Vintage Thing No.56 - speedway Allard Atom
Regular readers of this blog will know of my appreciation of Allards but I've never seen any quite like this one or heard any references to it. The Allard badge might be on this thing as a joke but I have a feeling that it really is an Allard. I spotted this at a very wet hillclimb at Prescott in - I think - 1984. The pictures aren't brilliant but it was raining pushrods and back then my camera didn't have a light meter that worked so it's pretty amazing they came out at all. It's got a speedway JAP 500 cc engine under the driver's left elbow that drove the rear axle by chain. I think it had a gearbox and wasn't direct drive. There were some Formula 3 500s at the event but I managed to establish - probably by asking someone nearby - that it wasn't an Allard F3 car but a speedway racer used on the same cinder ovals as the bikes. If you look closely you can see the Allard badge on the nose an I am inclined to believe it is an Allard. It's got a split f...