Mentioning "Healey" to Americans of a certain age (or level of car obsession) usually summons up recollections of the Austin-Healey, either the Big Healey that was a fairly common sight on our roads from the mid-Fifties through the late Sixties, or the tiny Sprite Bugeye that appeared in the late Fifties. But there were other Healeys before and after those cars, and they may not ring as many bells in the dusty attic of memory. After World War 2 Donald Healey founded a specialist car building firm in Warwick. He had been shot down while flying for the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, and raced cars after it, winning the 1931 Monte Carlo Rally in an Invicta. By the mid-Thirties (and his own late 30s) he was technical director of Triumph Cars. The 1947 Elliott coupe above was atypically elegant (its body was by Beutler in Switzerland), but its chassis was typical of early Healey designs: a ladder frame with independent front suspension with coil springs and trailing arms, a live axle rear, and hydraulic drum brakes during a time when mechanical brakes equipped (or afflicted) many British cars. The engine was a 2,440 cc Riley that made 104 hp when equipped with twin SU carbs. This was a twin-cam inline four, but with high cams and pushrods, not unlike the Lea Francis engine of the same period. Most of the 101 Elliott coupes looked like the green car below, rather than the white one above. Sincere and even friendly looking, but not what you'd call sleek...
Just over 100 of the Elliott coupes were built between 1946 and 1950; there was also a Westland open tourer that managed to sell 70 copies.
In '49 and '50, Healey also offered the Sportsmobile (below); only 23 were sold. This may have been the result of the clunky styling; the Sportsmobile looks like it was designed as transport for Wallace and Gromit. Another drawback was a short-lived steering system with a triangular aluminum pivot plate; even minor wear in the pivot bearing resulted in sloppy steering. Mobile, maybe, but not very sporting...
Healey's Silverstone was a more sporting proposition. The name was a clue; it was named after a race track. Appearing in July 1949, the Silverstone was designed to avoid a recently doubled purchase tax on cars priced over a thousand pounds; it sold for 975 GBP. Bodied in cycle-fendered style (think Allard or Frazer Nash) by Abbey Panels, it featured the twin-carb, "underhead cam" Riley four, but was the first Healey with bodywork supported on a tubular steel frame, rather than the wood framing of previous models. Despite success in racing, only 51 D Types, and 54 of the wider, more comfy E, were made before production ended in Sept. 1950. The E Type had a wider cabin, bigger windshield and hood scoop, but traded bucket seats for a bench. The green car below is a D Type.
The black car below is a coupe bodied by Tickford (who also bodied Alvis and Aston Martin chassis); the last one appeared in '54. The red drophead coupe below it was bodied by Abbott in the same period. Both shared the Riley engine featured in the Silverstone. Many Healeys, like the Elliott, Westland and Abbott, were named after the coach builders who bodied them...
Around the dawn of the Fifties, as a result of Donald Healey meeting Nash president George Mason on an ocean liner, a plan was hatched to outfit Healey chassis with Nash six-cylinder engines. Bodywork was nearly identical to the Panelcraft-bodied, Alvis-powered Healey 3 liter, which managed to sell only 25 copies. But the new Nash-Healey, fronted by a Nash grille and released in summer of 1950, sold 104 copies Stateside, and a Nash-powered Healey finished 3rd at Le Mans in 1952, behind two Mercedes 300SLs but ahead of the Ferraris...
Those were good sales numbers for Healey, but probably seemed small to Mason at Nash. The American company had already hired Pinin Farina as a design consultant, so the alloy Panelcraft body was replaced by the more stylish Farina-styled steel roadster body shown below for 1952. Size of the OHV six with special aluminum head stayed at 3.8 liters for '52, but increased to 4.1 liters for '53, when Nash added a coupe to the range. Nash-Healeys kept the Healey front suspension design, but substituted a Nash Ambassador torque tube and rear axle.
The side-curtained roadster on the 102" wheelbase was joined by a coupe (108" WB) in 1953, and only a lightly reslyled coupe with reverse-slant C-pillar (below) was offered in 1954. The revised cars sold 402 copies over 3 years, not bad considering that the roadster, priced at $4,700, was over a third more than a Jaguar, while the $5,900 coupe was in Aston Martin territory...
