Vauxhall History

Send This Page To A Friend
Fade To White
Vauxhall History


 

Vauxhall

 1897 - Present
Country:
UK

The Motorised Hansom Cab



In general, the design of the Vauxhall bodies of yesteryear did not show any daring originality, though there was one exception: in collaboration with the Earl of Ranfurly, who apparently couldn't quite bring himself to say adieu to the era of horsedrawn transportation, Vauxhall once built a number of motorised hansoms, thereby setting a record for driving seat altitude in automobiles. These vertiginous buggies were not a commercial success and died a quick death.

The Vauxhall Iron Works Company Limited first went into business as car manufacturers in 1903, but the marque's real origins go back to 1857. It was then that the Vauxhalt Iron Works was established for the production of marine engines, taking its name from the London district that it neighbored.

Long before the 30/98's accidental emergence, Vauxhalls of various shapes and calibres had made their mark in trials and racing. The celebrated Prince Henry model, for instance, won its spurs and its label in the Anglo-German match event of 1910 known as the Prince Henry of Prussia Tour, after its royal patron and participant. The four-litre PH from whose loins the sidevalve 30/98 sprang, can fairly be regarded as the prototype of the British sports car, and continued in production until the end of the first war.

Vauxhalls were consistent forefronters at Brooklands in the old track's infancy, marking an aerodynamic epoch with their razorblade single-seat bodies. These fresh concepts in streamlining led to frontal area reductions of over 30 percent, and "KN", king of the Edwardian mono-postos, hit a new low in this department with a cross section of less than 11 square feet. "KN", in 1910, was the first car to reach 100 mph in Britain. Aware of the need to minimise internal as well as external drag, Vauxhail made its historic century run with the gearbox and back axle drained of oil, thereby just cajoling 60 bhp into penetrating the three-figure barrier for a distance of a half-mile.

A. J. Hancock



One of the earliest claims to fame of Vauxhall occurred in 1913, when an attempt on the world's 12 hour record was made by AJ. Hancock, the Vauxhail works driver. His car was a special single-place Prince Henry. During pit stops Hancock had his face washed by chief engineer Pomeroy himself - in champagne. If they used the stuff for ablutions it is fascinating to speculate what Hancock and his obedient servants actually drank when the marathon ended with a bag of 17 records, even though they didn't include the target mark of 12 hours.

Next came the 1914 French GP Vauxhalls, Luton's employment of "modern" features like dual overhead camshafts pre-dated the 1922 TT cars. In fact, although the 4.25-litre jobs fielded at Lyons in 1914 were understandably inferior in specific output to the Sir Harrywagens, it is arguable that the former, in one important respect, more accurately foreshadowed later technical practices than the Ricardo layout: a Pomeroy design, the 1914 engine measured 101 by 140 mm making the bore / stroke ratio, rather obviously, 1 to 1.4. This, of course, was strikingly "shorter" than the generality of pre-WW1 racing engines, and entitles the claim that old man Pomeroy set the ball rolling in the direction of tubbier powerplants with a high crank-speed potential.

The trend might in fact have been much accelerated, and Vauxhall would probably have been the instrument of its hastening, if Pomeroy hadn't quit his Luton berth and gone to work in the US in 1919. At the time of his departure he was busy on the development of an intended successor to the L-head 30/98, featuring a single overhead camshaft driven by multiple eccentrics, a light alloy crankcase and precisely the same cylinder measurements as his 1914 GP engine. This opus, designated the H Type, never saw the, light of day, being nobody's sweetheart but old Pom's. But if he'd stayed instead of going, the OE edition of "Britain's fastest production car" would likely never have materialised, and the course of Vauxhall's high speed history might have been different again.

Vauxhall 30/98 Long Tail
Special bodies in a great variety of shapes were mounted on Vauxhall 30/98's in their heyday, such as this long-tailed two seater.

Special Bodied Vauxhall 30/98
Another special bodied 30/98 of a type popular in its day. Note that the rear springs are reversed and there is no passenger door - just a step at the front of the rear fender.

1911 Vauxhall Prince Henry
One of the very first picutres of the Vauxhall Prince Henry, take in 1911.

Vauxhall 30/98 OE Engine
The overhead valve OE engine which powered the Vauxhall 30/98. It provided excellent power for the time.

1914 Vauxhall Prince Henry
This 1914 Prince Henry belonged to the late Laurence Pomeroy, son of the designer.

Vauxhall Villiers
A version of the Vauxhall Villiers, this one supercharged - with cooler for ingoing fuel/air mixture exposed beside bonnet - and dual rear wheels.

