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The Automobile

A magazine celebrating cars from the golden age of automotive engineering, design and motor sport

18/07/2025

1903 Panhard Et Lavassor as featured in the latest issue

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17/07/2025

In the latest issue of The Automobile ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Monte Carlo or bust

Donald Healey’s rally-winning Invicta S-type has just been rebuilt to its original specification. Mick Walsh was given an exclusive look at the formidable lightweight

Auto-biography

Giles Chapman meets Ernie Unger, the unsung engineer behind one of Britain’s most innovative postwar sports cars

Concours at Como

It was a battle of Grand Prix versus grandeur at Villa d’Este, says Jörg Sierks, with an eyebrow-raising victor

The car of a thousand questions

A chance discovery of the sole surviving complete Fiam car led Francisco Carrión Cardenas on a quest to unravel the mysterious history of this forgotten Italian marque

A ’Nash for all seasons

Often neglected in favour of its wind-in-the-hair brethren, the Frazer Nash Le Mans Coupé remains an underrated gem. Richard Heseltine drives an immaculate survivor and wonders why it isn’t more greatly lauded

Patina perfection

This 1903 Panhard has never had a full restoration, but is one of the sprightliest and most useable Veteran cars out there. Long may it continue, says Zack Stiling

Last days at the Track

Matt Shepherd travels to Brooklands for the circuit’s final season, with help from hitherto unpublished photographs

Back on the Road

We report on the restoration of a 1929 Austin 16 Iver, which was used as a farm hack in the 1950s by the current owner’s father and now rebuilt after more than half a century of slumber

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11/07/2025

Incredible period photos of dirt road hill-climbs in an Austro Daimler ADM III 🏁

10/07/2025

Merwin Dembling’s 1952 summary of the Seven in the American magazine
Sports Car Illustrated

‘British motorists fall into two main categories: Austin Seven enthusiasts, and people who can afford an automobile.

‘“Sevenosis”, like measles, is a childhood disease almost everybody goes through. If caught in time, it can be cured by small but regular doses of income, but the recovery rate is not 100 per cent. Some people remain hypnotized by the fact that, though undergeared and underpowered, it can transport four people from A to B in relative comfort and at a moderate speed’

📸 Reverend Pixel

Read the full article in the August 2022 issue of The Automobile ⬇️⬇️⬇️

https://www.theautomobile.co.uk/product/back-issue-august-2022/

04/07/2025

Australian 🇦🇺 Derek Jolly’s highly successful Austin 7 racing car 1950 🇦🇺

03/07/2025

Driver Douglas Hawkes is thought to have convinced W O Bentley to enter the Indy 500 to boost interest in the new Bentleys, which was at this point a young company.

‘We had to have everything made,’ said W O, ‘gearbox, clutch, differential, bearings, stub axles – everything.

‘There were no proprietary makers we could draw on, no ready-made back axles, gearboxes, universal joints with drive shaft and so on. To design and build a new motor car in 1919 was like being cast on a desert island with a penknife and orders to build a house’

Rolled out near the end of April 1922, the aggressive-looking Indianapolis Bentley was and would remain unpainted save for its red wire wheels. A distinctive feature was the drilling for lightness of handbrake and gear levers.

The weight of the Indy car could not have been much more than its chassis weight of 1156kg. Taken to Brooklands for a shakedown, the racer proved to Hawkes and his riding mechanic Bert Browning that it looked and was quick, reaching a promising 95mph.

In the 1922 Indy 500, the Bentley finished in a respectable 13th place at an average speed of 74.95mph

27/06/2025

British Salmson S4C based on a French design and built in the UK.

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📸 Stefan Marjoram|Art & Photography

Photo from the May 2025 issue 👓

26/06/2025

A vexing question is why ERA’s proposed four-litre sports car was never finished and what really prevented the firm from developing a simpler, cheaper sports car with a broad market appeal.

The company made an attempt to produce a high-performance four-litre sports car to compete against, for example, Lagonda in the passenger car market. For a variety of reasons, the project was stillborn. Without any potential for commercial income, ERA could not survive.

It appears that by May, 1938, one ERA sports car engine was running on the dynamometer, and that there were sufficient parts for a second unit.

The sports car was to employ all-independent suspension, using trailing arms like the Porsche-patent front ends adopted for the single-seater ERAs, but with coil springs instead of torsion bars as the springing medium. It was to use a four-speed all-synchromesh gearbox with an overdrive top gear.

