Magnificent Machines: The Golden Age of the British Sports Car Timeshift

The Great British sports car.

A little cheeky.

It was about as much fun as you could have in those days with your trousers on.

Tantalisingly fast.

I remember the first time we went at 100 mph down the A5.

But above all, thrilling.

Shooting up the M1 in my dad's friend's E-type,

clinging on and seeing the big gauge at 135mph, thinking,

"This is the most exciting thing I'm ever going to do in my life,

"and if I die now, so be it."

This is the story of how the mass-produced British sports car

democratised speed and glamour.

It was a very glamorous era. They were beautiful cars.

How in a lost decade of Fifties hedonism

they perked up a grey country and sparked a manufacturing frenzy.

We could not make sports cars fast enough.

Our trousers were on fire.

A world of Healey 100s, frog-eyed Sprites, Jaguar E-types.

This was the golden age of the British sports car.

Strangely enough, the story of our mass-produced British sports cars

starts with these guys.

Well, not these are actual men, but American GIs.

We didn't always appreciate them.

But after the war, the cash-strapped motor industry needed their money.

Amongst all the boring family saloons Britain made,

there was one car which really tickled the GIs' fancy.

What really focused the British attention on the sports car

was that American servicemen who'd been stationed over here,

they'd been stationed in the US Air Force bases in East Anglia

and so on, they had seen these charming little MG sports cars

running around, which had been made before the war

and they thought they were fun.

And quite a lot of them

have bought these little MGs and took them back to America.

And suddenly, quite unexpectedly,

and with no effort at marketing or promotion,

the British motor industry found that the British sports car,

specifically the little MG Midget,

was a potential dollar earner for export.

That's right. GIs had spotted MG's two-seater sports car.

But MG didn't have any new cars to sell. Like everyone else,

they had spent the last five years servicing the war effort,

making parts for aircraft and overhauling tanks.

Anything except building sports cars.

They quickly scrambled into action.

Hoping no-one would really mind in the circumstances,

they dusted off the pre-war design that the Americans loved,

added a tweak here and there, and the car was ready.

It was called the MG TMidget.

Oh, bless.

This was the sports car that started it all.

It took America by storm.

And it still has lots of pre-war hangovers,

with cycle mudguards and big, spoked wheels,

but it has a lovely snorty little engine

and you're sitting there like a racing driver,

like Lou Vallario with your arm spilling over the door and a big,

big steering wheel with a horn push pointing straight at your heart.

And it's great.

And you just looked cute.

Overnight, the idea of a mass-produced British sports car

had been invented.

With the odd upgrade and occasional facelift,

the MG T series went on to sell nearly 50,000 cars,

most of them in America, but there was a home market too.

As matters improved and the world got slightly more peaceful,

people were able to indulge themselves,

and obviously one of the great indulgences is a pointless

sports car that's got two seats and a great big engine,

and is only good for one thing,

and that is a hell of a lot of bloody fun.

The dream didn't come cheap for the Brits.

In 1947, the average salary was £416, and a new MG T cost £527.

Which, in case you're wondering, is about £17,000 in today's money.

But unlike a custom-built Ferrari, these British sports cars

were within reach of affluent professionals.

Perhaps a suave doctor, or a rakish bank manager.

Early 1950s Britain offered driving nirvana for these lucky few.

With a tenth the number of vehicles around,

it was easy to put your foot down through the twisty roads.

They were just slightly rakish, I don't know, but you could drive

around with the hood down and this car was quite interesting,

because you had the optional extra aero screens fitted

behind the main windscreens, so you could lower the windscreen

and you'd got the aero screens, like the racing cars.

It was everyone a young man's dream, to have a sports car,

like the MG T, and I'd been a very lucky young man,

because, ordinarily, I wouldn't have been able to afford it,

but believe it or not, in 1952 I inherited £2,600,

which was a lot of money in those days, and not bad now.

And, of course, shock, horror, I suddenly had the wherewithal

to buy one of these much sought-after cars by young men.

With an eye on what his parents might think, John,

rather than throw all his money away, went for a second-hand MG.

