t store electricity in a tank, like you can petrol, and the only way we’ll have electric cars is by having two - one car for Town, one car for Country. That’s not very Green.

VW, however, has a hopeful little invention that follows historical precedents. It is the ingenious product of VW’s co-operation with the German Post Office (Deutsche Post AG) and the University of Art at Braunschweig. Dr. Rudolf Krebs, Group Manager for Electric Traction at Volkswagen AG describes the eT! as an automotive building block for zero emissions in urban areas. It has electric wheel hub motors and great freedom in manoeuvering. “If ‘refuelled’ with electricity generated from renewable energy sources, the eT! could indeed be operated with zero emissions,” says Dr Krebs.

Historical precedent 1. Ferdinand Porsche designed hub-mounted motors for his Lohner Porsches at the beginning of the 20th century. They do not require drive-shafts, gear trains or brakes. (Above) This Lohner Porsche had hub-motors in front; some were four wheel drive.

Historical precedent 2. When VW was run under the British military government of 1945 its principal customers were the British army and the German Post Office. The army bought VWs as communications and staff cars, the post office for delivering mail in the war-torn country.

It was Reichspost before it was Bundespost
Deutsche Post is still one of the largest customers of lightweight commercial vehicles, and wants a postal van that can operate semi-automatically. eT! can follow a postman from house to house (“Follow me”), or return on command (“Come to me”) – driverless. It can be operated by a ‘drive stick’ from the passenger’s side and its electric sliding door reduces a delivery person’s walking movements.


The eT! concept shown in a world premiere at the Design Centre of Potsdam will now be analysed. Let us hope if it ever gets made they find a name without the !

Bonhams puts it right


Following up to my recent post on the topic.

Bonhams was not concealing the history of the Macklin Austin-Healey. It just didn’t draw attention to its role in the Le Mans disaster straight off. Managing director James Knight points out its press release describing, “An extraordinary ‘barn find’ sports car with works racing pedigree, which survives today as an immensely significant reminder of an event that changed the entire course of international motor racing.”

It is more interesting than that. It illustrates how old racing cars, like a Tower axe (three new heads and five new handles but still the Anne Boleyn axe) have been taken apart and put together many times. A lot of this car competed at Le Mans not once but twice. Bonhams has gone to the trouble of engaging authority on Austin-Healey Special Test Car and 100S models, Joe Jarick to research its catalogue.

Donald Healey’s deal with BMC for the Austin-Healey 100 included producing Special Test Cars for racing and record breaking. They had to look exactly like production and while there was little time to modify the Austin A90 4-cylinder engine there were radical differences underneath.

For Le Mans 1953 journalist Gordon Wilkins co-drove Special Test Car NOJ 391 – chassis No SPL 224/B with Belgian Marcel Becquart. However, just after scrutineering it was rammed by a truck, suffering damage impossible to repair in time, so its engine, brakes and all scrutineer-stamped components were transferred to spare Special Test Car, NOJ 393 - chassis SPL 226/B - brought to Le Mans “as insurance”.

Registration and race numbers were repainted, so running as NOJ 391, in effect masquerading as the car that had just cleared scrutineering, Wilkins and Becquart finished 14th and third in the class. It says a lot for the solidarity of the British motoring press that none reported the subterfuge.

In 1955 entries by owner/drivers the factory regarded as mediocre made Donald Healey uneasy. He felt they could discredit his brand so the factory’s best driver, Lance Macklin and French Austin importer AFIVA persuaded the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (ACO) to accept a private entry. It was really a quasi-works entry, and the car selected was NOJ 393/SPL 226/B for its second 24 Hours at Le Mans.

BMC specialist Eddie Maher tuned 393’s engine, achieving 140bhp with high-lift, long-period camshaft and two SU HD8 carburettors. Formula 3 star Les Leston was taken on as co-driver. Geoffrey Healey explained: “We had no hope of winning with a basic production car, but had a good chance of a high placing with the train-like reliability of the big Austin four-cylinder engine…” Marcus Chambers of BMC/MG ran the pit, accompanied by Le Mans veteran and former Bentley winner, SCH ‘Sammy’ Davis.

