When Eoin drives a New Zealand-built replica of the legendary HWM the experience brings back memories of the original cars — and one special HWM; the Stovebolt Special.
Words: Eoin young Photos: Terry Marshall
Phil Scragg was a hill climb champion in Britain when I was gathering an interest in motor sport as a scruffy bank clerk in Timaru; borrowing old copies of Motor Sport and imagining I was part of Scragg’s crew, linking with the special he had confected around a cycle-guarded HWM racing car fitted with a Jaguar engine. I never met Scragg, but he had inadvertently worked his way with me, and I was hooked on motor sport. I met up with namesake (no relation) David Young, and was soon passengering with him in the ex-Peter Whitehead C-type Jaguar that Sir Stirling Moss now campaigns in classic events.
The car Scragg flung up hills in the late ’50s was broader in the beam than the original elegant little F2 HWMs
The Scragg Jag came back into my life again this year when I visited Ross McGregor and he showed me photos of his special, a car that had literally been made around my memories of Phil Scragg and his HWM-Jaguar. Barry Gurdler was responsible for making my memories into a motor car when he commissioned the splendid Tempero family coach-building company in Oamaru to re-create a version of that car.
Next best thing
I should now pin my colours to the mast and confess that I am an enthusiast for the feel and the excitement of old sporting machinery, and I don’t much mind whether the machinery is pedigree or not. To a large degree — well, to a total degree — this is because I could never afford a real one, so in my book a replica is the next best thing. I am made aware, almost on a daily basis since I mix with vintagents, that there are originals and there are fakes, and gentlemen do not discuss or associate with the non-original.
I had my own share of non-originality when I bought a Kougar in the UK. Dick Crosthwaite — the specialist engineer who has built Auto Union GP cars from the rubber up — had the idea of re-creating the Le Mans Replica Frazer-Nash powered by a Dolomite Sprint engine. A sort of replica-replica. But the Aldington family, which owned the Frazer-Nash name, scotched the project after the initial run had been made. Dick figured it was too good an idea to dump, so he scaled up the design to take a Jaguar engine, and the Kougar was created. It was a sort of poor-man’s C-type or
D-type, and I bought it from Stephen Langton’s Reigate emporium for £7500. Back then I thought it looked greata. When I look at photographs now it looks fairly awful. I loved driving it, and it always drew a crowd. Until a bloke in a petrol station came over, congratulated me on my motor car — and then asked where the spare wheel was. That was when it dawned on me that it didn’t have one. For the rest of the five weeks I owned the Kougar I was paranoid about getting a puncture¦
Jaguar special
Barry Gurdler commissioned the Tempero company to build a car in the spirit of the Scragg hill climb Jaguar, and in my eyes it’s my dream come true. Officialdom claims the car can’t even be a replica, because they’ve defined a replica as, in this case a car, that having every component replicating the original while not actually being an original. So it’s that dread four-letter word starting with ‘f’ — fake. There. I’ve said it. Everyone happy now?
It never left the HWM factory — Hersham & Walton Motors at Walton on Thames — so it can in no way claim to be an HWM, and never mind the fact that the current HWM management was delighted to send Gurdler original badges, key-rings and other trinkets. They even offered him a chassis number. In the eyes of vintage officialdom the car can only exist as a Jaguar Special, and everyone can ooh and aah over it, give it the accolade it deserves and have a clear conscience.
The car Scragg flung up hills in the late ’50s was broader in the beam than the original elegant little F2 HWMs. There was another HWM fitted with a small-block Chev V8, and it gained classic fame in the States as the Stovebolt Special. This feature will be a marriage of stories combining backgrounds and driving impressions. I have always wondered why a Queenstown-based group set off to build a series of cars copying the handsome single-seater F2 HWMs when it could have copied the first HWMs, which were one-and-a-half seaters. The replicas — sorry, fakes — could then have been made road legal, and offered the opportunity of taking a passenger.