1952 was a big year for Healey. Not only was Nash-Healey production ramping up, but in answer to a need for a less expensive roadster that could be produced at Healey's factory, designer Gerry Coker sketched out the Healey Hundred, with its curvy contours tightly fitted over a 90" wheelbase Healey chassis powered by a 2.6 liter Austin OHV four. As luck would have it, Austin and Morris had merged early in 1952 to form the British Motor Corporation, and when the minions of BMC saw the new car at that year's Earls Court show, they quickly made a deal with Donald Healey to mass-produce the car as the Austin-Healey 100. That's Leonard Lord from BMC on the left next to Donald Healey...
Production began in 1953. The new Healey had plenty to recommend it to sports car fans in the USA: swoopy lines, sturdy mechanicals, and a friendly price around $2,900. The 2.6 liter inline four's 90+ hp made it competitive in increasingly popular road races, especially after the 3-speed gearbox in the BN1 version was replaced by the 4-speed in the BN2. Our example Austin-Healey 100, in blue below, is parked next to a red Jensen-Healey from the early 70s; more on that later...
Note how designer Coker had finally found the fan-shaped Healey grille a happy home, and how the curve of the door sills mirrors the fender curves above. Also note the curved uprights of the folding windshield and how they work with the curves. The windshield glass was flat, and the curved sides probably made the side curtains an odd fit, but most observers thought it was a great-looking car. This blue example has been owned by the same Colorado family for decades...
In 1955 Healey introduced the 100S, a factory racer made in only 50 examples and only that year; there were another 5 factory test cars. It looked like an Austin-Healey 100 with an oval grille, but it was more. Alloy body panels replaced steel, four Dunlop disc brakes replaced drums, and a special aluminum cylinder head and twin carbs offered 132 hp. A 1955 Road & Track test gives a 7.8 second time for the 0 to 60 run, and a top speed of 120 mph, fast for the era. The photo below shows how the windscreen looks in folded-down position. Healey selected their purchasers from a list of successful amateur racers; most of the 100S models seem to have been delivered with the white and blue paint scheme shown...
You'd be forgiven for thinking the green car below is a 100S model. Actually it's a Healey rebuilt by Cape Motors in England, with a new alloy body like the 100S, a new chassis, an engine with the rare aluminum cylinder head, and 4 disc brakes.
There were other attempts to increase power on the Austin-Healey 100, and some of these involved American V8s, and some of those involved power bulges on the hood. Not sure what's going on with the cow-catcher bumper on the orange car, but the owner had a good sense of humor...
BMC had its own plans for more power, though, and in 1956, after 3 years of the four-cylinder 100, introduced the Austin-Healey 100-6. Still at 2.6 liters (actually 2639 cc to the Hundred's 2,660), it offered the smoothness of 6 cylinders with 102 hp; after a new cylinder head design from late 1957 the power increased to 117. The wheelbase increased to 92 inches; more power provided the excuse to offer alleged 2+2 seating in the BN4 offered from '56 on, while the BN6 offered in '58-'59 kept the two-seater's lines, all behind a new hood with scoop and a somewhat fussier oval grille than on the 100S. The example below is from 1959...
In 1958, the year the BN6 appeared, BMC released the Austin-Healey Sprite, with 948 cc inline OHV four accessed by a hood in unit with front fenders including the famous Bugeye headlights, steel body designed again by Gerry Coker on an 80-inch wheelbase chassis, and everything pared down to a 1,460 pound weight and $1,795 price. As with the AH 100-4 and 100-6, they sold thousands. Ads highlighted the Sprite-powered speed record car, as well as the kinship to the Big Healey...
When the Sprite was released in the USA, designer Coker had gone on to work at Ford in Detroit, and was disappointed to see that his planned retractable headlights had been ditched by BMC for cost reasons. But the Bugeye's trademark feature gave it an identity and a name, and some owners cannot resist pointing out that the car is, well, cute...
Bodies for the Sprite were built by BMC, while those for what soon became known as the Big Healeys were built by Jensen Motors...