The Austin-Healey was struck by Levegh’s 300SLR on the left rear, spun to the right, and bounced off the pit-counter before slewing to a halt. Macklin escaped but NOJ 393 was impounded by the Le Mans police. It was not until September 1956 that the Donald Healey Motor Company was able to negotiate its release. The worst damage was to the left rear and left-hand side, the impact against the pit wall having affected the same bodywork area struck by the Mercedes.

By 1957 Healey was busy with the 100-Six (this is a later 3000), so wanted rid of NOJ 393. It had been as advanced and fully-developed as any 100S but it was repaired in haste, so the left front wing, door and rear wing are steel, whereas the rest of the body is aluminium. It looks as though by 1957 Healey had exhausted its stock of alloy 100S panels and replaced the damaged wings and door with steel ones prior to selling.

Bonhams believes NOJ 393 retained the original engine SPL 261-BN as it has a rare works angled cylinder head along with evidence of scrutineering security measures to prohibit tampering. The original buff logbook records the Austin Motor Company, Longbridge, Birmingham as original owner, the first change date-stamped 28 February 1957 alongside Donald Healey Motor Co Ltd, The Cape, Warwick, made on completion of the repair following its return.

Big Healeys could be cads' cars. This 3000MkII belonged to Train Robber Bruce Reynolds

Sports Car Classics: A Vintage Archive


The best of Eric Dymock for £4.80. That is the promise of Dove Digital's new Classic Sports Cars, out now, packed with a selection of 50 years' road tests, feature articles and motoring columns. This two-part ebook includes material from The Motor, The Sunday Times, Autocar and excerpts from the author's books.

Sports Car Classics is available to download in two parts for Kindle from Amazon, in eBook format from Waterstone's, and for iPads and other iOS devices through the iTunes store.

Sports Car Classics Part One: AC to HRG

Sports Car Classics Part Two: Jaguar to Yamaha


Here is a sample from the section on Aston Martin:

SUNDAY TIMES: Motoring 25 April 1993
Aston will test the classic waters.
Aston Martin DB3S