It was £425, as I recall, which was quite a substantial sum,

and I caught the bus with a wad of notes

all the way from West Bromwich to Birmingham,

and I bought the car there and then for cash and drove it home.

My parents were like, "What have you done? You had all this money!"

But nonetheless, we loved it.

Well, it was quite glamourous, really, and I came from a background

where my mother and father hadn't got a car and I think it was

one of the first cars I'd ever been in

and it was well, glamourous, I suppose.

You felt as if you're getting somewhere in life

from the background we had both come from.

Yes, quite modest.

A new MG was out of reach to most of the middle-classes

and it was kept deliberately expensive.

To encourage exports to America,

the government added on the dreaded purchase tax,

which made an already pricey sports car even pricier.

There was purchase tax on anything, like a radio set or a car,

or whatever.

And the rating of that tax was raised or lowered

depending on how they wanted the demand to go.

At one time, I can tell you, there was a limit of £1,000,

I believe, for car prices.

Below that the purchase tax on a car that cost £1,000 was 33%,

and above it was 66%.

Even in these hard times, there was a feeling of optimism in the air.

For those few with the money,

finding some fun amongst all the austerity was a must.

Even if it meant taking the extra tax on the chin.

You've got to say, consumers having to pay that amount of money,

they wanted these cars really badly then, didn't they?

They would pay any price for these lovely new, exciting, fast cars.

And if it meant paying 50%

to the government for the privilege to drive them, then so be it.

But hold on!

The MG T was about to get blown out of the water, as another famous

brand muscled in on the act.

In 1948, Jaguar unveiled their XK 120 to a swooning audience,

and instantly made the MG look a bit prehistoric.

Clark Gable is pictured getting out of one,

and suddenly the world just stands back and sighs with admiration.

It was the poster boy of the mass-produced sports car.

Our rich cousins over the pond could just afford one,

but in post-war Britain, there was fat chance.

The XK 120 cost £1,263.

Weighing in at an eye-watering £36,000 in contemporary money.

It had 120mph top speed and film-star looks,

but was more than twice the cost of an MG T.

Even our rakish bank manager would balk at that.

Whoever could combine the beauty of the XK 120, with the driving

thrill of the MG at a lower price, would take the British sports car

into the modern age.

Step up, Leonard Lord, autocrat of the Austin Motor Company.

He too wanted to cash in on America's love affair

with the sports car.

Lord had plans for Austin.

Austin were then making fairly puddingy, soggy,

middle-of-the-road saloon cars which were driven by bank managers

or whatever they might be of the day.

Tax inspectors, perhaps.

They were all called after British counties

such as the Austin A70 Hampshire, the Austin A40 Devon,

which was succeeded by the A40 Somerset.

And they had all this running gear which was basically

the sort of things that you put under a soggy saloon,

and they decided to put that soggy saloon running gear

under what they thought was a car

that was as sexy and svelte and exciting as the latest Cadillac.

They were trying to produce a miniature American car.

The car that Lord announced to great fanfare was the Austin A90 Atlantic.

An Americanised sports car.

In their effort to capture a share of export markets,

British car manufacturers leave nothing to chance,

and on continental roads, new models that have never been seen

by the general public in England are here shown undergoing

practical tests before the production line gets moving in earnest.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

It cost quite a lot of money to make and by the time they'd got it

to America, the Americans were very good, and were then,

at mass-producing big, comfortable cars for very little money.

And so by the time the Austin Atlantic got to America

it had less room in it than an American car,

it went slower than an American car,

because with all these bits of chrome on it

it was quite heavy for the Austin A70 Hampshire engine.

And it was quite expensive, so it had no appeal to the Americans whatever.

A few were sold as a curiosity.

It had gadgets on it, but gadgets made by Brits,

so you would have, like, an electric roof, press a button

and very, very slowly the hood would come up, you know,

if it actually made it over the whole car you'd be glad,

but usually what would happen is, the electric motor would burn out,

so it was a kind of disaster.

It was a very misguided attempt to sell them something that

we thought they wanted, instead of something that they actually wanted.

