Forgotten Classic: Kieft GP Car Tests Dream Engine 48 Years Late

It's July 1951 and that's Stirling Moss up there, explaining a 500cc Kieft Formula 3 car to American racer Briggs Cunningham*. The other guy flanking Cunningham is Cyril Kieft, whose specialist workshop built the car, in which a mid-mounted Norton motorcycle engine drove the rear wheels by a chain.  Cunningham was at the time involved in a multi-year effort to win Le Mans with a car of his own manufacture...

...and it cannot have escaped his notice when Moss won the race later that day.  Three years later, Moss would win the Sebring 12 Hours in an OSCA* run by Cunningham's team.  Kieft continued to have success in Formula 3, competing against similarly-shaped, mid-engined cars from Cooper*.  Meanwhile, success in F3 got the Kieft team thinking about Formula 1 in 1953, when they heard that while Grand Prix races in '52 and '53 were run to Formula 2 regulations, there would be a new Formula 1 in '54, with engine sizes increased to 2.5 liters. Coventry Climax was beginning to have success with its overhead cam inline 4 (designed as a fire pump engine) in 1,100 cc sports racers, and Kieft, along with competing firm Connaught*, decided to design Formula 1 racers powered by the promised Climax Godiva FPE (now there's a name) V8 racing engine. The new engine was named FPE by engineers Walter Hassan and Harry Mundy (of Jaguar XK fame) in jest; it was the first of the postwar Climax engines not originally intended as a Fire Pump Engine, and the engineers had a hard time selling the project to the firm's management. The 4-cam, dry-sump Godiva was tested by Coventry Climax with 4 Weber carbs and initially made 240 hp, but the Coventry firm's management began to have doubts when they heard about the 260 to 270 hp range of the rival engines from Maserati, Mercedes and Lancia.  With experimental SU fuel injection, the Climax V8 could exceed 260 hp.  In retrospect, the firm's caution was probably unjustified.  The Maserati 250F initially made 220 hp from its twin-cam six, and the Mercedes W196 GP car 256 hp, later upped to 290. The Lancia D50 initially made 260 hp. Also, unlike these other cars, the Kieft GP featured Dunlop disc brakes on all four wheels.  So one wonders what might have been...

Coventry Climax cancelled its F1 engine project for 1954, leaving the Kieft team with two completed tubular chassis with all-around independent suspension, the one above with lightweight alloy bodywork. The Wilson pre-selector transmissions, made by Armstrong Siddeley, were heavier than their Italian competition, but they were available.  The engine bays were empty, though, owing to the Coventry firm's reluctance to face the allegedly more powerful competition. One tubular chassis derived from the GP design was fitted with an American De Soto V8 and alloy body, was then crashed, and resurrected decades later...

But Kieft had other plans as well, and began to offer English club racers its tubular chassis with pioneering fiberglass bodies and cast alloy wheels in 1954, a year when alloy bodies and wire wheels were still the rule.  The cars featured independent suspension with leaf springs at the rear, and the overhead cam Coventry Climax four in 1,100 cc form.  In 1954, Kieft was the first car builder to run at Le Mans with the Climax 1,100 cc engine; it retired in the 11th hour with transmission failure.

The new car could apparently be ordered with road equipment, but it appears that only racers were sold at 1,560 GBP per copy.  The fiberglass body appeared a couple years before the Jensen 541 with its "production" fiberglass body, and 3 years before the load-bearing fiberglass body on Colin Chapman's pioneering, but risk-taking, Lotus Elite.

In the earlier photo below of the Kieft with number plate LDA5, it appears with a wider air intake and non-flared front wheel arches, and seems to be winking with one uncovered headlight.  William Boddy identified it in his book as a 1.5 liter.  But Kieft built cars with a variety of engines, including a Bristol and that one-off De Soto hemi, so it could've been...

These cars didn't make money for Cyril Kieft, though, so by 1955 he'd sold the car-making operation, along with the two GP chassis, to Merrick Taylor. In that way, the Kieft story follows the theme of many others in this series, which is often about how making racing cars is a great way to lose money. The new owner switched the Kieft company emphasis to race preparation and tuning of other makes of cars after 1956, and changed the name in 1960.  For the GP cars waiting for their intended engines, though, that's not where this story ends...

