As reported last week, the 2016 MG MMM Tour will culminate with their attendance at the Thoroughbred Sports Car Club's Cultra Hillclimb on Saturday 11th June. Alongside participants from the four home countries there will be cars from Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. However, one of the three cars coming from Australia has famous motor racing royalty history and it will compete in the Ards and North Down Borough Council supported Cultra Hillclimb Competition, having enjoyed the previous four days of The Tour.
The 1934 K3 Magnette of John Gillett was raced during 1935 and 1936 by Prince Birabongse Bhanudej of Thailand, better known to motorsport enthusiasts as simply, Prince Bira. Bira had been sent to England to complete his education at Eton and was supposed to go up to Cambridge University, but the latter never happened. He lived with a cousin, Prince Chula Chakrabhongse, who managed a fledgling racing team and decided to try his hand at racing, driving in his cousin's team cars of which this K3 now owned by Gillett was one.
At the end of the 1936 season the car was bought by a John Snow in Australia, where it has remained ever since. It would go on to compete in half a dozen Australian Grand Prix, in the hands of successive owners, up until 1955 whilst winning the 1949 Australian Hillclimb Championship along the way. In 1988 the car was invited to Thailand, by its then King, to compete in races to celebrate the achievements of Prince Bira. From 1950 to 1955 the Prince had contested 19 F1 Grand Prix for Connaught, Gordini and Maserati as well as the LeMans 24 Hours in 1939 and 1954.
John Gillett hillclimbs and races this very original car in his native Australia and contests vintage rallies and trials with his wife Helen alongside. Helen's parents emigrated to Australia in 1922 from Ballinderry, near Lisburn, and she is planning to look in to her family history while they have an extended holiday here, as well as taking in the Tour and the Hillclimb.
Having brought a succession of special and unique cars to their Cultra Hillclimb Event over the past five years, the Thoroughbred Sports Car Club and Ulster Folk and Transport Museum partnership have scored another coup for 2016. The unique Lightweight Special built by the legendary Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini, will compete in the Ards and North Down Borough Council supported Cultra Hillclimb on Saturday 11th June in the grounds of the Folk Museum, driven by its present owner Andy Storer from Newark, Nottinghamshire.
Issigonis and his Lightweight Special
Alec Issigonis was born in 1906 in in Smyrna, Asia Minor (Turkey), inheriting British citizenship via his father and through the work he did for the British-built Smyrna Railway, Alec managed to acquire British nationality. Because Alec and his parents were British subjects, they were evacuated to Malta by in September 1922, ahead of the Turkish re-possession of Smyrna at the end of the Greco-Turkish War(1919-1922). Following the death of his father, Alec and his mother moved to the UK in 1923. Alec studied engineering at Battersea Polytechnic in London and despite failing his mathematics exams three times Alec entered the University of London External Programme and completed his university education.
Issigonis went into the motor industry as an engineer and designer working for the Humber Company and moving to Morris Cars in 1936. He designed the Minor for the latter when it became part of BMC and of course is most famous for the Mini. During 1933 to 1938, in his free time, Alec Issigonis and friend George Dowson constructed the hand-built car in Issigonis’ home garage without the aid of power tools.
Though a pre-World War 2 design, many of the car’s design ideas can be found in his post-war family cars. The chassis was a monocoque made of aluminum/plywood sandwich side panels that made it strong but lightweight. The side panels were linked by steel cross-members while the wishbone front suspension and 'trailing arm' swing rear axle were unique, in that they used rubber as the springing medium – in compression at the front and in tension at the rear.
Rubber suspension would re-appear in Issigonis's cone design for his signature project – The BMC Mini of 1959. To reduce unsprung weight more unique features were used, such as ultra lightweight Elektron wheels and hubs with integral brake drums. His weight-saving philosophy even meant that the aluminum-alloy skin of the Special was left unpainted. Power was from a supercharged 750cc Austin Seven Ulster engine which accounted for some 20 per cent of the Special’s 587 lbs, and was replaced after World War II with an experimental OHC engine made by Morris Cars, which boosted the little car’s power-to-weight ratio to more than 200 hp per ton! This engine is in the car today and the car is still used in hill climb competitions. The car enjoyed great success in hill climbs and sprint events.
In 1939 the Special beat a works Austin with the same engine at the Prescott Hill Climb. Issigonis was the car’s principal driver up until 1948 when the demands of his job forced him to stop. The Lightweight Special is still regularly today in VSCC events at Prescott Hillclimb, where in 1949 Issigonis and Dowson discovered the road-holding benefits of negative camber by removing some of the rubber loop suspension units from the rear axle. It was Issigonis’ belief that, “There is no use designing and studying one part of a car. Everything is too tightly integrated for that.” This philosophy he was able to successfully demonstrate in the Special (and repeat later in the Morris Minor and the Mini). Issigonis later described the Lightweight Special as :- “A frivolity in my life. It was not so much a design exercise as a means of teaching me to use my hands.”
Looking forward to Saturday's Cultra Hillclimb. I'll be there in my own Midget Gem - 'Pistachio' the mean green Fiat Topolino! Pop upstairs in the Manor during the day and say hello to the artists and craftspeople.
100 competitors + 60 pre-war MGs + Specials, Sprites and demos = a big petrol-fuelled fun day out.
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