MIKE ANTHONY
THE OCTANE INTERVIEW
Mike Anthony, 1950s privateer extraordinaire
‘THERE WERE STEN GUNS always lying around the house and I remember going on holiday to my uncle’s farm, aged 16, with an attaché case containing two Sten guns, a Luger pistol, plenty of ammunition, and a couple of bottles of whisky for my uncle. Can you imagine a schoolboy carrying that lot through Victoria Station today?’
There is, of course, an explanation for such behaviour. These were the dark days of World War Two, and Michael Anthony’s father (a travelling salesman before the war) had become a Home Guard instructor in the Sten submachine gun. His mother having died at the age of 28 from tuberculosis, the teenage Mike and his two brothers were regularly sent to stay at their uncle’s farm in Suffolk. ‘We used to shoot rabbits with a Sten gun,’ Mike chuckles. ‘And no, there wasn’t much left of the rabbit afterwards.’
Mike himself entered the Army in 1944, and during his three years in the Service he acquired his first car, a Singer Le Mans. This kindled his lifelong love of motoring and he would become a successful club racer during the 1950s and ’60s, a contemporary of many of our greatest drivers when they were upand-coming. Today, aged 89, he’s one of the longest-standing members of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, having joined in 1954.
‘I sold the Singer to my Sergeant-Major and my father then helped me buy what we thought was an SS100, but turned out to be the sidevalve Standard-engined SS90. As a result, I became expert in reshaping combustion chambers and I fitted a modified Standard 16 head, after which the car went very well. I was completely self-taught – the idiot’s revenge!’
After a few years of competing with the SS90, Mike was suddenly and unexpectedly introduced to a new marque of sports racer: ‘I was racing the Jaguar at Goodwood, and it broke down at St Mary’s,’ Mike explains. ‘As I was watching the other cars go through, I saw a little silver car go past, and the driver was doing absolutely nothing and was still faster than I had been! I tracked the driver – Colin Chapman – down in the paddock afterwards and ordered a Lotus MkVI on the spot.’
At first, Mike’s relationship with Chapman was perfectly amicable. He built up most of the car in the loft of Chapman’s Hornsey workshop before taking it home, and in April 1954 the two men, together with fellow MkVI driver Peter Gammon, formed Team Lotus for the British Empire Trophy race at Oulton Park. Gammon, whose MkVI was particularly light and highly tuned even by Lotus standards, finished an incredible third overall, ahead of three Jaguar C-types, but Mike’s race wasn’t so successful:
‘Chapman had built a new streamliner, the MkVIII, and Mike Costin was driving it up to the circuit after working on it day and night, when he fell asleep and woke up on a roundabout,’ he explains. ‘The car was making a terrible noise, so he rushed back to the factory before the police could arrive. Colin therefore asked if he could borrow my MkVI for Practice, but I think he must have over-revved the engine because on the first lap of my race, it blew up.’
At this stage of his competition career, Mike was still driving the MkVI to races and then driving home again. ‘I was up at Snetterton one day, going down the straight, and there was a big bang. When we took the cylinder head off in the pits, we could see the road through the engine, so there wasn’t much hope. Jack Sears took my wife Anne and I home to sleep at his house, we caught the train next day back home to Brighton, and Brian Lister delivered the car to Brighton for 12 quid, which wasn’t bad!’
Not all of Mike’s racing contemporaries were so obliging. Mike soon fell out with the aforementioned Mr Chapman…
‘Colin could be a sharp operator,’ he says wryly, ‘and I’ll give you an example. In 1955, I decided I wanted to move into the two-litre class, which was dominated by Bristols. So Colin agreed to make me a Lotus MkX, with a Bristol engine. When it was nearly finished, he told me, “I’ve had the chance to buy some special brakes for you, but they’ll be £1000.” I said, “Don’t be silly, the car’s only £1000.” “Ah, but these are very special. Pay me when you sell the car later.”
‘So I agreed to have the brakes, and I was at Charterhall on the long straight, and I was finding that I’d have to start pumping the brakes halfway down the straight to get them ready for the next corner. I sought advice from Wilkie Wilkinson, the chief mechanic of Ecurie Ecosse. “Where do you start pumping them?” “Towards the end of the straight.” “Oh, we start pumping them before we get to the straight at Le Mans!”
‘Wilkie then suggested that I have a word with the Dunlop rep, who greeted me by saying, “So how are you getting on with those experimental brakes that we gave Chapman?” So I wrote to Colin and told him that he wouldn’t be getting any more money from me, other than 20 quid for the brackets he’d made up – and he sued me in the High Court. The first day of the hearing turned out to be the first day of practice at Le Mans, so Colin didn’t turn up, and I won by default!’
Not surprisingly, relations between the two were frosty for a while, but Mike did end up buying another Lotus from Chapman.
‘I bought an Eleven and laid a Bristol engine on its side in it. That was a disaster… It would have been clever, if it had worked; in fact, it did work but only spasmodically, and in hindsight I should have dry-sumped it.’
