The Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon
houses a rare collection of British car industry endeavor. Let’s take a tour.
History has a tough time knowing what to
make of the British motor industry. On one hand sits the Total Disaster school,
citing as evidence the post-war collapses of Standard-Triumph, Rootes and BMC,
plus the scaling down of Ford and Vauxhall, despite the fact that Britain began
the 1950s making more than half the world’s exported vehicles.
On the other sits the Better Than Ever
school. Britain currently makes 1.6 million cars a year and is on course to hit
a record two million by 2016, at which stage we’ll be among Europe’s biggest
vehicle builders. How can this be failure? Add to this the fact that, under
foreign ownership, brands like Bentley, Jaguar, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin
have all revived and continue to insist that their success depends on being British.
Stars
of the main display area include two land speed record breakers: Sir Henry
Segrave’s Sunbeam 1000hp and the MG EX255.
The truth is that our industry is as
confusing as a collision of tidal waves, especially if you throw in a few more
factors: that this country is the cradle of Europe’s specialist manufacturers
(step forward, Caterham) and, even in tough times, British companies have been
gloriously willing to try risky, revolutionary designs that influence others.
The supreme example of this will always be Alec Issigonis’s Mini, but there are
dozens of others. Which is where the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon comes in.
Situated just off the M40 motorway near
Warwick on a 65-acre site next to Jaguar Land Rover’s all-action R&D
headquarters, the HMC has grown and developed since it opened in 1994 from
being a happy home for a valuable but unstructured collection of mainly BL
vehicles, to the nation’s number one center for all British cars, artefacts,
photographs, film, production records - and experts - which together can paint
a comprehensive picture of this country’s 120-year-old motor industry.
The
Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon houses
The museum was built using $12 million
liberated from Rover’s rapidly shrinking early 1990s coffers by the persistence
of its founding patron, Peter Mitchell. Like very few museums today, Gaydon
operates healthily, without Jaguar Land Rover handouts, on a turnover of about
$6 million a year, more than half of which is generated by a busy conference
trade - made possible because Mitchell and his architects had the foresight to
configure the building for big meetings and surround it with acres of free
parking. On weekends throughout the year, the space is used for peripheral
activities like motorbike rallies, model aeroplane flying days, one-make car
club meetings and much more.
Today’s visit isn’t going to be my first or
even 20th trip to the museum. I often pop in for a sandwich and a 20-minute
wander if I’m in the area. If you pay $23 for gift-aided entry and keep the
ticket, they let you in free for the rest of the year. However, my mission
today is on a wholly higher plane. I am to meet HMC’s curator, Stephen Laing,
who will guide me through the collections in a way that I’ve never been guided
before, then take me into the workshops and archive. I’ll also meet managing
director Julie Tew, whose skill at business development is a one big reason for
HMC’s greatly increased footfall, and Bob Dover, chairman of trustees and
former boss of Jaguar Land Rover, who has special clout when negotiating with
the neighbors...
Laing came to the Heritage Motor Centre “by
accident” 19 years ago. He trained as a materials scientist at Imperial College
but, fed up with London and keen on cars, took a couple of months’ assignment
at Gaydon and never left. A year later they made him curator, which meant
taking responsibility for the entire collection and helping to decide what
would be acquired. “We’re offered bequests quite often,” he says. “If we can’t
take something, we often know another museum that would like to.”
Heritage
Motor Centre - Gaydon - Warwickshire - Well worth a visit
Between them Laing, Tew, Dover and the
trustees have thinned the collection in recent years and redesigned things to
make it “a lot less car- parky”. They have 300 cars, show about 180 at any time
and have advanced plans for a new building nearby to house the reserve
collection.
Longer-term plans include the search for
funds to build a hotel, and it’s probable that Jaguar Land Rover will build
brand centers for its two marques on the HMC estate in the next few years. For
now, a superb collection of Land Rovers and Jaguars lives happily in the main
museum with a large collection of British bread-and-butter favorites (Spitfire,
Dolomite, 1100, MGB, Mini, A35 and dozens more) that become more special as
time goes by. Laing says that ‘my dad had one of those’ syndrome is a powerful
museum draw card. “Hardcore enthusiasts are extremely valuable to us,” says
Laing, “but so are the people who arrive looking for some nostalgia on a family
day out.”
Now that the main display area has space
and height (a mezzanine floor was added in 2007), it’s easy to focus on HMC’s
unique ‘sets’ of cars: three priceless Minis from the greatest days of the
Monte Carlo Rally, a group of four famous MG land speed record holders from
different eras, the latest from 1998, accompanied by various wind-tunnel models
and promo film. Next to them is the mighty Sunbeam lOOOhp, Sir Henry Segrave’s
twin 22.4-litre aero-engined record breaker (dubbed The Slug), which first
topped 200mph. It’s on loan from Beaulieu while they complete some building
work. Museums often co-operate like that.
