Inspiration
It’s worth remembering that, in the beginning, neither Donald Healey, his design team nor anyone at the newly formed BMC Competitions Department at Abingdon ever thought that Austin Healeys might make successful rally cars: it was never intended. Originally, it was thought they might become useful racing machines, but as for rallying in the 1950s – that was not considered exciting enough or demanding enough at the time. How wrong they were! As every Austin Healey enthusiast knows, the six-cylinder engined cars – 100-Six and 3000 – went on to build memorable reputations in the sport as the most charismatic, rugged, and visually appealing rally cars of the period.
For almost ten years, in fact, the works Austin Healeys were the most famous – and glamorous – cars in international rallying. This sport changed considerably in the 1950s, with high performance and sheer strength becoming more and more essential; rapidly it demanded the evolution of fast and durable cars. Austin Healey successes at this level helped consolidate a remarkable image for the marque.
Even so, their basic layout was by no means ideal for the ever-more-demanding rally routes of the period. It was only the gritty determination and boundless experience of the BMC Competitions Department at Abingdon which helped turn these cars into rally winners. As I became more involved in the sport at this time, it was fascinating to see the way that the cars improved. By the early 1960s they had become proficient in every way – in performance, in reliability, and especially in versatility. They were not merely good in their category, but were contenders for outright victory wherever they appeared.
Looking back over half-a-century, it’s easy to suggest that BMC (and Abingdon) wasted several valuable years before it began to develop the Austin Healey into a formidable works rally car, for even as a four-cylinder-engined car (the 100/4 and 100S) it could have been made competitive. Particularly with the 100S (and homologation could certainly have been ‘massaged’ through the system in those more naïve days), it could have been turned into one of the toughest and fastest sports cars in the business.
There does not seem to have been any malicious reason, or incompetence, behind this; it was more a matter of benign neglect. The fact is that for the first few years of its career, nobody at Abingdon troubled to do any serious development of the Austin Healey because there seemed to be other priorities, and much more exciting things to concentrate on.
It was certainly not because the cars were basically unsuitable (in the 1960s, BMC soon proved otherwise!), but because the Healey family itself never really gave it a thought at first, and because BMC’s newly-formed works Competitions Department concentrated on the use of other, more mundane, BMC models between 1955 and 1957.
Strange, though, isn’t it? Even by 1955 it was clear that sports cars had a great future in international rallying. Triumph, from a standing start, had produced a successful works team of TR2s, and in spite of its cars’ unpromising specification, Rootes had even wrung some success out of the heavy and under-powered Alpines and Rapiers. But, for the time being, the Healey family was not interested. In its first decade of life, the Healey company had built several fine and reliable endurance race cars – notably the Silverstone and Nash?Healey types – and was intent on doing even better with the lightweight 100S.
In any case, it wasn’t long after the original 100/4 had gone on sale before British and European clubmen made their own assessment of standard types of Healey, and came to their own conclusions. By the time the rival TR2 and 100/4 cars were well?established, the received wisdom was that the Austin Healey handled well but was too low-slung for use in rallies (where the surfaces were often loose and sometimes rough – which might cause damage to the underside of the cars), while the Triumph TR2 didn’t handle at all well, but was not as low, and seemed to be rugged enough for rallying work: in addition, it was significantly cheaper. The Big Healey, in other words, was soon seen as a useful machine for club racing, while the TR2 was soon preferred as a rally car.
Between 1954 and 1957, therefore, the works Triumphs had much of their own way in the hurly-burly of International rallying. Although these cars were never aggressively developed (the works TR2s and TR3s never used engines which were more powerful than standard, and there seemed to be no attempt to lighten them, or to make them special, for instance), and there never appeared to be a settled team of works drivers, they were usually reliable, and went on to pick up a series of impressive class and category wins in the Tulip, Alpine and Liège?Rome?Liège rallies.
It wasn’t until BMC’s works Competitions Department was freed from the dead weight of the sales department’s marketing demands (was it ever likely that an Austin A50 or A90 could be made competitive enough to win anything? Maybe not, but the sales staff wanted to see the cars out on events), and was allowed to pick the best cars for the job, that it even began to look like a professional organisation. For the experienced Marcus Chambers this must have been a frustrating time, as his organisation spent its first three years fruitlessly grappling with cars like the Austin A90 Westminster, the Riley Pathfinder, the MG Magnette, and the nimble but under?powered MG MGA 1500.
A look through the records shows that in those formative years, a works Austin Healey was only entered on one occasion – when Peter Reece and Dennis Scott tackled the 1955 Liège?Rome?Liège Marathon in a 100S. This, in fact, was not an Abingdon car, but was one of the works 100S competition cars, which had been prepared and run from Warwick in long-distance races.
Like so many of BMC’s rally entries of the period, the Liège entry was of the nature of a ‘suck?it?and?see’ experiment. Marcus Chambers wanted to see how a 100S would perform in an event where endurance and reliability had to be mixed with high performance. As he later wrote in his splendid book Seven Year Twitch: “The BMC entry was of a purely exploratory nature, the object being for two saloon cars to finish and demonstrate their reliability, with an Austin Healey 100S, making the best use of its superior performance – to finish as high as it could.”
Would the 100S be competitive against the four?cam Porsche Carreras or the Mercedes?Benz 300SL sports cars which were dominating such events? We may never know how good this car should have been on the famous marathon, for it did not even survive the first night of this four?day non?stop slog from Belgium to Italy and back. It was crashed, in Germany, in thick fog, at a very early stage, and had to retire.
Marcus Chambers’s comments in Seven Year Twitch spell out the farrago: “Dennis Scott had crashed the Healey at a corner on the way out of [Idar Oberstein]; he apparently went straight on, instead of turning to the right, and landed in a wood. Dennis and Peter abandoned the car to seek help, and on returning found that both the clocks and the spare wheel had been stolen. They returned rather sheepishly to Spa the next day.”
After that disappointing experience, Marcus then abandoned ideas of using Austin Healeys for the next couple of years, though his team lacked cars with enough performance to tackle the European opposition on equal terms