The engine-turned alloy dash gives a vintage visual massage for the driver who is anxious to be carried back to the ’50s
It’s my contention that Tempero made a better job of the re-creation than HWM did half a century earlier. Maybe retro-engineering assisted. The twin-skinned alloy body is a good-looker, but Ross McGregor says it means a measure of problems in that the body panels can’t be removed. The engine cover and the boot lid have Dzus fasteners. The rear wheel lives in the boot. The car commands attention. “Nice bum on it,” observes Errol Norris, he who built and raced the EN Special longer ago than he cares to remember, and not a man who makes idle comment. The windscreen is full width.
On the road
Goggles would have made a good drive great, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable. The engine-turned alloy dash gives a vintage visual massage for the driver who is anxious to be carried back to the ’50s. The big black-faced Smiths instruments and switchgear are from the donor vehicle. The 4.2-litre Jaguar engine has a four-speed overdrive gearbox. I couldn’t remember where reverse was that first time, when I desperately needed it, with the front wheels aimed over the abyss on Godley Heights as I was trying to turn it for another photo run for lens wizard, Terry Marshall.
It’s fitted with disc brakes all round, inboard rears and outboard fronts as on the donor Jaguar. There were Jaguar wires on each corner. The driver has a super view, sighting out over the louvred bonnet, sitting in squat broad buckets. There’s no driver’s door but one for the passenger, possibly in the interests of female decorum. There was a white roundel on the flank for a racing number. Ross had reminded me about the habit of the car to jack-rabbit on tentative acceleration. It was a car that liked to be shown who was boss, and in my brief drive I regret to say it wasn’t always me being boss.
Stovebolt
I was aware that my old mate Murray Smith had owned the Stovebolt Special in the States. I rode from Paris to Monaco in a vintage Monte Carlo Rally a decade or so ago in his 3/4.5-litre Bentley and he told me tales of the Stovebolt which sounded like the ideal marriage of car and engine. Fellow columnist Simon Taylor now owns the Stovebolt in the UK, and he was kind enough to recount the story of his car, as culled from various publications of the day and his own exciting experiences with it.
Simon became editor of Autosport in 1968, became a director of Haymarket Publications in 1975, was MD from 1980 to ’95 and chairman from 1995 until 2000, when he stood down to concentrate on writing and broadcasting — and racing his beloved Stovebolt Special. You must appreciate that Simon has always been an enthusiast.
The original HWMs
HWM built four offset-single-seater F2 cars with Alta engines for the 1950 season, and the small team included the legendary Alf Francis, who would go on to work closely with Stirling Moss. The bodies were made by Leacroft, a local panel shop run by racing driver Bob Cowell, who would later change sex and become Roberta. There were three works cars and a customer car. Simon’s car was the only one of the four to carry a chassis plate.
In those days it was easier to cross borders with whatever chassis number was convenient; “It was the third of the three 1950 works cars and yet it carried the number HWM 49-02, probably because team owner John Heath wanted any inquisitive customs man to think the car was at least a year old! Each car was hand built and had visible detail differences — aero screen mountings, body catches, body louvres — which has made it possible, when looking at photographs, to identify which car was driven by which driver.”
The engine-turned alloy dash gives a vintage visual massage for the driver who is anxious to be carried back to the ’50s
Belgian jazz man Johnny Claes — his band was known as Johnny Claes and his Clay Pigeons — raced Simon’s HWM in the first three 1950 races, Rudi Fischer raced it twice and then Stirling Moss took it over for the 1950 F2 race at Reims, finishing third behind Ascari’s works Ferraris and Andre Simon’s Gordini. It would be fair to say that Stirling’s next race in the car that would become the Stovebolt Special — the 1950 Bari Grand Prix for F1 cars — promoted Moss into the international spotlight. He finished third again, but this time beaten only by Farina and Fangio in the works F1 Alfa Romeos and ahead of Levegh’s Talbot, Cortese’s Ferrari and Biondetti’s Maserati. In the Naples GP a fortnight later he was leading the final, ahead of the Ferraris, when a back marker moved over on him and he hit a tree.
