If you are a vintage racing fan (or a racing fan of a certain vintage), you may be guessing this cycle-fendered projectile rocketing past a risk-loving crowd at the 1956 Pebble Beach Road Races is some kind of Allard or Frazer Nash*. But neither guess would win you a Forgotten Classics tee shirt, because the car is an even rarer HWM, built in 1950 at Hersham and Walton Motors by George Abecassis and John Heath in their dealership and service garage in Surrey, England. It began its life as a Formula 2 car with twin-cam four-cylinder engine built by Alta Engineering. By the time Bill Pollack raced Number 14 at Pebble Beach, the HWM had retired from Formula 2, crashed during filming of the Hollywood movie "The Racers" and been rebuilt by Tom Carstens in Washington with the just-introduced Chevy V8, acquiring then-novel disc brakes in the process. The car, nicknamed the Stovebolt Special, led the race until the differential gave up. It was the first Chevrolet V8-powered sports racer anywhere...
George Abecassis had raced Alta cars in the Thirties, winning the Imperial Trophy at a rainy Crystal Palace track in 1939. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying secret agents into occupied Europe durng World War II, and started the garage with engineer John Heath after it. They rebodied an Alta racer with streamlined, two-seater envelope sports bodywork in 1948, and then they were literally off to the races...
For the 1950 racing season they designed a new dual-purpose two-seater which could compete in sports car events, or with fenders and lights removed, contest Formula 2. It was light and simple, and its all-independent suspension give it competitive handling against more powerful Italian rivals. The HWM team gave Stirling Moss his start, and in 1951 they fielded a team of more streamlined single-seater cars. The light green HWM above is one of those single-seat Formula 2 cars from 1951...
A year later in 1952, Grand Prix races were run to Formula 2 rules, so the 2 liter Alta engine would be enough to get HWM into the big leagues, competing against Maseratis, Ferraris and Gordinis. The 2 liter formula lasted through the '53 season, and HWM would be outclassed by the new 2.5 liter Formula 1 cars in '54, especially the Mercedes and Lancia GP cars. But Abecassis and Heath, running their team on a tight budget, needed cash flow and found a market for sports racing cars powered by Jaguar engines, and in one case, a Cadillac V8. The dark green car shown above and below is a Jaguar-powered HWM from 1954.
Guests of honor at the Royal Automobile Club, the cars display their low stances and simple, purposeful lines, and their hosts at the club seem to have trusted that they'd leak no oil or other vital fluids onto that elegant carpeting. Amazingly, there's not an oil-catching pan in sight...
Abecassis and Heath had additional motivation to concentrate on Jaguar-powered sports cars when their friend Geoff Taylor at Alta Engineering signed an exclusive contract to supply his new 2.5 liter racing engine to Connaught* for its GP cars. This meant that HWM's old source of engines was unavailable in 1954. Budget-conscious Abecassis noted that one advantage of switching to sports cars was that they could simply drive them to the races, rather than paying to trailer them. Improvements on each car were made over a season or two of racing. XPA 748 on a 1953 chassis shows its original, small air intake at the race meeting above, and the 3-part scheme adopted in 1954 below.
During this period both Abecassis and Heath raced the cars, and Abecassis also raced cars for Aston Martin. The partners had taken on an Aston Martin dealership in 1951, having already offered CItroens at their Walton-on-Thames location. The lines of their body design for a 1953 HWM Jaguar, however, show more Pinin Farina than Aston influence on the silver specimen below. Flowing fender contours and details like the vents in the front fenders and just above the rear wheels resemble the Ferrari 375s from the era. The interlocking ellipses that enclose the low windscreen and the seats are a deft touch; this car looks good from any angle. Interestingly, though Jaguar had adopted disc brakes on its race cars by this time, HWM continued to rely on Alfin drums, apparently using up stocks of Formula 2 parts.
By 1956, the contours HWM wrapped around their tubular chassis designs were tighter and lower, anticipating the later Lister Jags and even the Birdcage Maserati. John Heath entered the Jaguar-powered example below in the 1956 Mille Miglia, but crashed and flipped the car, and died two days later at a hospital in Ravenna. He was 42 years old...
HWM had built a second Jaguar-powered car, XPE2, for the 1956 season, but Abecassis abandoned the racing effort not long after Heath's death. HWM concentrated on selling Aston Martins, and built one more hillclimb car to special order. Like Frazer Nash, which took on a Porsche distributorship to survive, HWM found selling and servicing road cars to be a better business than making racing cars.
There was one more car besides that hillclimb special, though. Abecassis decided to build a GT coupe with Jaguar power. It was 1957, and apparently he thought that both the Aston DB2/4 and Jaguar's new XK150 were already looking a bit old-fashioned. So he sketched up something wild, and had Aston stylist Frank Feeley (author of the DB2 & DB3S) revise his sketches into something more practical and buildable. The resulting fastback coupe with its glassy rear hatch, low roof, and one-piece clamshell hood indeed looked the part of a modern GT car, and Abecassis considered building a few for customers until he reviewed how much it had cost to hammer out his light alloy dream. So the only HWM closed coupe remained a one -off, and it was the last of 19 cars the firm built over 9 years. Many still exist, and the vintage racing boom has guaranteed that most of those will remain in running condition for a long while...
*Footnote: The saga of the Connaught, including the Alta-powered GP car that broke a decades-long string of British defeats in GP racing, is told in "Celtic Rainmaker: Connaught Broke the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", in our archives for July 24, 2016. The story of the Frazer Nash, another British specialist that survived as a business enterprise but not as a maker of cars, can be found in two essays, "Chain-Drive Frazer Nash: Not Your Grandpa's Nash", posted on January 28, 2017, and "Frazer Nash Part 2: When a Replica Is Not a Replica", posted on February 3, 2017.
Photo Credits:
Top: Don Palmer on tamsoldracecarsite.net
2nd thru 5th from top: The Royal Automobile Club (UK)
6th thru 8th: bradfieldcars.com
9th & 10th: autopuzzles.com
11th & 12th: pinterest.com
Bottom: fiscar.org (Fifties Sports Car Racing Club, UK)
How intensely I wish today's race cars resembled those '50s models, that modern automobiles were still unapologetically painted pea green, and that all garages were carpeted. Then, and only then, could we say we're civilized.
ReplyDeleteI agree that most of today's race cars, from Le Mans to Formula 1, are not a happy sight. Based on the number of garages I've encountered that fall short of the Royal Automobile Club, not to mention its carpeting, it looks like your standards of civilization are not going to be met anytime soon...
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