At the height of the classic car boom in 1989 a good Aston Martin DB3S might have sold privately for the best part of a million pounds. Collectors will watch Robert Brooks' Olympia auction on Tuesday (27 April), to see if one makes a quarter of a million. Brooks sold a coupe in 1989 for £400,000; Tuesday's price will be a barometer of how the market is recovering from the collapse of 1990-91.
The DB3S sold new for £3,694 9s 2d (including purchase tax) in 1954, and Brooks expects it to go for between £220,000 and £280,000. Only twenty were made with the same style, speed, and exemplary handling, delightful on the road and competitive in historic racing. The whereabouts of nineteen are well known and they rarely reach the market. Clive Aston is only the fourth owner of this car which he has had since 1971 and parts with in order to restore a similar but more historically important ex-works racer.
Professor Dr Robert Eberan von Eberhorst was dismissive about Sir David Brown, the tractor millionaire who owned Aston Martin from 1947 till 1972. “His understanding of cars was zero,” von Eberhorst recalled. Yet in 1950 Brown commissioned the tall aristocratic German to design a new sports racing car, the DB3, with a tubular chassis and torsion bar springing.
Von Eberhorst's credentials were impeccable. He was responsible for the pre-war Auto Union racing cars after Ferdinand Porsche defected to Mercedes-Benz. He followed Porsche's precepts for the post-war Cisitalia, an astonishingly advanced single seater, but his DB3 Aston Martin was a disappointment.
Its 2.6litre 6-cylinder engine, designed under WO Bentley, never produced enough power for Eberhorst's rather heavy and plain-looking design. In racing it was beaten by the new C-type Jaguar until WG Watson, a junior designer at Aston, by-passed Eberhorst and went straight to David Brown.
He suggested changes, which made the DB3S as it became known, into a technical triumph shorter, lower, lighter and faster. With a new aerodynamic body by Frank Feeley, it was an aesthetic landmark as well. The exquisite proportions, cutaway wings and crisp unadorned lines were distinctive and rakish.
Although lacking the power of a D-Type Jaguar the DB3S handled superbly, twice coming second at Le Mans driven by Peter Collins, Stirling Moss, and the Belgian Paul Frere. It was one of the pivotal cars that captured the racing car industry from Germany and Italy, to establish it firmly in Britain.
There were two sorts of DB3S, those raced by the works, and a small run of production cars shown at the Earls Court Motor Show in 1954. It only had 180bhp against the rival (and cheaper at £2,685 14s 2d) D-type Jaguar's 250, - Jaguar made 87 D-types against Aston's 20 of the production DB3S.
The car Brooks is selling on Tuesday has chassis number DB3S/106 - the sixth made. It was bought new by a Singapore industrialist who raced as an amateur in the Far East, winning the Macau Grand Prix in 1958. Its next owner crashed heavily in the 1963 Singapore Grand Prix and the wreckage returned to Britain as spare parts in 1969.
The engine, gearbox, and back axle formed the basis of a painstaking re-creation under Clive Aston. Works drawings and body bucks were used to keep the result as close to the original as possible.
Driving '106' on a test track provided a convincing testimony to the eulogies written on the DB3S. Sports-racing cars of the 1950s tended to have a fierce clutch, heavy gearshift and an engine that pulled only within a tight engine speed range. The DB3S has an even spread of torque, a light clutch and the gearshift is a delight.
Clive Aston warned me about the brakes, which was just as well because there is no modern servo assistance. They feel heavy when cold but once warmed to their task cope efficiently with the car's 140mph (225.3kph) performance. Acceleration is quick even by 1990s standards, - about the same as a modern road-going Aston Martin Virage, with an invigorating bark from the 6-cylinder twin-cam engine.
The handling feels light at the front; the steering has lost some of its straight-ahead precision so taking a racing line through corners needs a little practice. The low racing windscreen deflects very little of the slipstream, which buffets the driver, catches his cheeks, bombards him with insects and demands goggles or a helmet and visor. You can drive a DB3S to the shops but best keep your mouth shut.
The car's quality is impressive and looks at least a match for German contemporaries. The detailing is good and includes an imaginative gadget for cooling the driver's feet. In the course of a long race, close to a hot engine, they could get badly burned. A beautifully-made duct leads from under the front wheel-arch to the toe-board between the pedals, and a lever by the driver's door opens a flap to let air in. It also brought in tyre fragments and brake lining dust, so drivers finished races with black faces.

I was being set up. The auctioneer thought an approving Sunday Times column might raise the price. It sold for only £120,000; anybody in the business knew the car and it had neither a distinguished provenance, nor was it especially good to drive. In 1998 one went for £293,000, in 1999 £370,000, and in 2009 another sold for $1.98 million at Pebble Beach, although described as “suspect” by one collectors’ website and extolled with a “continuous history” by another. Some of the DB3S re-creations, or replicas, look and drive every bit as well. Best memory of the works Astons was at my first Grand Prix, the 1955 British at Aintree, was watching four of them in the sports car race, driven by Roy Salvadori, Peter Collins, Reg Parnell and Peter Walker overhaul the D-type Jaguar of race leader Mike Hawthorn.


39PH, the Le Mans AC Cobra that is the subject of an Eric Dymock original feature test in The Motor (as it was then) of 17 July 1963

Bonhams' dilemma: Austin-Healey


Bonhams is curiously coy about an Austin-Healey it is selling. Presumably the boot lid of NOJ 393 has been fixed after hurtling Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes-Benz into the Le Mans spectators in 1955. Bonhams merely describes it as “The ex-works Le Mans Lance Macklin 1953-55 Austin-Healey Special Test Car 100S Sports-Racing Two-Seater,” without mentioning that over 80 died in motor racing’s worst disaster. In its booklet of forthcoming sales highlights it has a picture of No 26 at Le Mans, in the early stages of the race. Editor Richard Hudson-Evans concedes the car is “infamous” without really explaining why.
Understandable really. Describing it as 1953-55 is a bit of cop-out. All other sale cars are described by the year they were made; a 1937 Bentley, a 1965 Rolls-Royce, a 1912 Lanchester. Bonhams seems sensitive about 1955, which everybody in the business associates with tragedy. True the Austin-Healey 100S model was made between 1953 and 1955, but chassis number SPL226B is a described by Geoffrey Healey as a 1955 100S; “… specially prepared … NOJ 393 with the high-lift, long-period camshaft and two 2in SU HD8 carburettors.”

