CLASSIC SLIPPERY ANNE RIDES AGAIN!
Why an Austin 7 Special is turning heads
In the 1920s, Austin 7-based specials were a popular choice for any form of motorsport. ‘Slippery Anne’ was one of the well-known single-seater A7 specials and Mark Atkinson has now painstakingly recreated this Brooklands racer. Working from little more than photographs and period texts, the recently retired aviation engineer from Lytham in Lancashire has spent several years turning an ambition into a reality and car was running in time to compete at Prescott in September. Atkinson plans to tackle a range of Vintage Sports-Car Club speed events in his creation but is determined to keep the car in as close to period specification as possible and not develop it beyond its period trim.
Atkinson explains: “I’m very interested in the methodology they used in period and how that evolved to what we use today. I worked in the aviation business and was always interested in how we could take things further, so this probably appealed. It is a relatively complex car to build if you don’t have a set of drawings. We just had photographs and period texts but there was a lot of spurious rubbish written about it. There is nobody left alive to talk to about the car.”
The original Slippery Anne was built by John (Jake) Pares and raced by George Coldicutt, who went on to race for the works Austin team at Brooklands. The work began in 1924 and the car was used in competition from 1925 through to the end of the decade.
The origin of the name of Slippery Anne has been the subject of some debate but is thought to refer to a ‘siren of the desert’ who would lure unwary travellers but was too fast and beautiful to be caught.
“It had a pretty illustrious record,” said Atkinson. “In its time, it established some records at Brooklands where it was raced regularly though the mid-1920s and it took class successes at Shelsley Walsh.”
After several seasons, Pares duly sold Slippery Anne to Basil Cooke and brothers Cedric and Ken Bouckley. Cedric Bouckley’s son Jeremy is a keen historic racer as well as being a prime mover in the Curborough sprint course near Lichfield and has given the project enthusiastic support.
In the late 1920s, the new owners of Slippery Anne used the public road up Saintbury Hill near Broadway for practice as it had a similar gradient to Shelsley Walsh. Later, the special was sold to an airman from Norfolk who, against advice, wanted to use it on the road and was sadly killed in an accident only a few weeks later and the car was written off.
Atkinson explained his reasoning behind starting the project, 80 years on from the demise of the original Slippery Anne. “I’m an engineer by trade and I build things and I’ve always been involved in conservation activities. I knew about this car for a long time and it was the first supercharged Austin racing car. It used a supercharger that Austin made themselves.”
He describes the process of gathering information as a case of pursuit and hard work aided by the generosity of people. “Through that route I went from having no information to having about 100 photographs and managed to work out what the chassis looked like. That was partly from the photographs and partly from logic and from discounting some of what had been written.
“I got a period Austin 7 chassis that was in a bad state but there is very little of a standard Austin 7 chassis within Slippery Anne. Then the generosity of strangers started bringing things to me: not just photographs but components from the original car. John Pares’ daughter was
named after the car. I made the faux pas of asking if the car was named after her but she pointed out that she was not that old!”
After several years, Atkinson had drawn up what he thought the chassis should be and went to a chap called
Mike New, a renowned Austin 7 expert who is on the eligibility committee of the Vintage Sports-Car Club.
“He did the bare bones of the chassis for me, based on those drawings,” says Atkinson. “So I picked up the bits I’d started with and began putting her together. I’d reached the point, after 40 years in my career, that I wanted to retire, and did so five years ago.
“I built the car, in every respect, to be like it was back in the day. Many of the cars with the VSCC today have been developed to the point where they are extraordinarily fast. But that wasn’t the intention with this car. Using the larger wheels is entirely a safety thing. She should really have the smaller spindly wheels, but she does have the six-inch brakes she had back in 1925.”
For the engine, Atkinson went to Alex Myall at Pigsty Racing near Gatwick.
“Alex is an exceptional engineer in my judgement and is also a man of great generosity when it comes to sharing knowledge and when I didn’t have any, he filled in the gaps,” reports Atkinson.
The power source is a simple 1924
747cc Austin 7 engine. In the day,
Slippery Anne ran with various sizes of bored-out engine, but Atkinson went with the standard 747cc.
“A chap in California made the supercharger for me,” he continues. “I used to work in California when I worked on the F35 jet programme, so I have a great respect for American engineers. He made me a beautiful little supercharger as an approximation of what was in the car. He managed to make something that looked pretty close if not perfectly the same.”
Power output at the moment, with a normal exhaust, is around 60bhp. Atkinson explains: “It should be good for about 70bhp, but we’d have to put different gearing on and spin the supercharger a bit faster and fit a better exhaust.”
Keeping faith with 1924 technology, the chassis and engine are clothed in a body made of wood and covered in linen and Atkinson’s attention to detail and engineering skills are clear to see. He says: “It has a very light body, mostly made from English ash, which is very straight grained, as used for the coachwork in many cars of the period.
“The wood is covered in aircraftstandard Irish linen, which is what it would have been back in the day. There are modern linens which are easier to use and last forever, but that wasn’t in the spirit of the project. I now need to paint it with silver dope to protect the linen from the UV rays, which they did in period.”
So, what inspired Atkinson to build a faithful recreation of a one-off, 96-yearold racing special? “It’s a mixture of things,” he ponders. “A big motivator is having a car which is as close as I could get it to back in the day. There are one or two parts of the original car in there, but I’ve stopped telling people what they are!”
There are also one or two detail changes, which Atkinson is happy to point out: “I had to go with an aluminium radiator because it is angled at 45 degrees and the VSCC graciously said that was OK as long as it was painted black. Making it out of brass would have been challenging and taken years before I got into the queue at the suppliers and would have cost a considerable amount of money.
It’s very hard to tell the difference now it’s in the car.”
Though initially a labour of engineering love, Slippery Anne is most definitely going to be used in anger and driven in competitive events and should be seen in 2021 in a range of VSCC sprints and hillclimbs.
There have already been several exploratory outings in the late summer of 2020. “It went to Curborough in August and a week later it ran at David Leigh’s charity event. She went to Prescott for her first competitive hillclimb with the VSCC at the end of September. That was an interesting experience,” says Atkinson.
“She’s got a 1923 rear axle, which is exactly what she had in period, so I’m very gentle off the line. I don’t want to tear it apart. But we were about 10s slower than everyone else in our class and that was probably entirely because of the slow start!
However, chasing competition results is not what this project is primarily about. It was born of an ambition to take on a 1920s engineering project and build a remarkably faithful replica of a state-ofthe-art single-seater racer from close to 100 years ago.
“It has created a considerable amount of interest and that’s been very rewarding,” says Atkinson. “For people to see it, and recognise what the car was, is super.”