Late in 1959 the Austin-Healey 3000 appeared, with 2.9 liter inline OHV six, still based on Austin's Westminster. At first, in Mark I and Mark II versions, these were offered as two-seater or 2+2 roadsters, all with side curtains and sketchy tops (above). In summer 1962 the Mark II convertible appeared with curved windshield and roll-down side windows. The 3000 substituted disc brakes at the front wheels; while drums remained at the rear. Grille shape went to the simpler vertical bar design on the Mark II, and power went from 124 to 148 over the life of the 3000, which ended after the 1967 model year. The Convertible model below replaced the roadsters, and acquired a wood dash in the Mark III version which appeared in spring of 1964, around the same time as Ford's Mustang. All Convertibles feature 2+2 seating.
New US safety regulations spelled trouble for the future of the Big Healey, and the father and son team of Donald and Geoff scrambled to save the car, and their manufacturing contract, by widening the 3000 model by half a foot and plunking a 4-liter Rolls-Royce inline six (inlet over exhaust valve) as supplied for the slow-selling Austin Princess into the 4000 prototype, of which a couple were built around 1966-7. But this adaptation of a 15-year old design was doomed by the 1968 merger of Austin, Rover, Triumph and Jaguar into British Leyland, an unwieldly mess of competing design teams with a surplus of competing engines, including the 3.5 liter Rover V8 and Jaguar's 4.2 liter six.
Meanwhile, in 1962, the 23 year-old Italian designer Pio Manzu won the design competition sponsored by Swiss publication Automobile Year by designing a new body for the Big Healey, which was built by Pininfarina to Manzu's specifications. As a sign that it might have pointed to a more modern future for the Austin-Healey, features of the Manzu design*, with its tall greenhouse, curved side glass and angular roof, appeared 3 years later on the MGB-GT, which was actually designed by Pininfarina. PF improved on the concept a bit by substituting a large hatch for the conventional trunk lid on the Manzu design.
When the Healey concern found a new manufacturing deal to replace the BMC contract, it was with American importer Kjell Qvale and Jensen Motors, and the car they hatched was the Jensen-Healey. Appearing in 1972, it was a conventional two-seat roadster with live rear axle and disc brakes at the front only, like the Big Healey it sought to replace. Chassis design was more rigid than that car, but testers found it was not rigid enough to avoid the cowl shake of the Big Healey. The one modern, cutting-edge feature was the twin-cam 2 liter inline four sourced, oddly enough, from Lotus. The engine looked great on paper, making 140 hp from 2 liters with 4 valves per cylinder. The new engine had not yet appeared in any Lotus product, so in a way the Lotus engineering team was using the Jensen-Healey team to do trouble-shooting on their new engine. And there was plenty of trouble on the Mk. 1 cars' engines, including water pump failures, oil leaks, gasket failures, low oil pressure, and fuel line leaks. By the time the J-H team sorted out the Mk. 2 cars, their project was losing money. Perhaps a better route to success would have been to use a proven production engine, like the Ford V6 in the Reliant GTE. The Jensen-Healeys we see today have been mostly sorted out and offer plenty of fun; this red example has a Toyota 5-speed transmission...
By the time Jensen offered a 2+2 sports wagon version in 1975, Healey had withdrawn from the project, so the new model was offered as the Jensen GT. With more development and some advertising, it might have filled the gap left by the Volvo 1800 ES. But the effort collapsed in 1977 for lack of funding, and Jensen was so invested in the Jensen-Healey that it collapsed too.
*Footnote:
The Nash-Healey saga was detailed in "Italian Jobs from the Heartland, Part 1: Italian Bodies for Nash and Hudson", posted November 17, 2016. And we detailed Pio Manzu's award-winning redesign of the Big Healey in "Forgotten Classic: Austin-Healey 3000 by Pio Manzu Out of Pininfarina", posted October 31, 2016.
Photo Credits:
Top, 2nd & 5th: classicdriver.com
3rd: Wikimedia
4th: classic-trader.com
6th &: 8th: Wikimedia
7th: bonhams.com
9th: U.S. Postal Service
10th (Nash-Healey coupe): LCDR Jonathan Asbury, USN
11th: The Nuffield Group, featured on solarnavigator.com
12th & 13th: The author
14th: Wikimedia
15th (Cape Healey): Mike Fuchs
16th thru 18th: The author
19th: British Motor Company
20th (Bugeye Sprite in toy box): The author
21st: Unique Car Auctions
22nd: bringatrailer.com
23rd: mossmotoring.com
24th: Automobile Year
25th & bottom: The author
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