The Kieft GP chassis passed through various owners to Gordon and Martyn Chapman, who discovered 3 FPE engine blocks, 8 heads, and other parts in an abandoned building near the Silverstone track. They bought the lot, and found that the FPE shared some vital parts with the later (GP Championship-winning) FPF four-cylinder engines. After Gordon Chapman's death, Bill Morris bought the GP chassis and the engine parts.  The chassis with body in place was completed with an FPE engine in the bay, an uprated Wilson gearbox, and with the alloy coachwork detailed with cooling vents and painted in a metallic green that Cyril Kieft selected. Rear suspension was given a bit of negative camber. Fifties car magazines would've called the cramped interior "businesslike." Not too long after the beginning of the current century, the Kieft GP car was finally ready to run, as Bill Morris said, "only 48 years late."

The chassis plate tells the story.  This is the car with Chassis #1, and Engine #1...

...and it finally ran.  On September 21, 2002 the Kieft GP car ran its first-ever road race at the Vintage Sports Car Club Silverstone meet.  In the audience was 89 year-old Cyril Kieft.  He'd  lived long enough to see his dream racer get its dream engine and hit the track, and to hear the wail of the near-mythical Godiva FPE at full song.  Cyril Kieft died in 2004.

*Footnote:  Cunningham's namesake cars were profiled here in "A Moment Too Soon: The Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham", posted April 15, 2017, and we told the story of the Moss victory at Sebring in Cunningham's OSCA in "OSCA: When a Maserati Is Not a Maserati", posted  Dec. 29, 2022.  Cooper Cars, which like Kieft had origins in Formula 3, had its longer and more successful history surveyed in "Cooper Cars Followed a Winding Road to the Major Leagues", in these posts for Feb. 11, 2022. And finally, the seldom-told story of how the Connaught came to be, and of how it became the first British car to win a Grand Prix race after World War II, is told in "Celtic Rainmaker: Connaught Ended  the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", in our archives for July 24, 2016. 

Errata:  We made a typo on the first version of the GP car's first race.  It was Sept. 21, 2002, not Sept. 2021.  Apologies.

Photo Credits:  

Top & 2nd:  500race.org

3rd:   bonhams.com

4th:   Bill Morris

5th:   car.info

6th:  pinterest.com

7th:  C. Dunn, featured in The Sports Car Pocketbook by William Boddy, Sports Car Press, 

        New York City 1961. 

8th:  Wikimedia

9th thru bottom: bonhams.com

Kit Houses, a Solution to Overpriced Housing? A 1920s Sears Kit House in Boulder Revives the Question...

On University Hill in Boulder, you happen upon this Craftsman style bungalow in what looks like its originally intended form.  There's a welcome absence of those awkward second-story additions that real estate agents have taken to calling "pop-ups", as though all old houses are somehow yearning to release their inner Clashing Additions, like English muffins springing out of a toaster... 

Intrigued, you walk around the place.  It's well-maintained, with an array of photovoltaic panels on the roof that shows the owners' concern for their carbon footprint.  Another thing that would keep the carbon footprint down is the actual footprint; the house is modestly sized. In a country where the average new single family house in 2021 was just under 2,500 square feet, this one appears well under the average. If you're a follower of historic residential architecture, though, there is something vaguely familiar about this house, so you take some pictures before you move on...

From 1908 until 1940, Sears, Roebuck & Co. offered kit houses as part of their Modern Homes catalog. Over 70,000 of these kit houses were sold in a variety of styles (around 370) and sizes, before sales wound down during 1942. These houses were shipped to buyers in boxes containing wood framing elements, doors, windows, siding and trim, all marked for location. Think of that IKEA bookcase you may have bought, only even more of a pain to assemble. It turns out, though, that buyers saved plenty of money by ordering the components this way, compared with paying a contractor to source them. Also, as the houses were already designed, there was no architect's fee (hmm...sorry, fellow architects), though there was the cost of engineering and building the foundation, which needed to relate to various soil conditions, sloping vs. flat sites, etc.  Our University Hill example happens to be a Sears Oakdale...

