Mike Loasby of Aston, DeLorean and more
Free-thinking engineers like this are rare today. Peter Tomalin meets the architect of past Astons and a whole lot more
‘I’VE BEEN SO FORTUNATE to meet and work with so many brilliant people. Lovely people, too. Most of them…’ A mischievous gleam is never far from the eye of Mike Loasby. Now in his early 80s, still married to the girl he met more than 60 years ago and ‘semi-retired’ in bucolic Shropshire, Loasby is as sharp and lucid as ever. He’s the classic English gent, slightly schoolmasterly, a stickler for accuracy, but with a sense of fun and a gift for understatement. He makes ‘good copy’, as editors say.
Kenneth Michael Loasby – but always Michael or Mike – was born in Coventry, so a career in the industry might have been pre-ordained. His father’s work, however, saw them relocate to rural South Wales when he was a boy.
‘My father was technical director of British Nylon Spinners, and they wanted to set up a factory in a depressed area. So we moved from the city to the country and I got hooked into farming and veterinary surgery. In the meantime I met Anne – and cars, both of which changed the pattern of my life somewhat.’
Veterinary science’s loss was engineering’s gain. In 1957, aged 19, he left Monmouth School and after a ‘wasted year’ joined Alvis as an engineering apprentice. ‘I was not spectacularly successful as an academic, and was obviously panicking my parents. However, they did sponsor me to race a Lotus XI at the time, which introduced me to the marvels of swing-axle suspension.’
Loasby got to know the Lotus first on the road, often using it for the 105-mile commute from Wales to Alvis’s Coventry works. ‘My best time was 87 minutes for a route that passed through Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Evesham. Mind you, the roads were a lot quieter then’.
At Alvis, the management were happy for him to spend time tuning the Lotus. ‘They apparently considered it part of my training,’ he explains. ‘Alvis was one of the best apprenticeships you could get. I met interesting people like Hermann Graber [founder of the eponymous Swiss coachbuilder best known for clothing Alvis chassis].
Latterly, Mike Dunn [Ford, Rolls-Royce] was chief engineer and gave me lots of opportunities to develop.’
Loasby was employed primarily in the car drawing office, but he was by no means constrained. ‘I did a lot of test driving – including the fighting vehicles – and a lot of engine design. We developed the straight-six from around 110bhp to around 150bhp. We even got one to over 200bhp. Tremendous fun and great experience for me.’
When it became apparent by the mid-60s that Alvis was going to stop building cars, Loasby jumped ship to Coventry Climax as a senior designer. He led a small team working on lightweight engines for military operations, though the business’s racing side was a major attraction.
‘I got to know Wally Hassan and Harry Mundy [esteemed engineers, best known for their work at Jaguar] and also Harry Spears, who ran the engine test and engine build for racing engines. They were winding the racing side down by that point, though I did have the pleasure of the flat-16 on one occasion.’
In his own racing career, Loasby had progressed to a second Lotus with Webers and wishbone suspension. ‘We had some good racing but it wasn’t deadly serious. I had a big ding at Goodwood. A track-rod end broke as I hammered past the pits and I went straight on at Madgwick and into the barrier. I was patched up at Chichester Hospital but my own doctor then grounded me for a month with concussion, abrasions and shock. I didn’t race for a couple of years after that.’
When he got the bug again, he built a Formula 3 Brabham with Alvis friend Brian Leake and the help of old school chum Alan Rees, who later co-founded March Engineering with his fellow Monmouth alumnus, Robin Herd. ‘For a couple of seasons we had a lot of fun and quite a few podiums. But we didn’t have the money and we were having children by then, so we packed it in and sold the lot. We missed it, but there were lots of other interesting things to do.’
Loasby had been with Coventry Climax only a year or so when fate played a decisive hand. ‘A friend came round one day and said: “Have you seen this?” It was an advertisement in the Coventry Evening Telegraph for a development engineer at Aston Martin Lagonda. I thought, well, might as well have a go. And I got the job!’
The interview was conducted by Aston’s chief engineer, Tadek Marek, who at that time (late 1966) was overseeing the development of the new V8 engine and the DBS. The expat Pole was coming towards the end of his career and had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Fortunately he and Loasby hit it off from the start. ‘A true gentleman,’ is how Mike remembers him. ‘We got on terribly well, I think because we thought the same way. He allowed me to get on with what I wanted to do. It was enormous fun.