Yet there is no denying its role in the accident. Paul Frère, a Le Mans winning driver, contributed a detailed analysis of what happened in Andrew Whyte’s book on works racing Jaguars. It seems almost beyond doubt that the sequence was set off by two of the drivers looking in their rear-view mirrors instead of what was happening in front of them. Macklin was behind Mike Hawthorn pulling his D-type into the pits, but he was looking over his shoulder as it were, for Levegh’s Mercedes bearing down on him at maybe 150mph. Hawthorn quite properly braked with 600yards to go, surprising Macklin who pulled out to avoid colliding.

Levegh too was looking behind him. A French guest-driver in the Mercedes team he knew that Fangio, in the leading 300SLR, who had spent most of the first two hours of the race duelling with Hawthorn was close behind. Fangio had caught up an entire lap on the Frenchman (real name Pierre Eugène Alfred Bouillin and in his fiftieth year) who was anxious not to impede the team leader and established world champion driver.

Levegh seems not to have spotted the slower Austin-Healey. The silver Mercedes drove up its sloping tail and over the low fencing, breaking up as it flew.

Sensibly the race was not stopped. The Automobile Club de l’Ouest knew that the roads around would be choked, hampering the emergency services. Fangio was sharing the Mercedes with Stirling Moss and by midnight it was leading the Jaguar by two laps. In view of the accident however, Stuttgart withdrew the cars at 2am and Hawthorn and Bueb won a cheerless and melancholy victory.

The Austin-Healey was impounded for a year and a half while investigations into the accident went on. The track was completely rebuilt to prevent anything like it every happening again.

Wisely Bonhams will not be drawn on what the car is expected to make; it is billed “estimate upon request”. The sale takes place at Brooklands. At Mercedes-Benz World.

Autocar: World's oldest motoring magazine

Autocar was so good this week that I have paid £89 for a subscription on my ipad. Hilton Holloway’s analysis of Jaguar Land Rover is masterly despite a bit of PR-speak; “all-new” in the headline and twice in the first paragraph is tiresome, but his scrutiny is well informed and well briefed. He shows the likely effects of US legislation on Jaguar’s small-car policy and Tata’s proposal to build a carbon-copy of the Wolverhampton engine factory in India. I didn’t know the extent of universities’ research on Jaguar’s behalf, nor the University of Warwick’s role in research and development. Great material. Tells you lots you didn’t know. I’m not sure about his description of the X-type as “unloved” however. It was unloved only by Americans, who made the mistake in the first place of insisting it was retro-styled. It was quite a decent car and well made; basing it on an old Mondeo was quite practical to get Jaguar out of the mess British Leyland had left.

Holloway also speaks boldly on roads. Everybody forgets that the entire Olympic site could never have been developed in, “huge land-locked post-industrial Stratford” had the battles over the M11 link road been lost.

So, Holloway a star, along with Alan Henry who was covering grand prix races when I was covering grand prix races and that’s a long time ago, and the eternally boyish Richard Bremner. His Land of the Rising Sunderland is a succinctly written reminder of 25 years of Nissan in Britain. Autocar does this sort of thing well; nobody else seems to be doing it. Applause too for the techy diagram of the Suzuki Swift Sport rear suspension. Nobody else is doing that either.

Bremner is perhaps too kind to the Triumph Stag. Pretentious, unreliable, held together by that ungainly roll-over bar the V8 was, alas, one of the late Spen King’s rare failures. BL’s press launch didn’t go well either. A pre-production Stag Clive Jacobs ran for years ultimately did the decent thing and set itself comprehensively on fire. It was nevertheless restored and is still running.

Jaguar X-type. A perfectly worthy car.