Simon: “He staggered semi-conscious from the wreck with a smashed kneecap and his front teeth knocked out. When I told Stirling 49 years later that I’d bought the car, he said, ‘Have a look in the under-tray, boy. Perhaps you’ll find my teeth!’”
The wreck was eventually rebuilt and sold to a wealthy Swiss, Count Jacques de Wurstemburger, who raced as ‘Herve’ when pseudonyms were popular among wealthy sportsmen so their fathers wouldn’t be aware of their dangerous pursuits.
Toulo de Graffenried, another wealthy Swiss who had won the British GP at Silverstone in 1949, told de Wurstemburger that Twentieth Century Fox was planning a movie called The Racers, with Kirk Douglas as the hero, and it needed cars. As there was no GP at Monaco in 1952, the movie people staged their own. Kirk Douglas refused to leave Hollywood, so the American driver John Fitch was signed as technical director and doubled as Douglas in the race scenes that included a spoof crash with the HWM. They also used Spa and Reims and did final filming, now with Douglas at the wheel, in Hollywood.
Bargain buy
Tom Carstens, a top sports car racer in West Coast events, learned that the movie’s cars were for sale and offered to buy the slightly-battered HWM for $5000. He was told that Fox was in the movie business, not the motor business, and if he wanted the HWM he would have to take the two 4CLT Maseratis and a brace of sports-racing Ferraris as a package — all for his offered $5000! He sold the Italian cars, which helped fund the total rebuild of the HWM, a make-over that included a Chevy V8 from Edelbrock, a Jaguar gearbox, a Halibrand quick-change diff and Halibrand disc brakes.
The September 1956 issue of the American magazine Sports Cars Illustrated devoted eight pages to the transformation, and christened the new car the Stovebolt Special in its cover headline. The hot-rod people dismissed this because they regarded the flat-head Chevrolet six-cylinder as a Stovebolt, and the V8 was something else again.
It would be fair to say that Stirling’s next race in the car that would become the Stovebolt Special — the 1950 Bari Grand Prix for F1 cars — promoted Moss into the international spotlight
Simon: “The car was taken back to Tacoma, Washington, where it was worked on by Dave Fogg, an Allard racer and friend of Tom Carstens. Tom really wanted to get back at the rich Ferrari-owning Californians, who scoffed at the hick loggers from the Washington forests, calling them squirrels. So Dave made up a delightful little brass plaque with the legend ‘Made in the Woods by Squirrels’. It’s still on the car today.”
The car had a hectic and successful racing life until the mid-’60s, when it was laid up in the back of a garage to be re-discovered, and eventually restored, by John ‘Bat’ Masterson, who fitted Wilwood disc brakes and a four-speed Chevy gear box, and raced in historic events in the early 1980s. Murray Smith bought the historic old vehicle a few years later, and Simon — who had known the car since reading that copy of Sports Cars Illustrated as a 12-year-old schoolboy dreaming about racing as a public school boarder — made his 43-year-old dream come true by buying the Stovebolt.
They made the perfect partnership. “During the 2001 season I did several hill climbs, and generally learned about the car. I didn’t want to be bothered with tow cars and trailers, as I regard driving the car to and from events as part of the fun of owning it.” Peter Denty did another restorative rebuild over the winter of 2001/2 and Mike Huddart rebuilt the Chev V8, replacing the worn-out Stromberg carburettors with a trio of small twin-choke Rochesters. He saw 420bhp on the dyno, with 430lb/ft of torque.
Simon’s proudest performance in the Stovebolt was taking it to Laguna Seca in 2003. “It practiced on Friday — we qualified 12th out of 23, which I was happy with as I’d never been to the place, even though the car had! — and in the race on Saturday we worked up to eighth, two places behind Phil Hill in the Mille Miglia Alfa coupe. Then on Sunday we peeled off the numbers, drove it onto the lawns at Pebble Beach, and got second in class in the concours. It must have been just about the only car on the Monterey Peninsula that weekend that raced at Laguna Seca, was shown at Pebble Beach, and travelled between the two in the Californian traffic jams under its own power. It’s that kind of car¦”
