Words: Eoin Young
Photos: Terry Marshall
The little Connaught team always fought above its weight and was rewarded when a young man training to be a dentist became the first British driver to win a Grand Prix in a British car since Henry Segrave won the 1923 French GP in a Sunbeam. Tony Brooks beat the best Italy could field on the day when he won the 1955 Syracuse GP for Connaught, finishing over a mile ahead of Musso’s works Maserati, averaging a shade over 100mph and setting a new lap record. The 23-year-old had spent the flight to Syracuse studying dental textbooks for an upcoming examination.
Brooks says he was picked to drive for Connaught, “because they couldn’t find anyone else at short notice.” He had never driven the car before and he was racing against the Maserati works team! He couldn’t afford a hire car, so he learned the course on a scooter. As well, one of the aged Connaught transporters had broken down, missing the fi rst day of practice.
They told Brooks not to rev over 7000rpm, so he thought it wiser to stay under 6500rpm. Brooks and Musso disputed the lead, with Brooks saving his brakes and letting Musso past into the hairpin only to pass him on the way out. “Without realising it, he was playing cat-and-mouse with Musso, and he had completely demoralised the Italian,” wrote Denis Jenkinson in his Motor Sport report. ‘Done his head in,’ as they would write today¦
Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver
The Connaught team was the fruition of a dream by a pair of RAF pilots, Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver, who would join forces with a company called Continental Cars to set up as a Bugatti dealership post war, but when the French company failed to face the market in the ’40s, they concentrated on selling used Bugattis. The partners were kindred spirits, campaigning a pair of road equipped Grand Prix Bugattis — Oliver in a Type 35B single-cam 2.3, and Clarke in perhaps the fi nest Bugatti of all time, the Type 59 3.3-litre which ran against Mercedes and Auto Union, driven by Dreyfus, Brivio, Wimille and Nuvolari.
The pair’s first sports car was based on a Lea Francis, and three cars were built. In 1970 I bought a Jaguar-engined Kougar for £7500 from specialist dealer Stephen Langton, who took me on a tour of the barns that contained his stock. I had never seen one of his cars before, and he told me it was a 1948 Connaught L2 sports-racer. The price? The same as I’d just paid for the Kougar! I bought the Connaught as well, and sold it to Peter Briggs for his museum in York, Western Australia. As fate would have it, that same car came up for auction at the Bonhams Goodwood sale in July this year, where it sold for £30,000. The name Connaught was actually a mish-mash combination of Con-tinental and the word aut-omobile. It built cars for Formula 2 and then Formula 1 in the early ’50s as the Grand Prix grandees came and went, and for a few years F2 became F1 to maintain grids.
Under the hammer
Brooks scored Connaught’s famous victory in 1955, but after seven years of ambitions chasing dreams, the stark fi nancial reality arrived. The Autocar reporter in September 1957 could have been writing about Arrows in 2003: “Only when such an organisation is pulverised beneath the auctioneer’s hammer is the full measure of its background and the financial outlay involved appreciated. First there are the cars — those highly-bred and ever temperamental performers — together with their five transporters. Behind them, the many and varied props which support the glamorous motor racing scene. First, perhaps the drawing office, with its silent, studious equipment for the specialist designers and their trusted henchmen — stools and drawing boards, draughting and printing machinery, cabinets and accessories.
Nor can anything be made without a store of raw material, with its inevitable accumulated excess of one thing and shortage of another.” The Connaught auction was held over three days in mid-September 1957 and included “Six Connaught Formula 1 Grand Prix Racing Cars (fully prepared for Grand Prix racing) and with Full Racing Equipment.”
Nostalgia shared the limelight with the cars and the bidders. A faded newspaper cutting catches the mood. “When the Connaught ‘stable’ came under the auctioneer’s hammer in the racing car workshop at Send, Surrey, there was only a dusty garland of laurel leaves to remind bidders of the racing victories which the cars have won for Britain. The garland was the one presented to Tony Brooks when he won the Syracuse Grand Prix in a Connaught in 1955, when the Connaught team beat the official Maserati team.” Five of the cars sold for a total of £9225. One, which had passed into the ownership of the Italian, Pietro Scotti, was withdrawn when there was no bid over £500. The auctioneer was asking for an opening bid of £2000.
