Simon Taylor Full throttle
‘He was a big fellow, and he didn’t say much. As a boss he was firm, at the wheel he was press-on, sometimes a bit wild’
Winning anything in a car with your own name on the badge is a real achievement – like Jack Brabham’s F1 world title in 1966. At all levels of racing there are other heart-warming examples. But here’s a pub-quiz question that can have just one answer. This man founded a car maker that sold nearly 2000 road cars in eight years – saloons and drophead coupés, sports cars and sports-racers. In his own cars he won the Montecarlo Rally outright and did the Le Mans 24 Hours four times, finishing third at his first attempt. That man can only be Sydney Allard.
The Allard has always been a Marmite car. Most have a sidevalve Ford V8 with more torque than horsepower, a fairly crude chassis with its roadholding limited by the Ford-derived front swing-axle, and bulbous lines that are not to all tastes. But I love Marmite, and I love Allards because, whatever else they do or don’t have, they have character – just like their creator.
He was a big fellow, 6ft 3in and broad, with spectacles, and he didn’t say much. As a boss he was firm but good-humoured, and at the wheel he was determined, press-on, sometimes a bit wild. In 1929, aged 19, he was running his own garage business in Putney, and soon he was building Ford V8 specials for himself and for customers. Light weight and lots of torque made them successful trials cars.
After WW2, with materials in short supply, Sydney’s little factory in Clapham somehow managed to churn out cars by the score. The heavy saloons and dropheads weren’t awfully fast, but the two-seater J-types were – especially if they were upgraded to bigger Cadillac and Chrysler units. Sydney raced his J2s in the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia and at most British circuits. Earlier, he built an Allard single-seater powered by an air-cooled Steyr V8 and won the British Hillclimb Championship.
Sydney’s first Le Mans was 1950. He ran a Cadillac-powered J2, and at around 4am a gear selector broke. Sydney jammed it in top gear and he and co-driver Tom Cole raced on for another 12 hours to finish a brilliant third. In 1951 and 1952 he was out of luck, but in 1953 with a new car, the JR, he took the limelight by coming round at the end of the first lap in the lead, ahead of all the Jaguars, Ferraris, Lancias and Astons. Three laps later the chassis broke.
But the greatest achievement for Allard, the
man and the car, was winning the 1952 Montecarlo Rally outright. It’s forgotten now what an immensely important event this was, with works teams and top drivers battling through from starting points all over Europe on a punishing schedule to a final common route through the mountains. Weather conditions that year were particularly bad, with snow and ice throughout. Driving one of his P-type saloons with Guy Warburton and Tom Lush, Sydney beat Stirling Moss’ Sunbeam-talbot to outright victory. But the publicity didn’t last long: the following week King George VI died, and the accession of the young Queen Elizabeth took over the news.
Through the mid-1950s Allard sales dwindled as other makes became more sophisticated, so Sydney turned his attention to drag racing. His incredible four-wheel-drive machine with two Steyr engines side-by-side connected by chain never really ran, but then he copied USA fashion and built a Chrysler-powered slingshot dragster, which posted the fastest quarter-mile times ever recorded in Britain. He sold a handful of his smaller dragster, the Dragon, and there was even a three-wheeled microcar, the Clipper.
Sadly, in the midst of all this activity, Sydney became ill, and he died in 1966 aged just 55. But many of those 2000 cars live on, helped by a thriving owners’ club. And every time I see an Allard, particularly a bluff, no-nonsense J2, I think of the bluff, no-nonsense man whose name is on the nose.