Laurence Pomeroy



General Motors acquired the dwindling assets of Vauxhall Motors in 1925, and set to work imprinting Detroit's stamp on a British marque previously renowned for making excellent sports and racing cars. The old company's racing and sports car ventures were mostly marked by a sort of inspired inadvertence. The legendary Vauxhall 30/98, for example, "came into existence by accident," to quote Laurence Pomeroy, son of the man who accidentally designed it.

Then, with the 130 bhp out of 4.5 litres unblown, the three twin Vauxhalls produced specially for the 1914 French Grand Prix were probably the most powerful cars in the historic Lyons line-up; unfortunately none lasted the course. Later, however, when Vauxhail was almost past caring what happened the cars won many races under conditions and over distances they'd never been intended for. As for the fabulous 1922 TT jobs, with engines designed by Ricardo, the circumstances of their genesis verged on fantasy.

The Tourist Trophy



Presumably not later than the summer of 1921, it was decided by the AIACR (predecessors to the FIA) that the new Grand Prix formula for the 1922-1925 period should be based on a displacement of two litres. The Royal Automobile Club, as Britain's ruling body on the AIACR council chamber, were strangely not privy to this resolution. Regulations for the UK's own grande epreuve, the Tourist Trophy - a Grand Prix in everything except name - were therefore framed around the first formula that popped into the RAC's head.

This was a maximum of three litres. Consequently, Continental constructors unanimously ignored the TT and the astronomically expensive cars built by Vauxhail for the Isle of Man contest were thereafter useless for any race with GP pretensions. But all was not in vain. Although no longer eligible for the Grands Prix, the TT Vauxhail was of such superb design that nothing could hold it down in the many branches of speed work - and in the hands of some distinguished private owners it would excel.

Sir Harry Ricardo



Victories were soon to follow at Brooklands, where the TT would compete (and be victorious) in record breaking attempts, hillclimbs, speed trials, and beach events. In 1926, during his second tenure of the Fastest Man on Earth title, Parry Thomas drove a TT Vauxhatl for one hour at 104.88 mph during a wholesale clean-up of international class D records. At Shelsley Walsh, the first classic English hillclimb, Raymond Mays beat the field five times in five years in his supercharged derivative of the same model.

The engine in the TT was a Harry Ricardo designed masterpiece - it had four wet-linered cylinders with a bore and stroke of 85 by 132 mm, an aluminium alloy block, two separate bronze cylinder heads (one to each neighbored pair of pots}, a built-up crankshaft to accommodate the six ball-bearing mains, roller big ends, a central flywheel, two overhead camshafts driven by a frontal train of spur wheels, four valves per cylinder and provision for three spark plugs in each head. In practice, though, only one plug per cylinder was fitted, with central location.

A Brilliant Design



Contrary to general racing usage at that time, ignition was by coil and battery. (Unlike Duesenberg, whose contemporary racing engines also employed coils rather than magnetos, Ricardo dispensed with a generator.) The valves, operated through non-adjustable fingers, made an inclined angle of 90 deg., and all eight exhaust ports were separate. On carburetion, as in so many other departments, Sir Harry's thinking was way ahead of his time: from each barrel of a dual choke Zenith carb, one tract nourished a duet of cylinders, there being no connection between the two systems.

Over on the exhaust side, Y-junctions cored in the head collected the spent gas for discharge through four downpipes. Stuck with the low octane fuel available at that date in those latitudes, Ricardo set his compression ratio at the puff-ball figure of 5.8 to 1. In spite of this, though, his plant developed 129 bhp at 4500 rpm. Actually, however, the merit of the achievement is best measured by the yardstick of power relative to piston area, in which light it much more closely approached levels for unblown racing engines being developed half a century later. Each square inch of piston crown yielded a phenomenal 3.67 horsepower.

Vauxhall vs. Sunbeam vs. Bentley



Notwithstanding the large crank chamber capacity imposed by the indoor flywheel, the whole structure was enormously rigid, a factor contributing importantly to the high mechanical efficiency it realised - 80 percent at 3000 rpm. Fitted with the original two-seater body - deckhands were compulsory under the TT rules of the day - the three-litre Vauxhall had a top speed of around 115 mph. Alas, however, the car failed at its only attempt at the TT. Out of the three machines that were fielded, one placed third, behind a Sunbeam and a Bentley, and at least one of the other two retired with minor engine derangements. Actually, though, in spite of their immaturity, the Vauxhalls were considerably faster than the victorious Sunbeam, this being demonstrated beyond doubt when one of the Vauxhall's beat a Sunbeam by five mph in a straight fight at Brooklands later the same year.