“Motor racing enthusiasts cheered when John Coombs, the racing driver, after bidding unsuccessfully for three cars, succeeded in getting a B2 Connaught for £1750.”
History steps in
Then came the bids that would echo down the years in Grand Prix racing. “Another well-known driver, Stuart Lewis-Evans, was with Mr L Underwood of Messrs Compton and Ecclestone, who bought two of the B-series cars for £2100 and £1950. It is likely that Lewis-Evans will drive one of these cars, in which he won the Richmond Trophy at Goodwood this year.”
We can assume that Lewis-Evans was bidding on behalf of his mentor and racing manager, Bernie Ecclestone, for the two cars were entered for the 1958 New Zealand Grand Prix. Lewis- Evans was to drive the B3 aerodynamic ‘toothpaste tube’ and the B7 with a standard ‘Syracuse’ type body for Roy Salvadori. Salvadori finished fifth and Lewis-Evans was out late in the race with engine failure.
Salvadori says they were given instructions from Ecclestone not to bring the Connaughts back to Britain. “Stuart came in all smiles one morning before breakfast in Auckland, and said he had sold his car. I asked him how much he had got for it, and he said it rather depended on how much the stamps fetched.” Lewis-Evans had entered into an agreement to swap the Connaught for an album of supposedly valuable Hungarian stamps! “I suggested that he contact Bernie rather quickly, and when he came back from making the phone call, which wasn’t the work of a moment from New Zealand in those days, he was ashen. I had the feeling that Bernie hadn’t agreed to the deal on the stamps¦ but in fact I’m sure that Bernie would have done the deal for the stamp album if he’d been there himself!” Salvadori laughs at the memory.
The cars presumably went back to Britain, because Bernie made ineffective attempts to qualify at Monaco and the British Grand Prix in 1958.
Stuart Lewis-Evans had been signed for Vanwall in 1957 when Connaught withdrew from Grand Prix racing, and he drove for the team for two seasons, with pole increase the wheelbase, and the build run picked up on chassis A3 — so A5 was actually the fourth Formula 2 Connaught powered by the 2.0-litre modified version of the Lea Francis motor. For nearly half a century, Eric Thompson believed he had owned and raced A5, as he explains: “The property developers who were bulldozing the Connaught workshops in Send, Surrey, decided to throw a party for anyone connected with Connaught. I met up with Leslie Marr at the function, and he said he had bought A5 as an unpainted brand-new car in August 1952. This prompted an indepth investigation which showed A6 to be my car. Not A5. For the record, A1 was Kenneth McAlpine’s, and I don’t know where it is now. Maybe Bernie (Ecclestone) has it. A2 was never built in series but was in fact built up from spares and recently sold at auction. A3 was bought by Ken Downing, and then sold to Rob Walker for Tony Rolt and me to drive. A4 was a works car then sold to Johnny Claes, now owned and driven by David Wenman and Whizzo Williams. A5 was Leslie Marr’s, and he sold it to Bill Holt. A6 was a works car and was sold to Ecurie Ecosse.”
Restoring A5
Christchurch carrosserie specialist and car restorer, Les Marshall, handled the rescue and rebuild of Connaught A5 now owned by Grant Clearwater, who spends much of each year in the UK masterminding the Seat international rally programme and the entries in the British Touring Car Championship. “I first spoke to Grant about the Connaught in the UK soon after he had positions at Monza and Zandvoort, but without a win. He had qualified third for the final event of the 1958 season in Morocco but the transmission locked solid, the Vanwall somersaulted in fl ames and he succumbed to his burns six days later in London. Roy Salvadori enjoys retirement in style, with an apartment overlooking the starting grid in Monaco. Bernie Ecclestone is still Bernie Ecclestone.
Connaught’s New Zealand connection
The saga of Connaught A5 became confused as early as the original chassis numbering. After chassis A1 had been made as a works car, chassis A2 was made, but it hung unused in the rafters for years because the decision had been made to bought it, early in 2002, from the Fenton family in Auckland,” Marshall said. All the engineering work in the Connaught rescue was handled by Brian Taylor.
Connaught A5 had been brought into New Zealand by Ron Duncan in 1957, but he competed in only a few events before selling the car to Jim Fenton, who converted it to a sports car along the lines of the SLR sports Connaughts. He crashed the car in the 1962 Dunedin Road Race at Cemetery Corner, bouncing over the steep kerb and rolling down the hillside.
