1927 Alvis Racer Restored
Fifty Years After It Stopped Building Cars, Alvis Restores its Front-Wheel-Drive 1927 Grand Prix Entry.
Make: Alvis
Year: 1927
As war loomed on the horizon, Alvis's Thomas George John began cleaning up the company's old shops. He'd already set up about 18 factories across England to build airplane engines and needed still more space, so he ordered a bunch of obsolete race cars, some more than a decade old by then, to be sent to the scrapyard. Ironically, if he hadn't ordered it junked, one of those three - a cigar-shaped front-wheel-drive straight-eight car built for Grand Prix competition - wouldn't still be around for the reconstituted Alvis company to re-introduce this weekend.
Alvis and Front-Wheel Drive
Long before Rover and then British Leyland swallowed the company whole, Alvis had set up shop as one of the dozens of Coventry-based carmakers of the Twenties. While John had insisted on a reputation for reliability above all else, it wasn't long until the company established a competition department and John hired Captain G.T. Smith-Clarke as chief engineer to explore more advanced designs than the company's side-valve four-cylinder engines and the conventional rear-wheel-drive chassis. Indeed, in March 1925, just five years after the carmaker formed, it fielded its first front-wheel-drive competition car at the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb.
The car "was named Tadpole because of its tendency to wag its own tail," David Owen wrote for an article in Automobile Quarterly in 1978. "Still, (Major Maurice) Harvey finished second overall despite a nonfunctioning blower."
As Owen described the Tadpole, it was of a rather intricate design, with double quarter-elliptic springs for suspension, inboard brake drums, and double-jointed half-shafts taking the output from, essentially, an Alvis 100hp four-cylinder engine turned 180 degrees "so that the blower and single carburetor projected into the cockpit while the final drive stuck out beneath the radiator."
If all that sounds similar to Harry A. Miller's front-wheel-drive system, you're not alone. Griffith Borgeson, writing in a 1983 issue of Automobile Quarterly, noted that "there are too many details that are too close." Alvis's car hit the track just two months before Miller's first front-wheel-drive car and the Alvis "incorporated the same overall concept (as the Miller) in its front-end design, plus such identical specific features as inboard brakes; longitudinal quarter-elliptic front springs; similar brackets for mounting them; similar, unusual deep frame rails; the same geometry of steering knuckles, outer U-joints and wheels. Plus the use of a front DD (De Dion) tube, albeit double."
Borgeson went so far as to interview at least a couple of people connected with Miller - including S.C.H. "Sammy" Davis, who spent time at the wheel of both a Miller and an Alvis - about the similarities in the hopes of making some sort of connection, though he could find nothing more than suspicion. "(Davis) attributed the Alvis design to Smith-Clarke alone and told me in writing that it was his feeling that, if the engineer had not obtained his information from one of the Americans he obviously had to have gotten his hands on some good illustrations of Miller fwd."
Alvis's Eight-Cylinder Racers
The two, four-cylinder front-wheel-drive cars that Alvis campaigned proved themselves capable in 1925, lapping Brooklands at more than 100 MPH, so John decided to go Grand Prix racing for 1926. As Owen wrote, John determined the cars needed dedicated racing engines rather than adapted production engines, so Smith-Clarke designed a supercharged straight-eight to meet the 1.5-liter size limit, taking inspiration from Duesenberg's walking-beam horizontal-valve engine design. Without a driveshaft running underneath the car, Smith-Clarke and Alvis Chief Designer W.M. Dunn were able to bring the car low - comically low, compared to the competition. They gave it a no-nonsense rectangular grille and a long, tapering tail.
Two cars built to that design raced just once at Brooklands, with disappointing results. Still, John and Smith-Clarke kept refining the cars, changing to a double overhead-camshaft design with hemispherical combustion chambers for the straight-eight in 1927.
It's not clear whether John had two all-new cars built for the 1927 or if he simply ordered the revised engines placed into the 1926 cars, but a pair of Alvis front-wheel-drive cars were entered in the 1927 British Grand Prix but didn't start. Alvis then entered those same two cars in the Brooklands 200-mile race where, according to an Alvis Car Company press release, they got off to a rousing start. Both lapped the track "in excess of 120 MPH" and showed "prodigious pace," but both also DNF'd with engine failures. Harvey bowed 24 laps in while George Duller retired on the 52nd lap.
Exactly what caused Harvey's engine to fail seems unknown, but Duller's engine quit after a connecting rod decided to self-dismantle into countless pieces. According to Owen, Alvis gave up its Grand Prix designs after that, citing rules changes instituted for 1928. Alvis did not, however, give up its plans for front-wheel drive and introduced a line of front-wheel-drive production cars for 1928.
The Duller Alvis
Curiously, when John ordered the old race cars, including Duller's 1927 car, to be scrapped, he didn't seem to mind holding on to the shattered connecting rod that caused it to fail. It - or, at least, the majority of it that didn't disintegrate into the oil pan - remained with the Alvis archives and is on display at the resurrected Alvis company's showroom today.
As Alvis's press release continues the story, John sent the three old race cars to Roach Brothers in Coventry with "strict instructions that (they were) to be broken up and not sold on." Roach Brothers surely carefully listened, gave John their word, then almost immediately turned and sold the Duller car to Bill Pitcher.
The car came without its engine and front-wheel-drive system, so Pitcher sourced a transmission from a 1929 Alvis and a 1929 Alvis eight-cylinder engine that possibly powered one of the company's Le Mans cars and laid plans for converting the Duller car to rear-wheel drive.
Meanwhile, during World War II, Luftwaffe bombing raids targeted and decimated the Alvis Coventry factory for its aircraft engine production. So had John not ordered the car scrapped, it still would've been destroyed.
And, as fate would have it, Pitcher never followed through on his rear-wheel-drive plans. The car and its parts sat around untouched until the mid-Fifties, when he sold it all to front-wheel-drive Alvis enthusiast Nic Davies. Davies, according to the Alvis press release, took it with him as he traveled the world, moving from Australia to Papua New Guinea and to Florida. Not until 1990 did he start to reassemble the car, and though he was able to get the 1929 engine running and the car driving under its own power once again, it was far from restored.
Hope for a correct restoration came in 2006 when Stote and Tony Cox, another front-wheel-drive Alvis enthusiast, bought the car from Davies and began to research the car's original specifications. While most of the core elements of the car - including the chassis and much of the body - remained original and in good condition, a number of other elements, including the radiator, the hood, and the rear suspension, had gone missing. In addition, the 1929 engine resembled the car's long-gone original engine, but it was not an exact match.
Fortunately, not only did Alvis's archives - including original parts drawings - and leftover parts stock survive World War II in Alvis's Kenilworth location, they also passed into the ownership of Red Triangle, a company established by ex-Alvis employees specifically to provide spare parts and service to Alvis owners. And while Alvis itself had been sold out of British Leyland in the Eighties and subsequently bought and sold several times since, Red Triangle managed to purchase the rights to the Alvis name and restart production of several classic Alvis models as continuation cars.
That meant Stote and Cox had access to a wealth of information about the Duller car, including drawings of the car's original engine, which they then used to have a new, period-correct engine and gearbox cast to properly restore the car. In the press release, Stote called the restoration "a journey of discovery."
While Alvis made no mention of offering a continuation version of the racer, plans are apparently afoot to return the car to Brooklands for the 100th anniversary of its one and only race in 2027. In the meantime, it will see its post-restoration debut this weekend as part of the Automobile Council 2023 event in Chiba City, Japan, as part of Alvis's collaboration with Japanese distributor Meiji Sangyo.
Written by
Daniel Strohl Hemmings
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