A more successful conversion by Mike was his Standard Vanguard race-car transporter, inspired by the Mercedes Renntransporter. ‘I asked my local chassis repairer to let me know when they had a damaged Vanguard in. A few months later they rang up and said that Coombs of Guildford had just written-off a Vanguard with a damaged front, so I asked them to cut the front off and I’d have the rest. Using a scrap van bought for £150, I joined the various pieces together and extended the wheelbase by 5ft 6in, with steel-angle welded to the chassis to strengthen it.
‘The engine came from a scrap Vanguard, and I did a lot of work on the head so that I could fit modified downdraught Solex PBI32 carburettors to clear the steering column. The vehicle would cruise quite happily at 85mph, helped by an overdrive gearbox that I’d taken out of my father’s Vanguard without him knowing! He only used the car around town and so he never used the overdrive…
‘One day at Silverstone, the BRDC secretary asked if I would be interested in £500 starting money – the catch being that the race was in Bari, in Southern Italy. And this was in the days before autostradas.
‘A mate and I got halfway down Italy before the water pump spindle broke. I blanked off the pump and we drove on thermo-siphon the rest of the way, with no temperature problems at all. Coming back, I’d ordered a new pump to be collected from
‘I DIDN’T LIKE THE JAGUAR D-TYPE – TOO LIGHT AT THE FRONT – BUT I GOT DOWN TO MIKE HAWTHORN’S TIME, WHICH I WAS PLEASED WITH’
Rome airport, but they wanted me to pay duty on it, so I told them to keep the bloody thing and I drove off again!’
Mike’s ability as a racing driver led to a drive in Marcus Sieff’s Jaguar D-type at Goodwood, and another in an Ecurie Ecosse D-type at Silverstone, but he didn’t enjoy either. ‘At Silverstone, I lost it at Abbey, the long left-hander, which was a sod in the wet in the “D”. I didn’t like the D-type – too light at the front – but I got down to Mike Hawthorn’s time, which I was pleased with.’
There was also a brief period racing the exMille Miglia AC Ace, PYF 800, owned by dentist Malcolm Knights (featured in Octane 167) and fitted with the Bristol engine from Mike’s own Lotus MkX. Mike and the Ace scored a notable victory at a wet Spa in 1958, beating the 22-year-old Jim Clark into fifth place. ‘It was Jimmy’s first race abroad for Border Reivers, driving a Porsche, so we rather took him under our wing. He was a very nice chap,’ Mike reflects.
He grows sombre as he recalls some of his other racing contemporaries who died too young. ‘I had two co-drivers killed in races. Mike Keen and I were sharing a CooperBristol in the Goodwood Nine Hours; he tried to take Fordwater flat-out, went off into the infield and hit a stook of corn. It was very upsetting. And my former co-driver Mark Lund – who had got the best result my Bristol-engined Lotus Eleven ever achieved, when he won at Brands Hatch – was killed testing for Aston Martin.’
The Bristol-engined Lotus Eleven led to Mike’s last ‘serious’ race car, a ListerChevrolet. ‘Archie Scott Brown always beat me, and when he went to Lister to drive a Lister Jaguar I decided I wanted a Lister Chevrolet. If only I’d been sensible!
‘Bob Hicks bought me a Chevy V8 for £40 from an American car dump in Paris, and I bored and stroked it to 5.5 litres and fitted four twin-choke downdraught Solexes. They were buggers to tune! It broke the record at the Brighton Speed Trials by doing 139mph over the line – on seven cylinders, because I’d taken a plug lead off due to water in a cylinder – but I sold it at the end of the year for £875. I saw it advertised for sale last year for a million pounds.’
Changing tack dramatically, Mike moved to Formula Junior for a few seasons, initially driving front-engined, single-seater Elvas. ‘I raced with the Fitzwilliam team and before we got the cars I would go up to the factory in Hastings and help build them. I loved Formula Junior and won a lot of races, particularly in Denmark. I was very fond of Copenhagen, which had a track you could fit in my back garden. I used to get everybody to go to Copenhagen – Moss, Brabham, Surtees, Hill – and on the Sunday evening after a race we’d all go to the Belle Terrace restaurant and have a great time.’
The Elvas were followed by a rear-engined Gemini in 1962, which Mike also assembled, but growing family commitments impelled him to hang up his racing helmet. He took over the family business trading in furs, which his father had set up after the War; when the bottom fell out of the fur trade, he bought a Shell service station and went into business making the chassis for Southern Roadcraft Cobra replicas. Other projects included a Lotus Esprit display race-car built from a spare shell – commissioned by Lotus for the Geneva motor show – and in latter years several go-karts for his grandchildren, based on electrically powered invalid cars. ‘They’re so well-engineered; the back axle is an aluminium casting and it even has a diff.’
Looking back, he muses: ‘I suppose what I’m most proud of is that I built, prepared and raced my own cars single-handedly for most of my career. “Ambition beyond ability ” probably sums it up best. I’ve always been rushing around like a bloody idiot.’
Long may he continue to do so.