Fenton never raced the car again, but had started on converting it back to a single-seater. Fortunately he had kept most of the body parts, but when the car arrived down from Auckland to Gore, and then to Marshall’s workshops, it was a body wired to the chassis and several boxes of bits. It was a complicated puzzle for Marshall to solve.
“Fenton must have repaired the back end, because it had a badly bent De Dion tube when it crashed and that had been replaced. I had only seen a few photos of the car at Dunedin after it crashed.
“I had boxes of bits and pieces and I had to try and sort them out and find out where they were from, because they had been cut off the chassis and rounded up. I had to try and line up the body, the tanks and the whole car again. Luckily those major parts had all been kept. The only part missing was the coneshaped rear of the airbox that covered the carburettors.
“We didn’t really have a lot to go on. We had those few brackets and we had to work it out. Luckily I had a copy of To Draw A Straight Line, the book written by Connaught designer Johnny Johnson. It was invaluable, because it had a page-size plan of the car and I managed to have it enlarged and figured the layout from there.
“Then I discovered that the chassis had a huge bow in it where it had gone over the gutter and gone down through the trees in Dunedin. Grant searched the world to track down the right size chassis tube, and he eventually found some in France and had it sent out.
“When I had stripped it to a bare chassis I put the tubes back in and in the meantime I made up all the brackets necessary to go on the chassis to hold the tanks, the rear A-arms, all the body and the brake pedal assembly¦ that all had to be made new. It was very much a case of retro engineering¦”
The original wheels were magnesium alloy rather than wirespoked because it saved weight, and they were paradoxically bolt-on because the F2 races they were built for were too short to require pit-stop tyre changes.
Leslie Marr
Leslie Marr was the first owner of A5, and he commissioned the car to be painted in his own colour scheme of green with a maroon grille, nose band and wheels. Marshall discovered the remains of the Marr maroon hue when they removed the bent and buckled grille, which was now painted yellow over the original colour. The maroon colour was also showing under the nose, so he managed to rescue enough to match the colour. He made a new grille, and from the remains of one mirror he made two new ones.
Leslie Marr, now 84, was kept in touch with the rebuild of his old racer, and at the launch party of the reborn Connaught in October, 2006, at Marshall’s workshops, a letter was read out with Marr saying, “What wonderful news that the old car will race again. I would love to see her back in action again. Don’t forget to be very careful not to over-rev the engine!” Marr had raced Connaught A5 with its 2.0-litre Formula 2 engine in the 1954 British Grand Prix, qualifying 16th and finishing 13th, seven laps down on the 2.5-litre works Ferraris of Gonzales and Hawthorn who finished one-two.
The following year Marr sold the car to Bill Holt, who loaned it to Graham Whitehead for the Avon Trophy race at Castle Combe, where he finished sixth. In 1956 Holt took the car to South Africa where he scored a win, a disqualifi cation, a fastest lap and a retirement. Ron Duncan bought the car at the end of the 1957 season and shipped it to New Zealand.
Clever box of tricks
In an intriguing twist of technical history, the A-type Connaughts were all fitted with the Wilson four-speed pre-selector epicyclic transmissions. I wonder whether this was a download of Whitney Straight’s preference for the pre-selector. Kenneth McAlpine, one of the original partners in the Connaught organisation, had bought and raced Straight’s 8CM Maserati Grand Prix car, which was fi tted with the Wilson-type pre-selector transmission, and before the 8CM Straight had raced with a Wilson transmission in his K3 MG, which Tazio Nuvolari drove to win the 1933 Ards TT when Straight was unable to drive in the race himself.
McAlpine explained the pre-selector to historian Thomas O’Keefe: “The pre-selector gear shift worked like a motorcycle shift, and you flicked it up or down and then when you declutched, you freed up one band and locked the next one, automatically adjusting the tension on the bands in the process. Although the brake bands tended to wear out initially, and getting the gear ratios correct took some doing, the pre-selector ’box was regarded by one and all as a clever box of tricks.
“It made the car easier to drive. If you were going into a corner, on the straight you would fl ick the lever up, have both hands on the wheel, then, at the critical moment, you would operate the clutch pedal and that changed the gear. Thus you selected the change of gear at a time convenient to yourself.”
