Chain-Drive Frazer Nash: Not Your Grandpa's Nash

As part of our long-running series on car manufacture as a tool for achieving bankruptcy, we thought of presenting the Frazer Nash saga.  Then we noticed something odd: the company never quite went out of business.  It's true that founder Archibald Frazer-Nash and his modest motor works skidded into receivership in 1927, three years after starting production of his spindly little roadsters.  But then the Aldington brothers bought the concern in 1929, and kept it going through the end of the chain-drive era and (against all odds) into postwar success as England's Porsche distributor.  The chain-drive cars, though, were among the first sports cars to be recognized as classics, and it's their aura which interests us here. Minimalism wasn't much of a word in 1930, but it's hard to look at a Frazer Nash chassis from that year without having it float to the top of your mind.  It's a car that made an impression because of the things it lacked.  The list begins famously with the absent gearbox and continues with the absent differential, missing driver's door on most models, and largely absent weather protection.  Forget about effete nonsense like bumpers, radios and heaters.  In fact, forget about having the shifter and the emergency brake inside the car. If you wanted to operate the shift, you'd hang your arm outside, and if it was raining (nearly every Frazer Nash lived in the British Isles) your arm got wet.  But then again, Frazer Nash tops were sketchy (when present at all) and time-consuming to erect, so in the event of rain you were likely getting soaked anyway...

Wait a minute, we just mentioned the shifter after telling you there was no gearbox.  A contradiction?  Time for a bit of history.  In 1910 Archie Frazer-Nash formed a partnership with H.R. Godfrey to make the G.N. cycle car.  In those early motoring days, cycle cars were a modest step up from drafty, hazardous motorcycles.  They offered the added stability of 3 wheels (the Morgan trike) or 4 (Amilcar, G.N.), and usually space for two smallish, friendly people.  In order to save weight and cost, Godfrey and Nash came up with a chain drive and dog-clutch system, with different diameter sprockets offering various speeds as on a bicycle. There was a separate idler shaft for the reverse effect; the diagram below also shows the quarter-elliptic springs which were the source of the car's memorable ride qualities (think of an unhappy wild pony).  When a move upmarket failed and G.N. wound down, Archie Frazer-Nash took his chain-drive system and some G.N. parts, and started making cars on his own.  It was 1924...

Specialist car builders in Roaring Twenties England were catering to racing aristocrats, and to possibly less-expensive thrill-seeking by men (and some women) who'd managed to survive the Great War, and saw nothing especially scary about racing up a muddy hill in a flimsy little car which exposed you to the elements almost as much as a motorcycle.  Hill climbs became popular contests, and none was more famous than the one at Shelsley Walsh, which gave its name to the twin-supercharged s.o.h.c. 4 cylinder Frazer Nash Shelsley model.  Unlike G.N. which made its own two-cylinder engine, Frazer Nash sourced its engines from other specialists, including Gough, Meadows, Anzani and Blackburne, which made a refined twin-overhead cam six, at 1,657 cc the biggest of chain-drive 'Nashes. None of the cars had differentials, so there was a bit of sliding in the rain and on tight corners.  Steering was startlingly quick, as little as 7/8 of a turn lock to lock on some models. The great automotive writer Ralph Stein likened driving a Frazer Nash to being on two motorcycles bolted together...    

The magic never faded, but the business of selling chain-drives suffered from competition with upstarts like Jaguar, which offered bourgeois luxuries like interior shift levers, windshield wipers, and even heaters.  Production slowed to a a trickle, with only one chain-drive car produced in 1939, by which time Frazer Nash had signed up to distribute BMWs in England, an effort derailed by war.  The loyalty and enthusiasm inspired by the chain-drive Frazer Nash greatly exceeded what would be expected from a total production of 350 cars.  A high percentage have survived, along with this limerick about them:

Nash and Godfrey hated cogs,

Made a car with chains and dogs.

It worked.  But I wonder, would it if 

They had made it with a diff.?*

*Footnote:  The Frazer Nash was, of course, unrelated to the American Nash or to the Frazer produced by Kaiser-Frazer in the USA.  The author of our limerick is unknown, but it was popular in England's Vintage Sports Car Club, and I found it in William Boddy's The Sports Car Pocketbook, from Sports Car Press, New York, 1961.  If you need help telling a Schneider from a Salmson or a Senechal, Boddy's your man.

Photo Credits:
Top:  giddins@porsche.blogspot.com
2nd:  Giddins Racing
3rd:  oppositelock.com
Bottom:  Linda La Fond