Poor old Leonard Lord was left looking pretty sheepish.

The Atlantic had missed the point completely,

a sporty car was supposed to be fun to drive.

The Americans had enough slow and flabby cars of their own.

They wanted the British approach that Jaguar and MG did so well.

The Atlantic also failed on the style stakes,

it was as ugly as old sin.

Style now mattered, even in Britain.

The nation's attention had been focused on modern design

at exhibitions such as Britain Can Make It and the Festival of Britain.

The space-age styling of the '50s was a celebration of progress,

it looked to the future.

The public wanted their sports cars to do the same.

Only a car that offered futuristic looks,

100 mph performance, and the promise of pleasure would do.

In 1952, out of the ashes of Leonard Lord's Atlantic failure,

came a sports car that would be a runaway success.

Working out of an old RAF hangar,

a tiny carmaker called Healey had some big ideas.

At the helm was Donald Healey,

and he wanted to create sports car alchemy.

Way back in the 1930s Donald Healey had won the Monte Carlo Rally.

In the 1930s he had been technical director of Triumph

when it was still an independent company.

But during and after the war, he set out to make his own cars,

in his own company,

which he did for some years at a scruffy little factory in Warwick.

And it was only in the early '50s he took a deep breath and thought,

OK, he could see the potential of sending cars to the United States.

Healy had heard about Austin's American misadventure

with the A90 Atlantic.

He knew that Leonard Lord had piles of leftover Atlantic parts

stacked up in his factories, and was desperate to find a use for them.

Donald Healey had a bold vision.

He would take the best bits of the field Atlantic and use them

to make a real sports car for the 1952 motor show.

Using their racing expertise,

his small band of engineers teased 100 mph performance

out of the engine, and created a car that drove like a dream.

But Donald Healey wasn't satisfied,

he hated the look of the car's front end, with its oversized grill.

With no time to change it before the motor show,

he ordered to be displayed with its nose hidden behind a large pillar.

That didn't stop Leonard Lord from spotting it.

Leonard Lord went to the opening day of the motor show,

peered behind the pillar, saw the Healy 100 using his engine,

thought it was brilliant and said to Donald Healey,

"I will make this car for you."

In an amazing turn of fortune,

Lord agreed on the spot to mass-produce Healey's car.

In return it would be renamed the Austin Healey 100.

Hello!

This was the sports car that set the standard for a new generation.

# It's wonderful

# It's marvellous

# You should care for me... #

It really took Donald Healey to bring it all together

and add a bit of sex appeal, and also come up with something that

he knew everyone would want, and that would be a car that would do 100 mph.

In those days, that was a kind of magic figure and I think he thought

that if he could produce a car that could do that,

and demonstrate it to people,

then he would have an export winner on his hands.

It looked beautiful, it did 110 mph, the Americans loved it,

it immediately started to sell.

Contrary to Donald Healey's fears,

the 100's styling was the very thing that people fell in love with.

What really matters to the ordinary man in the street

lusting after a new toy, is what it looks like.

If you actually look at the construction of the Healey,

it wasn't that different from the later types of MG Midget,

the TD and the TF, which were then being made,

but of course it looked like a modern car,

it had a full-width all-enveloping body,

whereas the MG Midget still had separate mudguards.

Even for the diehard MG fan it was too much to resist.

There is not a straight line on it.

It's curved in every dimension, from above, from the side,

from the back, the front,

even the windscreen is a one-piece curved screen, which was unheard of.

It just looked so... What's the... Not necessarily...

I don't know how to explain it, it just looked so...

-You used to say it was like a beautiful woman.

-I did.

It is. You can stroke her curves.

There was only one thing John could do to satisfy his longing,

head straight off to the dealer.

This is the dream car really, it looked so nice,

it was new and smooth and...

And I...

The catalogue list price was 1,063, 12 shillings and sixpence.

That was the catalogue price. I could see that I was...

Well, this car, this car, I want it.

HE LAUGHS

And they struck a deal with me. I've got the receipt for it.

Still got the receipt.

The British sports car was no longer just a fun way to get around.

