Vintage Thing No.58 - Lea-Francis 14 hp Sports

Among my photos of the 2009 Le Mans 24 Heures (Part 3 of Endurance Spectating coming soon) I found this Lea-Francis .

I've always been a bit partial to LeaFs and was fascinated to learn that they were built in penny numbers in the Coventry streets that I knew as a student. Much Park Street was just a few streets away from where I lived and Lower Ford Street was where my mates hung out for a while, in a house that had survived not only The Blitz but possibly also the plague - Coventry being a great medieval city.

Two gangs of us had houses in Vine Street that backed onto a factory still known as the Singer Works and at certain times of the day and night a great whir would begin as the shifts changed over.

This brought home to me what it must have been like to be in the motor city during the inter war years. I can visualise everyone making engines and bikes and cars and then staggering next door from the blackened, stone-walled foundries to crash out afterwards. The city must've been buzzing.

Lea-Francis were never common or what you might call mass produced. This is part of their charm but for the post war industry volume was everything. Riley, a bigger and much more famous Coventry marque, misinterpreted consumer demands by having masses of different models but making them in tiny numbers. They went bust in 1938 despite their cars being wonderful Imps and Sprites and with a range that included the V8 Autovia.

Lea-Francis were too small to even get into that sort of trouble and were never swallowed up by British Leyland or the Rootes group. LeaFs (note the spelling) had a high camshaft engine after the school founded by Riley. I really like the layout of these engines and they're about as sophisticated as a non-overhead camshaft engine can get. There's a camshaft on each side of the block and the layout allows short pushrods for a robust valvetrain and hemispherical combustion chambers for a good gas path. The Lea-Francis engine first appeared in production in 1938 and went further than the earlier Riley design in that the camshafts were so high in the block that the cam followers were in the head. To my mind this is a very elegant compromise between the simplicity of an overhead (i.e. underhead cam) engine and the more accurate valve timing and lower reciprocating weight of a twin cam (although there's nothing quite like a twink)

A few years ago I discovered the rolling chassis of a 14 horsepower shooting brake in a scrapyard in Cornwall. I quite fancied it myself to make a special but felt that a Leaf specialist might be better placed to do this. This car had belonged to the proprietor of the yard as a boy and as he was just about of retirement age it had been stood for a while. As he put it, "The bodywork just fell away."

This bloke is that rare thing, a scrap dealer with a heart, and the chassis was never baled up.

Neither of us had a clue how much it was worth I sent off a few e-mails and eventually - like after a couple of years - someone in the know came down and made an acceptable offer.

This Lea-Francis 14hp Sports is better than a special. I really admire its lines - for 1947 this was an advanced form of styling.

The 1767cc engine is a typical British long stroke design with a 72mm x 100mm bore and stroke but would be good for 65hp and 85mph on twin SU carbs. This engine, together with a LeaF chassis, was the basis for the Connaught sportscars. Hugh Rose designed it. He was an ex-Riley man and many Riley personal went over to "the LeaF" once Riley had become part of the Nuffield organisation.

Blocks were cast by the Midland Motor Cylinder Company in Birmingham and machined by Henry Meadows Ltd of Wolverhampton pre-war but by Riley Motors post war in Aldbourne Road, Coventry until Riley decamped to Abingdon.

You get the picture - if engine components weren't whizzing across Coventry or Birmingham for the next stage in the process, they were stood still just long enough to be assembled.

The sportscars heralded the adoption of bigger valves and a remote change gearbox. Early ones had beam axles but torsion bar independent front suspension came later.

I don't know who was responsible for the styling of the 14 hp Sports. It bears a resemblance to the contemporary 14hp saloon. Some sources credit this body to an outfit called Minnion & Keene while others state that the rather better known firm of gentleman's carriage outfitters of Charlesworth, located in (surprise, surprise) Much Park Street were responsible.

So, if it wasn't engine components that were whizzing across the streets of Coventry it was body drawings for approval.

My guess is that whoever did the saloon did the roadster, too, and a fine job they did of it.

I would quite like a 14 hp Sports although I think the 2½ litre Sports that came later is probably more my kind of car. The 85x110mm 4 cylinder engine put out a lusty 100bhp on a compression ratio of 7:1. Increasing the CR to 9:1 gave a power increase that Barrie Price in his book The Lea-Francis Story describes as "useful".

The 2½ litre Sports has a wider cockpit with winding windows and all had IFS. The only slight detraction for me is the screen surround, which doesn't fold down and looks a little fussy compared with that of the 14hp.

Maybe a 14hp Sports with IFS and a 2½ litre motor? Unlikely - they only made 118 of the 14s and 77 of the 2½.

It's enough to make me wish I hadn't passed on that LeaF in that yard.