In the mid-Twenties, when the Oakdale was still offered in this friendly-looking Craftsman style, the kit price was just under $1,800.  For comparison, in 1925 a new Ford Model T was yours for $260, in factory-fresh black. By the Thirties, Sears had restyled the Oakdale, removing some of its homey charm.  But it was still a bargain...

This version of the Oakdale turns out to have an enclosed back porch in compatible style, and a garage that is not of Sears origin.  The overall condition of the house is evidence of the likelihood that people still feel at home here...

This might be a good moment to point out that after World War II, shortly after Sears got out of the kit house business, there was a revival of interest in manufactured housing in the USA, in order to meet the demand for housing created by legions of young people leaving the military and starting families. One effort launched in Chicago was Lustron Homes, prefabricated in steel using manufacturing techniques employed in the car industry, and with enameled steel exterior panels. Unlike the kit houses, the components on these prefabricated houses were combined into subassemblies for speedier results.  Opposition to these prefab designs came from construction unions, who saw them as a threat, and from various building and zoning departments, whose expertise was based on traditional construction techniques and whose codes failed to allow for new methods.  Lustron folded after 1950.  Most of the suburban sprawl that accommodated the postwar housing boom was achieved using conventional on-site construction.

How much of it was conventional?  Well, according to eyeonhousing.org, the total US market share of non site-built single-family houses (that is, modular or panelized) was only 2% in 2021. According to Dwell Magazine, the prefabricated share of the new single-family housing market in Scandinavia that year was 80%.  By the late Fifties, Scandinavian firms were pioneering prefabricated, modular and panelized designs. Their design, detailing and provisions for energy efficiency in these have kept up with technical advances. Equally important, zoning codes throughout Scandinavia encourage these houses, and building codes address the technical aspects.  By contrast, when we designed a house addition based upon modifying steel shipping containers in Denver in 2014, the building department was uncertain about whether this constituted a prefabricated house, and delayed approval while searching for a category under which it could be evaluated.  Manufacturers like Pluspuu in Finland offer a variety of configurations emphasizing energy efficiency, in sizes that have increasingly vanished from American cities and suburbs owing to land costs.  The logic seems to dictate that with land prices high, one needs to build as big as zoning allows to maximize profit.  As a result, the late 70s was the peak period for small home builds (averaging 1,400 sq. ft.), averaging over 450,000 per year, but that number is now around 60,000 in the US.

Allowing accessory dwellings on standard lots would help provide more affordable housing, at the small cost of rewriting some low-density single-family zoning. Adapting zoning to allow more multi-unit housing and allowing modular construction for that would also offer a path out of the housing crunch.  A coordinated approach encouraging multi-use zoning and adaptive re-use of often-abandoned but sound buildings in rural downtowns could also provide housing, especially for those who can now work at home, and don't need to be near a large urban center...

It's all enough to make you wonder if Scandinavians know something we Americans don't know. As potential first-time buyers are confronted with an impenetrable housing market offering oversized, wasteful, uninspired choices, it's probably time for zoning changes that allow greater density, and for building code changes that allow for more prefabrication, including kit and modular houses, and for architects and designers to offer something more connected to the way a whole new generation of housing consumers wants to live.

*Footnote:  For Part 2 of this long-interrupted series on mobile, modular, prefabricated and kit houses, please see "Mobile vs. Prefab: If It Can't Go Anywhere Can It At Least Look Like Home?", in our archives for August 3, 2017.  In that post, we visited modular and prefab housing exhibits in Chicago and New York, reported on an innovative reconfiguring of a mobile home by CU students here in Boulder, and also showed a factory-built house in Finland.

Photo Credits

Color shots of the Sears Oakdale house in Boulder are by the author.  The monochrome shot of the Oakdale with plan is from the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes Division, while the perspective of the Craftsman style version above it is from searshouseseeker.com. The color shots of the Pluspuu houses are from pluspuu.fi.  The bottom shot of the Norwegian kit structures is from katus.eu.