The Healey projected just the right image

for the aspirational middle class.

-It was just glamorous, wasn't it? It really was.

-Yeah, yeah.

It certainly felt a cut above, shall we say.

Like they said, you didn't get somewhere, you arrived.

I suppose looking back

you were treated a bit differently, weren't you?

-When you arrived in a car like that?

-Yes, there was...yes.

Bit like arriving in a Rolls-Royce now.

It was thought, mistakenly, that we were people of substance.

Little did they know.

The Healey had cost John equivalent of nearly £21,000.

It would require a few...compromises.

We got married in June 1956 and we went on our honeymoon in the Healey.

Actually, I lost my cap, it blew off because we had the hood down.

We came home to a house we had just bought

with the rest of the money, and we had this lovely car in the garage

-and no furniture in the house.

-THEY LAUGH

The Austin Healey had all the right ingredients.

Now other manufacturers knew what to aim for.

The sports car scene was about to explode.

By 1955, Standard Triumph had got in on the act

with its manly and rugged TR series.

A cheeky-looking 100 mph car that cost less than the Healey.

It was noisy but great fun so I said, "I'll have one of those",

it turned up in about five or six weeks,

it was black and blue interior, and it had a heater.

In fact, when building the TR2, the first thing they put in

was a heater and built everything else round it.

So if you needed to repair the heater at all,

you had to take the car apart, more or less. It was ridiculous.

But it was a 100 mph car and there was no speed limit then,

apart from the 30 mph in towns

and so you could bat along at whatever speed you liked.

MG also rejoined the sports car world with the MGA,

their first new car since the war.

With sweet modern looks, it was one of Elvis' favourites.

That's to say, quite girly.

The golden age of the British sports car had arrived.

By the mid-'50s, let's say 1955, when the MGA was launched,

you then had three quite accomplished, exciting and desirable

British sports cars in the mid-range.

You'd start with the MG, which was suddenly a very good-looking car,

you'd have the TR above it, then you'd have the Healey 100 above that,

so suddenly there was quite a good choice,

and they were all really good-looking vehicles.

They've all got this ability to lean on your arm out,

very important that with your flat cap, you've got your arm dangling

out of the side of the car, the leather patch of your blazer visible.

Very important indeed. They all facilitated that.

Once MG launched the MGA,

we had three basic motor cars to argue about in the pub.

There has always been a love/hate relationship between Triumph and MG.

I mean, Moses said unto the Lord "come forth"

but he could only come fifth because he was driving an MGB.

And Healey drivers had it in for Triumphs.

The TR2, the styling was ghastly compared...

HE LAUGHS

You might be seeing some nice gentlemen with the TR2.

And you know, that was actually... it had a tractor engine in it.

Actually, the engine wasn't bad. It was the best part of the car.

It was cheaply made, really, and it just didn't look right.

I didn't like the Healey because it has this leaning back look to it,

I didn't fancy that really.

Doesn't bother some people but I didn't like that.

People became Triumph men, or people became MG men or whatever,

and to see or hear of people jumping ship from one model to another,

from one brand to another, there weren't many of them about.

This is what all the advertising people played on,

once they'd got their claws into people,

they made jolly sure that they could keep them.

To keep their customers' fanatical loyalty going strong,

the manufacturers all tried to hog the publicity limelight.

Each brand wanted to look the fastest,

the coolest and the most contemporary out there.

It was time to pull out the big guns.

And what better way to show your thrusting modernity

than by becoming a record breaker?

MG and Austin Healey would both go over for two or three weeks

to the Salt Flats in Utah in the States to do long-distance events,

you know, three hours round and round in a circle, 24 hours and so on.

They'd take a specially streamlined one over to Utah

and they'd try and set all kinds of speed records for engine size.

So it wasn't that they were trying to produce the fastest car on earth,

but they'd be producing the fastest car up to 1,500CC

and whatever that was, 0.7mph would then be something

they could use in all their advertising

and really crow about it.

'Abbingdon on the River Thames, the MG car factory.

'From these drawing boards over the years have come one model

'after another of a world famous family of sports cars.