Although performance of the TT engine, right off the drawing board, was already high by the standards of its time, Ricardo, with a foresight and imagination that bore the mark of the mastermind, endowed his engine with tremendous margins for long-term development. The power plant of Raymond Mays' hillclimb car, variously designated the Vauxhall-Villiers and the Villiers-Supercharge, was finally made to develop 300 bhp at 6000 rpm, going up in gradual stages over a period of six years ending 1933. Here an Amherst Villiers blower was employed, giving a maximum boost of 20 psi and fed through triple Zenith carburettors.

Ricardo and Vauxhall took no part in the several makeovers, which were the result of teamwork between Amherst Villiers (who also did much of the development work on the historic Blower Bentleys for Le Mans), Tom Murray Jamieson (who was later to design the twin-cam Austin Seven engine) and Peter Berthon (who would go on to become the leading technician of the ERA and BRM ventures). With its relatively heavy reciprocating parts and piston velocity of 5189 feet per minute at peak power, this supercharged monolith had an understandable reluctance to hold on to its top rpm for very long.

Terror at Brooklands



Once, when Mays was rash enough to keep his foot in the Zeniths for a complete lap during Brooklands tryouts, the entire car was seized with what Mays later described as "mechanical palsy". For agonising moments, during which the car was within inches of going over the top of the banking, the eyeballs of the terrified fellow travellers - Mays and Berthon - were shaken around in their sockets so violently that they blacked clean out. On another occasion, and in a different place, Mays broke a crankshaft at 6000 rpm, this being perhaps the only authenticated instance of fragments from a decimated engine landing in two different counties. (It's a pity to have to admit the car was practically straddling the county border at the time.)

The TT Vauxhall's four-speed gearbox, as well as the cylinder/crankcase block, was an aluminium alloy casting, a factor helping to keep the dry weight of an unmodified car down to the moderate figure of 2464 lb. One of the many chassis features was a complex braking system in which the normal pedal applied the front brakes: a big hand-lever acted on the back wheels alone; and a little trigger on the steering column routed compressed air to all four pairs of shoes. Source of the air for this servo system (parts sourced from Westinghouse) was a pump operated off the camshaft drive train.

The Vauxhall 30/98



It somewhat over-simplifies the conception and birth of the lovely Vauxhall 30/98 sports car to say that "it came into existence by accident". Pomeroy himself provided the key to the enigma by adding that "it was never planned for production". He was right, it wasn't! A fellow named Joseph Higginson, inventor of the Autovac, was, at the beginning of the 1920s, enjoying enviable successes as an amateur driver in English hillclimbs. But Higginson had his frustrations, too, the chief of them being his recurrent failure to undercut the course-record for Shelsley Walsh. As mentioned above, this event was the blue ribbon of the hillclimb game in Britain. And the simple fact was that Higginson's huge and cumbersome 80 horsepower La Buire didn't have what Shelsley took.

He therefore paid a series of calls on the best brains in Britain's automobile industry, offering large sums for a car that would help him realise the ambition of a lifetime. The only taker was Laurence Pomeroy Aine of Vauxhail, who, because Joseph hadn't given him enough time to start from scratch and create something entirely new, took the logical course of extracting some extra power from the best of his designs, the Prince Henry model. In the few months that were available, Pomeroy increased the bore and stroke of the 95 by 140 mm unit to new dimensions of 98 by 150, and also adding other engine touches of a more subtle character. That was early in 1913 - and the recipe worked. Higginson, at his very first Shelsley Walsh appearance on a Vauxhail, set a record that was to survive until 1921, although the postwar climbs there were resumed in 1920.

Enchanted with the results of Pomeroy's cuisine, Vauxhail forthwith built two more 30/98s in the approximate image of Joe's, turning one of them over to the company's managing director. P.C. Kidner, and the other to their established professional race driver, A.J. Hancock. These cars were immediately successful in speedwork and, before anyone quite knew what was happening, the model had crystallised into a limited-numbers production type.

In keeping with its almost haphazard entry into the world was the fact that even the people most closely concerned with the 30/98 were never exactly sure how the car came by its designation. It was then, and remained for years afterwards, a favorite nomenclative practice in Britain to make up type numbers out of two sets of numerals with an oblique between them, the prefix denoting the nomimal horsepower under the English fiscal system, and the suffix the output in bhp, real or fictitious. But the 30/98 never was fiscally rated at 30, and it never developed 98 on the dynamometer. One theory is the engine developed 30 bhp at 1000 rpm and that the 98 referred to the bore measurement.

The Vauxhall 30/98 Velox



Superficial scrutiny, or even a much closer study, fails to reveal even a few obvious reasons why the original L-head 30/98, known as the E Type and displacing 4526 cc produced more power than contemporaries of comparable capacity, and did so with such smoothness and lack of effort. It just did, something it had in common with all the creations of chief engineer Laurence H. Pomeroy. Basically the prescription was straightforward enough: side valves, a five bearing crank, fixed cylinder head, single riser carb, iron pistons, a compression ratio that wasn't higher than 5 to 1, a chain-driven camshaft with the sprockets at the front. Nevertheless, his unpretentious movement churned an honest 90 bhp at 2800 rpm, giving the car a top speed of around 85 mph when fitted with what became the classic 30/98 body - an open sports four-seater of trim and slender shape, known as the Velox.

