A wonderful waste of effort
Chris Williams’ fire-breathing 42-litre V12 Packard-Bentley
AT BROOKLANDS, IN 1933, they said old John Cobb was a fruitcake, cramming a 27-litre Napier Lion aero engine into a racing car.
Likewise, Chris Williams doesn’t care what you think of his car, one he brands ‘the biggest waste of time, money and effort in automotive history’. He’s utterly outdone Cobb’s NapierRailton. His Packard-Bentley has a 42-litre V12 marine engine from a WW2 US motor torpedo patrol boat. There’s more capacity in one of its cylinders than from an entire Jaguar XK engine, and at 1.7 tons it’s half the car’s weight.
Why did he build it? He says it will never race, and he doesn’t fancy experiencing its limits where, with 1500bhp being generated with help from a screaming, dustbin-sized supercharger, it might do 160mph.
Chris first saw the Packard power unit at the Beaulieu autojumble 15 years ago. ‘It was eight feet tall. Then I saw it advertised in the VSCC magazine. It was just up the road, so…’ He decided to mount it in a Bentley 8 Litre chassis.
‘We sawed the water pump off the bottom and repositioned it up front. That dropped the height by a foot. The rest of the car is made from sweepings, discarded Bentley bits like the Speed 6 back axle. We machined a new one for the front, six inches wider for stability. The gearbox is Bentley, too; there’s a big shock absorber between it and the engine.’
When it was completed, everything seemed okay. ‘How could you ever find out what will happen until you build and run it?’ asks Chris. ‘It was soon ruined. Both big ends had gone, and the crankshaft was bent – it’s six feet long and you can hardly lift it. The deeper we delved, the worse it was.’
The mechanical problems were methodically fixed, with beefing-up wherever needed. The balloon tyres were specially made in Bolivia.
‘It’s a comfortable car, it rides over everything. But it doesn’t like tight bends, or stopping. The steering is vile – so heavy – and without the two universal joints in the steering column to get round the engine, the wheel would be outside the cockpit.’
It’s already kinked at an awkward angle, and the clutch pedal has a vast amount of travel. Driving it slowly, though, is fairly pleasant, because there’s 2000lb ft torque.
Were the car ever provoked, though, it would be a whole new kind of scary.
‘At 100mph, with the boost just coming in, you begin to feel the violence, the tyres start to squirm. Up until then, I’d say it generates 5-600bhp, twice the power of a Blower Bentley.’
At events, where the Bentley-Packard always gathers a crowd, Chris starts up the beast and sends sheets of flame shooting from the 24 exhaust outlets.
‘The crowds just stand and stare. It’s a glorious dinosaur. I don’t want you to like it particularly but, if you do, then great.’
‘Packard’ is cast on the engine’s sides, and there’s a Bentley badge on the radiator cowling several yards ahead of the screen behind which the driver cowers. But the car’s name is Mavis.
‘Mavis was the most innocuous, simpering name we could think of for such a ludicrous car,’ Chris says. ‘That’s the British way.’