High Performance,

ALAN JUDD

High Performance: When Britain Ruled the Roads Simon & Schuster £20 Accounts of the post-second World War British motor industry usually make depressing reading.

With steel rationing and pressure to export or die, most manufacturers initially produced updated versions of 1930s cars. For a time it worked, making Britain temporarily the largest carexporter in the world. But it was downhill thereafter: too many manufacturers, cars designed only for British roads, taxation policies that meant most were underpowered, conservative and out-of-touch managements, mergers that didn’t work and an increasingly truculent labour force encouraged by unions to strike until there were no jobs left.

Peter Grimsdale knows all this but gives a very different and uplifting slant to the story by concentrating on successes. He focuses on people who did things differently and whose achievements are with us still, either because we collect them or because their successors are still achieving. His subjects include: William Lyons, founder of Jaguar; Colin Chapman of Lotus, who taught the industry to ‘add lightness’; Alec Issigonis, designer of the Morris Minor and the Mini; John Cooper and Donald Healey, who could make anything go faster; Stirling Moss, Paddy Hopkirk and Jim Clark, who proved it; Malcolm Sayer, the mathematician who designed the E-type; and David Bache, who made Rover what it was while running a sideline in tailoring.

There’s also a shoal of lesser-known influential figures: Walter Hassan, whose fire-pump engine triumphed in Formula 1; ex-us serviceman Bob Blake, who fashioned the E-type’s hardtop without a drawing; Gerry Coker, who designed just two cars – the Austin Healey and the Sprite; and the glitzy Lady Docker, whose Daimler with 7,000 gold stars, gold-plated radiator and hubcaps, and silk interior with Cartier fittings, was an infusion of glamour into drab post-war Britain.

We are accustomed now to seeing British-made or -driven cars winning F1 Grands Prix; yet before the Second World War, only one had ever done so. After Bentley’s Le Mans successes of the 1920s, Britain didn’t feature in performance motoring, on or off the track. Where Americans and Continentals were innovative, most British car-makers were risk-averse and complacent, sheltering from competition behind a 33.3% tariff wall, doing what was done before.

Significantly, few of the post-war generation Grimsdale writes about were trained engineers or designers; still less managers. They were enthusiasts who started under railway arches or in Nissen huts or the backyards of pubs, preying like magpies on the expertise of others. Colin Chapman strapped a leading aerodynamicist to the bonnet of a racing Lotus so that he could observe wind effects at 100mph.

An exception was William Lyons, whose early passion for motorbikes led him to make sidecars. By the age of 21, he and a partner had founded the successful Swallow Sidecar Company with money borrowed from their fathers. He then turned to cars, and by the outbreak of war his SS Jaguars were popular enough to be dismissed by the motoring establishment as ‘Wardour Street Bentleys’. During wartime fire-watch duties, he and two employees dreamt up a new engine, the famous Jaguar six-cylinder, which was to last the rest of the century and dominate Le Mans in the Fifties. In the run-up to the 1948 London Motor Show, Lyons designed in two weeks the Jaguar XK120, a revolutionary sports car which set Jaguar on the

path to international success. Unable to draw and no good with his hands, Lyons approached car design like a sculptor, supervising others, who shaped his ideas in wire, wood and metal. He had an almost flawless eye for line and elegance and a genius for communicating his vision to the men with hammers.

Most of the innovative vehicles Grimsdale describes in this thoughtful and stimulating account were the products not of committees or focus groups but of individual minds like Lyons’s, harnessing and inspiring those around them. It’s hard to say whether there’s still such scope with mass production, computer-aided design and AI but, as Grimsdale points out, our engineering skills are such that almost all F1 racing cars are made here, while the phoenixes that arose from the ashes of the British motor industry – Jaguar, Land Rover, Aston Martin, Bentley and Lotus – still carry the genes of their enthusiast founders.

The message, if there is one, is to let imagination thrive.