‘Tadek was not a well man, really. He harrumphed about the place, chain-smoking Gauloises, he only had one kidney and he didn’t have terribly good eyesight. But he was an amazing driver, even then.
‘We had a DB4 and a DB5 with the V8 engine in, and we’d go down to his place in Italy. Startling performance. The DB5 had a racing V8 with four twin-choke Webers. You could spin the wheels in third gear in the dry.
‘It was an immensely exciting time for me. I was doing probably about 90% of the test driving. We used to bomb down the road to Woburn Sands – excellent test route, fast corners, bumpy with good kicks on them.
‘The police attitude was: “You’ve got your job to do, I’ve got mine.” Then the 70mph limit came in. I was coming down the motorway from MIRA, driving quite slowly, probably around 90, and the sergeant said: “What were you doing then? Having a burn-up?” It was the first time I’d been pinched for speeding. After that I averaged about once every seven years. Occupational hazard…
‘My first real job was to go to the wind tunnel with the Lola [the Aston V8-engined T70 Le Mans car], which wasn’t doing what it was expected to do. It wasn’t going very fast, because they had huge spoilers on the back which put the drag up enormously. We did a few modifications, took some of the flaps off, and it eventually did 205mph or so at Le Mans. Not bad in those days.
‘We had a number of problems with the engine, but the problem at Le Mans [which caused the Lola’s early retirement] was not one of those. Tadek was really upset because the race team changed the plugs for the race and burnt the pistons out in a few laps.
‘Back at the factory, he ran engines on the test beds for 24 hours to prove the point. We had lots of complaints from the neighbours about that. They used to ring the police station but no-one would answer the phone because the police were round with us, watching!’
The DBS, then with the six-cylinder engine, also benefited from time in the wind tunnel. ‘The car was slow – we could just about creep to 140 in it. So we got it in the wind tunnel and the drag was awful. We found the air
flow was separating, either at the top or the bottom of the rear window. It also had alarming front-end lift. Motorways in the main are fairly straight, but Jabbeke in Belgium has one or two wiggles which become fairly apparent when you’re doing 140. It felt as though the front was off the ground – an alarming feeling when the steering goes light. So we tried an under-spoiler at the front. We knew so little about aerodynamics in those days. It’s frightening when you look back.
‘We used to do special engines for the road-test cars, but then everyone was at it. Jaguar, to the best of my knowledge, never got more than 200bhp out of their 4.2.’
When the V8 engine made it into the DBS, the performance took a serious leap. ‘We were trying the new Brico fuel injection. We took a V8 down to Italy and it worked a treat – we exceeded 170mph on the motorway. But there were problems with it and they went back to carburettors. People get frightened…
‘We had a lot of trouble with the wire wheels, spokes becoming loose, which was not desirable. We also had solid discs, which were overheating, before we switched to vented discs. Basically the rest of the car was yet to catch up with the performance of the engine, which made around 350bhp, though production cars had less.’
In late 1969 Loasby was tempted away from Aston. He was offered the position of executive engineer at Triumph, responsible for the design of all engines for worldwide markets, a position he held for nearly six years. ‘I worked on the slant-four and the V8, and I reckon I did about 90% of the Rover-Triumph straight-six for the SD1.’
But in 1975 he was persuaded back to Newport Pagnell by the new owners who had brought the company back from the brink. As chief engineer, Loasby was responsible for refining the V8 and engineering brand new projects – including the spectacular wedge-shaped Lagonda.
‘The biggest sorrow I have over the Lagonda is the electronic systems. I’d decided that electronics were the future – everything was still crude and mechanical in those days, and it was all wrong. It occupied so much space. Electronic instrumentation was completely new, but I thought we’d scratch something together for the first few cars and pretty soon everyone would be doing electronics and we’d be able to pick something up.
‘It didn’t work out like that. Cranfield University got involved but they didn’t have the practical knowledge. We had a bootful of electronics that didn’t work.’ Delays and teething problems plagued the Lagonda, though it eventually found a lucrative market in the Middle East.
