Frazer Nash, Part 2: When a Replica Is Not a Replica

In the late 1970s I lived near the train tracks in Evanston, Illinois in an apartment building which also housed a shop where an affable mechanic named Dave specialized in classic, sports and other odd cars.  The location was especially convenient as I often took the train to work, and when my used-but-loved Jaguar got the hiccups I just moved it from the garage across the street to the back one, where Dave would have a look.  He drew the line at working on my old Renault, as I recall (here's where I remember how much I rode my bike). There were always interesting cars lurking around Dave's shop, including a Zagato-bodied OSCA coupe* and once, a Lotus Elan which had been trampled by a panicked (or jealous) horse.  Possibly the rarest one I encountered was nearly identical to the car pictured below. As nearly identical as something made by hand and subject to special customer requests can be, and thus the name: Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica. By "replica", AFN Ltd., the maker of all things Frazer Nash, was signaling that the nearly 3 dozen customer versions they built from 1949 to '54 were replicas of the car they'd raced at Le Mans in 1949. This was a replica that wasn't a replica, you see... 

It was as if, in order to assure you that your Beetle was genuine, Volkswagen had labeled each of the 21 million copies they churned out as a Type 1 VW Prototype Replica...  No matter; the Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica was light enough and sturdy enough to do well in endurance racing, taking 3rd at the 1949 Le Mans 24-hour race, and winning the 1951 Targa Florio and the 1952 Sebring 12 Hours.  The car I saw in Dave's shop belonged to Chicago collector Ben Rose, and like all Le Mans Reps, featured a 2 liter six derived from the prewar BMW 328.  It was a tight little torpedo of a car, with low-cut doors, cycle fenders and a little plate identifying the engine builder as the Bristol Aeroplane Company. During the vintage racing boom of the 1970s, after Frazer Nash had abandoned manufacturing cars to concentrate on selling Porsches, the UK restoration shop Crosthwaite & Gardiner built six new replicas of this model using the original chassis and body design along with the Bristol engine.  These cars are known as Le Mans Replica Replicas.  They truly are replicas...

The Le Mans Rep was the most famous and numerous of the postwar cars built by AFN, but there were others worth noting.  The Fast Roadster introduced in 1949 quickly morphed into the Fast Tourer and then into this Mille Miglia.  If you're into English cars of the 50s you'll notice the similarity to the MGA which came 6 years later, especially in the fender shapes front and rear and the way the bonnet and surrounding valence curves down to the wide, flattened version of the traditional grille.  Later versions of the Mille Miglia, like the one below, reverted to the vertical grille and a smaller bonnet opening.   But the Aldington brothers, who ran AFN, were such good sports they apparently never took up the issue of the cribbed design with the British Motor Company.  In any case, the latter company's MGA outsold the much more expensive Mille Miglia (11 examples made) by almost 9,000 to 1.

By the mid-1950s AFN was becoming aware that the 20 plus-year old Bristol engine design had reached the limit of its development, so they looked at other alternatives, checking out the more modern 3.4 liter Armstrong Siddeley six, which they judged to be too heavy.  A prototype aimed at larger-scale production and a lower price was built with a 2.6 litre Austin four for the 1952 Motor Show, but it was immediately upstaged by Donald Healey's spectacular Healey Hundred with the same engine, and that car became the Austin-Healey 100-4. The Targa Florio model which had formed the basis of the Austin experiment was modernized into the Mark II, with sleeker nose and tail and the old standby Bristol six, and one of these was brought to California and successfully raced by Marion Lowe.  

So AFN continued to offer the Bristol engine while searching for more power.  They offered a Le Mans coupe (9 built) on the Le Mans Rep chassis with alloy bodywork, and a delectable competition roadster, the Sebring (3 built) on the Le Mans Mark II parallel tube chassis with De Dion rear axle.  And if one of the major manufacturers complained that they had licensed that name, AFN could reply that they had, after all, won the race*…The Sebring may have been aimed at American racers, but in the two-liter class their attention had been captured by the AC Ace Bristol (see our post for 12-24-16), which cost around half as much.  

There was a last-ditch effort to outfit the Le Mans chassis with a 3.2 liter BMW V-8, and two were built, based upon the Porsche 356 body shell (as the English concessionaire, AFN had easy access to those) but with a long bonnet and trad grille.  This car was too expensive to be competitive, even against Aston Martin, and looked like the compromise that it was.  Those of us who remember the Frazer Nash will instead remember those sharply-focused racing torpedoes, and the iconoclastic chain-drive cars* that came before them.

*Footnotes:  For the OSCA Zagato 1600 GT, see "Almost Famous", our post for April 20, 2016. AFN's customers must have taken the naming business seriously; of the 9 Le Mans coupes produced, 6 competed in their namesake race.  Marque expert David Thirlby (Frazer Nash, Haynes Publishing, UK, 1977) estimated a total postwar production figure of 85 to 87 cars.  And for a brief history of the pre-war chain-drive Frazer Nash, please see the previous post, "Not Your Grandpa's Nash", from January 27, 2017.

Photo credits:
Top:  the author
2nd:  flickriver.com
3rd:  wikimedia
4th:  bringatrailer.com
Bottom:  frazernasharchives.co.uk  ('54 Sebring on left; '55 Le Mans coupe on right)