However, the designer, Murray Jamieson, the same man who designed Austin’s superb 750cc twin-cam racer, was fatally injured whilst spectating at Brooklands in 1938 stalling ERA’sm sports car project.

The power unit was to be ‘a big six with two carburetters’ incorporating several ideas of Jamieson’s own, including ‘two oil sumps, the smaller in the usual position and the larger alongside the crankcase’. This concept was developed to prevent oil starvation and to heat the oil more quickly.

The lesser known story about ERA as told by Doug Nye and Illustrated by Stefan Marjoram|Art & Photography

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13/06/2025

This 1913 Napier Type 44 20/35HP will be sold by RM Sotheby’s in July

📸 James Lynch

12/06/2025

IN THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE AUTOMOBILE:

MEXICAN STANDOFF

Facing stiff competition from Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari built a team of three special V12 340s
to contest the Carrera PanAmericana in 1952. Julian Balme gets behind the wheel of one of
them

THE HERMON CONUNDRUM

Two Hermon cars were built in 1936, but all trace of them was lost during the Second World
War – until one of them turned up after 70 years of storage. Christopher Scott MacKirdy
pieces together the true story

A SPORTING STANDARD

Eric Gordon England’s lightweight bodies will be familiar to Austin Seven owners, but the
London coachbuilder had further strings to his bow. Zack Stiling takes a look at a 1928
Standard Nine endowed with one of these stylish, sporting creations

BENTLEY AT THE BRICKYARD

In 1922, W O Bentley sent a specially-constructed racer to contest one of the toughest events
in the world: the Indianapolis 500. Karl Ludvigsen tells the story

EDWARDIAN GRANDEUR

Peter Card is smitten by a grand old lady in the form of a 1913 Napier 30/35hp from the
Boland Collection

THE SILENT SPHINX

Zack Stiling tries a 1952 Armstrong Siddeley Whitley and meets its enthusiastic custodian

JOHN’S JUNK

Jeroen Booij got more than he bargained for when he visited one of the last traditional
scrapyards in England some 30 years ago

BACK ON THE ROAD

We report on the restoration of a 1915 Singer 10hp that was formerly part of the Sharpe
Collection

Discover more in the latest issue of The Automobile ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

https://www.theautomobile.co.uk/product/latest-issue-july-2025/

06/06/2025

1958 Bentley S1 Honeymoon Express by Freestone & Webb currently up for sale by Fiskens

📸 Rob Cooper

05/06/2025

WELLESLEY SPECIAL
1937 4wd special with two BSA engines

The creator of the Wellesley Special, Richard Wellesley, was, as his family name suggests, the nephew of the Duke of Wellington.

Having been inspired by Robert Waddy’s 4wd special Fuzzi, Wellesley decided the easiest way to build himself a lightweight 4wd special would be to acquire two vee-twin BSA Three Wheelers and, in his own words, ‘cutting two of these to bits and welding them together, the front engine drove the front wheels and the back engine drove the back wheels’

He taught himself the basics of mechanical drawing, and designed the car on a drawing board, methodically laying out how the controls and linkages would work, which undoubtedly helped to get the car built in such a short space of time. The engines ran on the standard 26mm Solex carburetter and lengthy inlet manifold from the road car. The combined output of the two engines was 44bhp delivered through 3 forward speeds.

Suspension comprised of eight quarter-elliptic springs supporting the front hubs, which contained hook joints, the wheels being driven via shafts from the differential. It was an early form of independent suspension, and reduced unsprung weight in a way that became common on racing cars many years later. A single inboard brake acted on the differential, and the whole assembly would have been remarkably lightweight for its time

Wellesley’s special was put together in remarkably quick time – around seven months –and was completed in April, 1937. It was entered it for his first competitive event, the Lewes Speed Trials, on 8th May and was awarded fourth place in the re-handicapping class.

Wellesley said, ‘Off the start line it span all its wheels, and the front wheels went on spinning for about 12 yards. If you were lucky and you’d aimed the car right, you could steer it – just – until the spinning stopped and then, of course, you could steer properly’

Read more about Martin Bell’s recreation of the Wellesley Special in the July 2024 issue of The Automobile

https://www.theautomobile.co.uk/product/back-issue-july-2024/

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