At the base of the escalator that takes you
to the conference suites sit half a dozen Austin Sevens, appropriate in this
influential little car’s 90th anniversary year. There are several British-built
volume models and a battered Chummy once driven from Buenos Aires to New York,
plus prime examples of a 1931 BMW Dixi (left behind when BMW sold Rover) and a
1935 Datsun Type 14. The last two are Seven copies that helped to kick-start
these companies in the car business. The sixth car is a 1931 Seven Swallow, the
upmarket Seven derivative that Sir William Lyons built on his journey from
sidecars to Jaguars.
Dixi
was BMW’s licensed copy of the Austin Seven.
Jet-engined
Rovers include the T4, which also served to preview the design of the Rover
2000 executive saloon.
Rover jet cars are a unique HMC thread. The
original JETl, a decapitated 75 powered by a gas turbine, lives in the Science
Museum, but we view the T3 (a compact jet-powered coupe) and T4 (a saloon that,
apart from the turbine in its nose, revealed what the forthcoming Rover 2000
executive saloon would be like). Normally we’d have been able to see the
1963-1965 Rover-BRM Le Mans car, but it is away being restored to running order
exciting news indeed.
We walk on past Laing’s favorite from the
collection, a 1908 Austin 9.0-litre grand prix car (“It was a pretty average
racer, so they just parceled it up and sold it to the nearest customer”), as we
head for my own personal show stars: HMC’s wealth of fascinating prototypes
that never quite made production. There’s a Twini (a Moke with transverse
engines front and rear), a Minki (a Mini restyled and re-engineered for the
K-series engine), a Triumph Lynx (TR7 2+2 coupe) and a Rover SDl estate (it
looks so good that you could practically launch it today). There’s a Michelotti
restyle of the Triumph Dolomite that never made production and a wide-bodied,
front-engined MG proposal, the DR5, that sits on a TVR chassis and might have
become the next MGB if the company hadn’t decided to build the MGF.
The
Twini is a Moke with a transverse engine at each end.
We walk past some old driving friends,
including a 1929 ‘Blue Train’ Rover Light Six, complete with rickety Weymann
body, which I once drove in a vintage rally. There’s the oldest surviving
Rover, a 1904 single-cylinder 8hp, in which the Steering Committee and I once
did the Brighton Run. And there are Alec Issigonis’s twin prototypes: the
hydraulic transmission ‘gearless’ Mini and the A9X, the great inventor’s own
Mini replacement, which I was allowed to drive when I visited his home not long
before his death in 1988.
Then, to underscore the fact that so many
of Gaydon’s special cars are runners, I’m allowed to take to the estate roads
in the greatest Rover never built: the one and only mid-engined Rover P6BS, a
V8-powered coupe concept proposed by Spen King on P6 saloon bits and allegedly
kyboshed by Sir William Lyons because it might have hurt Jaguar sales.
This is a 45-year-old prototype. It’s
remarkable that it starts and runs at all, let alone emits (after a decent
warm-up) a vintage V8 woofle. The steering is light because the wheel is big
and the weight is mostly behind you. The wheel arches intrude a lot (that would
have needed fixing in production) but the big wheels, complete with Rover 2000
hubcaps, make the coupe ride surprisingly nicely and respond with Torquay ease
to the throttle. Down the bonnet, you’re even looking past bigger, early Range
Rover-style bonnet castellations. This is British automotive creativity laid
bare, and it’s on view any day of the week. This place only shuts between
Christmas and New Year.
The joy of the Heritage Motor Centre is
that you can savor it on every level. You can drop in with the kids, knowing
they won’t be bored. If you’re interested in the early days of the British car
industry, there’s plenty to see (including Lord Nuffield’s office, to show how
the ‘modest magnate’ lived his life). There are lots of ordinary British cars
to get your nostalgia juices flowing. And there’s the most amazing collection
of postwar might-have-beens that show where British engineers and designers
were directing their ‘Spitfire mentality’ several decades after the war. The
British car industry may have nosedived, dogged by overmanning, worn-out
factories and dud management, but the creativity did not.
Rover
T3 is a jet-powered coupé.
Rover
SD1 estate still looks great.
Early
Morris Cowley in the workshop
The
Mini features prominently, from sketches of Issigonis’s original proposal to a
‘gearless’ prototype fitted with a torque converter.
After
driving it, Cropley says the P6BS is the best Rover never built.
