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
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