Engine Punk

Tim Kary in the Imhof Special and Rob Robinson-Collins in the ex-Imhof Allard J1 at the Heritage Trial on 4th July 2021 I was delighted to re-acquaint myself with the Imhof Special at the Heritage Trial in 2021. Tim Kary is the current owner and really knows how to drive this historic car which I first came across in 1993.  I had recently started a new job and moved to sunny Andover in Hampshire. Having checked out the local car club, I arranged to meet the club president at the club workshops during his lunch hour. Picture the scene – an old army Nissen hut on the edge of Salisbury Plain. The interior is dark but orderly. This is the workshop of the local car club. And there he is, Il Presidente!  He wears overalls over his office clothes, complete with shirt and tie. He’s sitting in the bare framework of a very small sports car while he files some tubes in the cockpit. He may have been making engine noises before he heard the door open. Binky (aka Mr Robert Robinson-Collins)...

Team Robson with their Rickman Ranger and Graham Beddoe at the start of the 35th Launceston Trial For Graham Beddoe and me, today’s Launceston Trial was a trial of two halves. Before lunch we seemed to be lacking grip. After some post Exeter Trial fettling, the Arkley-MG felt soft on the rear during the drive to the venue in Lew Woods. The weather conditions were ideal but the mud was not to my taste. It was frequently deep and not very liquid, often taking on the consistency of modelling clay. The mud filled the cleats of the Arkley-MG’s tyres, front and rear. The front end could wash out and, if I throttled back to get the front tyres to bite, I struggled to get going again. This was a surprise because the Radar Dimax Classics on the rear had acquitted themselves well on the Exeter in January, despite taking a beating. The conditions then had been much wetter and we weren't in Lew Woods.... We began well with Zak’s Track, which turned this way and that throughout the trees. T...

Bereaved twin  Hero  in between pulls of the plough My mother was a twin to my Auntie Margaret. They might have been identical twins although I could always tell them apart.  They identified with ploughing engines built in pairs. One was built to winch from the left and the other winched from the right. With a friendly amount of whistling between the two, they would shuffle forward gradually along the field, speeding the plough between them. Hero pulls from the right hand side with its secondhand Fowler cable drum Ploughing was heavy work so the boilers were big and the cylinders of the engine equally massive. Their wheels were wider than other engines to spread their weight over soft ground. Overall, ploughing engines had a greater physical presence compared to other traction engines. My mother and aunt often said it was the plainness of these huge engines appealed. I don't think they personally identified with that plainness. It was the twinship they liked and the mass...

Long before I ever became a Candid Provocateur, I stumbled across the Imhof Special. One of my best friends at school gave me The Book of the Motor Car , published in 1952 by The Naldrett Press Ltd and approved by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, no less. My favourite chapter was Building Your Own Car by A Godfrey Imhof, in which our hero made a competition car out of parts of Ford 10 and Austin 7 gleaned from scrapyards. HRK55 was the first version of the Imhof special as described in The Book of the Motor Car   (Photo : Naldrett Press) Who couldn't be inspired by such Boy's Own DIY initiative? I later discovered that this A Godfrey Imhof was actually the Godfrey Imhof, or Goff Imhof, one of the original Candidi Provocatores who’d raced Singers before the Second World War prior to rallying and trialling Allards in the immediate post war period. He built the Imhof Special using his experiences of trialling the big V8 sidevalve engine cars and ushered in a new ...

English by looks but rear-engined in nature (Photo : Saco) When I wrote about Little Jim in my original post , there was a conspicuous gap in the narrative. Some details about the pre-war Little Jim were known to me but the next prototype for a very small car for the Rootes group was even more mysterious. All we had to go on was a mention in the Henshaw's book about the Hillman Imp,  Apex - The inside story of the Hillman Imp. This, of course, was the eventual flowering of the small car concept developed by Rootes. In the Henshaw's book, Little Jimmy i s described as rear-engined and powered by a two-cylinder version of a Volkswagen air-cooled motor. These pictures of Little Jimmy popped up on the Auto Puzzles website in 2014 and eventually appeared via a link on the Imp Club Facebook page. What's that coming over the hill? (Photo : Grobmotorix archive) It took a while for the puzzle to pan out. By a process of elimination, the Rootes group were eventually identified and C...