Pomeroy's handiwork in 1913, like Ricardo's nine years later, certainly showed a shrewd appreciation of the importance of good cylinder filling and structural rigidity. His cams for the E Type engine gave a higher lift than was probably to be found on any non-racing mill of the period, while his valve clearances, at .050 and .060 in. for intake and exhaust respectively, were truly jumbo voids. Something else in common between the Pomeroy and Ricardo was their inclination towards advanced tuning and development. The E Type 30/98, which was promoted to full production status after the first World War, won countless speed events in Brtain and abroad during the 1920s. What power output was eventually achieved wasn't easy to say, but some motoring historians guessed that the single seated car that lapped Brooklands at 108 mph must have taken the dynamometer well into three figures.

The E Types were also very reliable. Running over atrocious roads, one heavily-crewed example averaged a record breaking 40 mph from Durban to Pretoria in South Africa. Earlier, one of the half-dozen Es turned out before WW1 had had the memorable distinction of placing second in the 1914 Russian Grand Prix at 70.8 mph average speed. What this race was, or where it happened, is obscure. The 30/98s fall into two subtypes - the side-valve E model and the OE with pushrod overhead valves. The latter, still with a 98 mm bore but its stroke reduced to 140, was launched early in 1923 and gave 112 bhp at the increased crank speed of 3500 rpm. Regular OEs were little if any faster than the L-headed version, presumably due to the slight gains in weight and the girth that accompanied the switch to ohv. On the other hand, the pushrod version brought real improvements in flexibility throughout the speed range and would throttle back to six mph on its 3.3 to 1 top gear without snatch with a full four-person crew aboard.

The General Motors Takeover



At birth, the OE was braked on the back wheels only, same as the E Type had been, but front brakes, featuring heavily ribbed drums of imposing measurements, were added in the autumn of '23. A later development was the introduction in 1926 of a counterbalanced crankshaft, superseding what was disrespectfully known as the "bent wire" crank. This, by moving the safe rpm limit up the scale, much increased the scope for hopups. From the dates quoted here it will be apparent that General Motors did not immediately junk the 30/98 on taking over at the Vauxhall plant, sited at Luton, Bedfordshire, in 1925.

Indeed, although the Detroit influence foreshadowed Vauxhall's erasure of the sports car from their catalogue, the finishing touches were put to the OE by engineers working under GM orders. These included the conversion of the brakes to hydraulic operation in 1927 - the 30/98's last year in production - and the redesigning of the fuel filler orifice to cure it of its notorious habit of regurgitating about half of its intended intake onto the ground. It needs more than a respectable specific output, or even a vigorous power-weight ratio, to make a great car, of course, and the 30/98 possessed the necessary additional prerequisites of greatness. It was superbly made from the finest materials.

The general readability, with the possible exception of the earliest OE, which was a mite short in the wheelbase and therefore had a tendency to skid in the wet, was of the highest order. The layout of all the engineering elements was neat, orderly and accessible to a degree that even Bentley couldn't surpass. Every car was exhaustively and expensively tested before leaving Luton: engines were run for impressive durations on the bench, then the cars were placed on a roller rig and operated in all gears in turn under conditions simulating street work. Finally there was a normal roadtest routine.

Well might Motor magazine remark, in reports published in 1919 and 1920, that the 30/98 was "a car containing all the essentials of a racing model without the usual accompaniment of harshness and excessive noise"; and that it represented "a new conception of what the sportsman's motor car should be." The external hallmark of Luton was always the distinctive fluted gougings tapering rearwards from the radiator shell into the bonnet shoulders. These flutes originated back before WW1. Bodywork for the 30/98s was meticulously made and finished, the paint jobs being individually blanketed in airstreams from multiple ovens permitting precise control of temperature and humidity.
Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon in a Vauxhall during a Hillclimb Event
The TT Vauxhall's potential went unrealised in road racing but proved itself in hillclimbs and other speed events. Most potent of all was the Vauxhall-Villiers version, which ran in both supercharged and unblown forms. The picture above shows a Villiers during a hill climb event, with Raymond Mays driving, and Peter Berthon as co-driver. Both Mays and Berthon were heavily involved in the ERA and BRM Formula One projects.
Latest Classic Car Classifieds


Sell Your Car or Parts Browse the Classifieds It's Absolutely Free! - Find Out More