Rather easier, and very much a Loasby creation, was the 1977 Vantage. ‘We’d improved the standard V8, then we thought it would be fun to do a faster version. So we did a sporty tune and increased the horsepower to about 380-390. We also spent a lot of time developing the exhaust to make a nice noise. I personally don’t like V8s all that much, but we managed to get the Vantage sounding somewhere between a V8 and a V12. I remember one night coming out of Earls Court, following a Ferrari. The noise echoed beautifully along the streets.
‘We got the drag right down in the wind tunnel. It felt like a railway engine with the front right down over that spoiler, and it easily exceeded 160mph. We had a lot of cars coming back with accident damage in the early days because people didn’t realise how fast they were going.’
Loasby also instigated the Bulldog supercar project, with its twin-turbo V8. ‘We had two engines, the cooking version at 700bhp and the “sporty” version at 800-odd. The test-bed at Aston was designed for only 200bhp, so you had to start the engine up with a low amount of weights on the balance because it wouldn’t speed up with all the weights on. As the revs rose you’d rush around putting on more weights, then stand well clear!’
He didn’t, though, witness the Bulldog fully grown. At that point he wasn’t seeing eye-to-eye with Aston Martin’s then managing director, Alan Curtis. ‘The company wasn’t big enough for both of us, and he owned it, so…’
Word got around that Loasby wasn’t happy at AML. Someone contacted him from DeLorean, which was hiring for its sports car project in Northern Ireland. So at the end of 1978 he joined the DeLorean Motor Company as director of product engineering.
The omens weren’t good from the start. ‘Bill Collins [formerly chief engineer at Pontiac] had designed quite a radical car with a load-bearing plastic chassis, and I thought I was going to DeLorean to productionise that car. But then I joined, only to find that it had been stitched-up by Colin Chapman and was effectively going to be a Lotus with a stainless steel body.
‘I had very little influence on the car, although I do read things that I apparently did that sound like good ideas! I was involved in laying out the production line, the engineering department and the test track. But the car was a semi-disaster, really. It wasn’t well-engineered, 130bhp was pathetic and the suspension design was very ordinary. It used to go into negative castor if you lifted over a rise, and the back gave you roll-oversteer. But all they wanted to do was get it into production. The first 400 that went to the States had to be stripped and rebuilt.
‘I was promoted sideways as director of new projects, but you never knew what was going on – knowledge was power, as they say. I won’t mention names, but there were one or two people I will never talk to again. Anne and I did, however, make a lot of very good Irish friends.’
In 1982, with DMC clearly on the skids, Mike quit on what he and Anne called Good Thursday – ‘It was closed on Good Friday, so I couldn’t hand my notice in’ – and started his own company, Midland Design Partnership. Over the next two decades he engineered everything from cars to coffee machines.
One client was FF Developments, for which he designed 11 four-wheel-drive systems, some for Ford and Jaguar: a 4WD XJS got as far as a pair of prototypes before Jaguar went off the idea. He also returned to Aston Martin, as a consultant, for one final stint from 1989 to 1998, working first on the Virage and later on a series of special-bodied V8s for the Sultan of Brunei.
With such strong Aston Martin links, it’s no surprise that a modern V8 Vantage today shares garage space with a BMW 135. ‘I love the Aston,’ he says. ‘Such a beautifully balanced car – you can steer it from the back or the front.’
Extra-curricular work over the years has included an F2 car and engine, a flat-four racing bike engine, a convertible Jaguar XJC and a mid-engined sports car. And Mike has still found time to get his private pilot’s licence, pursue his love of classical music and enjoy frequent skiing holidays. ‘We decided to call it a day in 2015, though, after Anne ruptured the ligaments in her knee.’
The couple have two sons. John, the mathematician, works in the printing industry. Simon studied engineering and design and has since had his own motor-industry career. He currently heads Hyundai’s design department.
It was Simon who brought his father’s old Brabham F3 car back into the Loasby fold. ‘We sold it in ’67 or so,’ says Mike, ‘and it went all round the world before coming back to the UK. The owner didn’t want to part with it, but eventually he yielded so it’s now back in the family.’ Simon also recently acquired a DeLorean, representing another chapter in the Loasby family story.
On that theme, where might they fit the Alvis Stalwart 6x6? Looks like they’ll need a bigger garage.
‘I HAD LITTLE INFLUENCE ON THE DELOREAN, BUT IREADTHINGSTHATI APPARENTLY DID THAT SOUND LIKE GOOD IDEAS’