'Right now, the draughtsmen are working on a very special job,

'that of designing the fastest 1.5L car in the world.

'A car tailor-made to fit one of the fastest drivers in the world,

'Stirling Moss.'

The MG car company decided they wanted to go for this world record,

class G I think it is, and of course they had this fantastic-looking car.

It was about the height of my knee, and beautiful streamlined,

I'd lie backwards like this and the steering wheel was like that.

'Moss climbs into the driving seat to see how it feels.

'Everything must be perfect for a fault that would only be

'a minor discomfort at a mile a minute could be disastrous

'at four miles a minute.'

The point about that of course being that almost the whole motor car

was special, but it did have the basics of a standard MG engine

and things like it.

And most important, it had the big MG badge up front,

and that's really all that mattered.

Stirling, typical Stirling, I admire the man for so much,

Stirling would apparently arrive the day before these events,

look at the car, say, "Is this it? All right",

jump in, and within one, two or three runs,

he would set the record and then fly home.

He was such a pro.

'Stirling Moss is ready.

'Record breaking's a new departure for him,

'except of course Grand Prix lap records,

'which he breaks with almost monotonous regularity.'

I remember taking top gear at about 200, which is fairly interesting.

You don't really steer it,

you sort of wish it goes that way, a little bit this way.

That was a bit scary.

Speed records squeezed out of custom-made death-traps

were perfect to make the brand look heroic.

But the thing that really sold the sports car was the dream

that you too could imitate your hero on the racetrack.

Prestigious races like Le Mans were the ideal place

for manufacturers to show off their cars and gain precious publicity.

I can't stress too much how important success in motor sport was

to the image of the British sports car.

Particularly in the '50s and '60s.

Not only did each of the manufacturers have a works team,

a factory-backed team, they would pick and choose

their events carefully so that somehow or other they hoped they

could gain success even if they weren't going to win outright.

So it meant for instance that Triumph would go to Le Mans,

even though they were only going to finish ninth, tenth or eleventh,

and Ferrari would win,

they could still have something to advertise at the end of it.

'Right from the start, the giants battled for the lead,

'whilst the Triumph settled down to lap steadily,

'according to their pre-arranged plan.'

The phrase, we've all heard the phrase,

"win on Sunday, sell on Monday",

effectively that's an American invention,

the phrase, but it applied.

So if MG had done something wonderful on a Sunday,

you would be amazed how often an advert would appear

in the Daily Express the day after,

or in Auto Sport the week after,

making sure that the world knew about this.

They were all fighting for the same market, they were all

fighting for the same people, and if as an example MG could say,

"We went to Le Mans and we won the class in the 24 hour race"

and the opposition weren't able to say it, tick, that's a plus point.

But while Le Mans races used customised versions

of everyday sports cars, 1950s rallying offered the chance

to see them compete straight out of the showroom.

The cars racing in the thrilling European events

were the very models that you could buy from the dealers down the road.

This was publicity gold.

'Still leading the way and unpenalised with their TR3.'

We were running, in those days, standard cars.

I was lucky enough to sit with a guy who won the first

British Rally Championship in 1958.

He used his own TR3.

On one event, before one event, he had some problems with it,

we borrowed sales-demonstrator from the Triumph dealer

in Stoke-on-Trent.

The only tuning he did, he checked the tyre pressures.

I put a bit of cardboard on the dashboard

so that my map light wouldn't reflect on the screen.

That was the only work we did, and on the Monday morning,

I took it back to the dealers, it went onto the sales floor.

If the wins weren't coming in,

the manufacturers had another trick up their sleeves.

'By the way, the age of chivalry is not dead,

'the ladies must not receive male assistance from their team-mates.'

Yes, women came to the rescue.

All-women teams raced the same events as the men, but battled

for the ladies' prize, the award for the highest placed women.

Having far less competition meant a much better chance

of bringing in some silverware.

They could pop their little win in the papers

and get some kudos for the manufacturer.

'At the Earls Court motor show less than four months later,

'the hard-top MG, as used on the Alpine Rally,

'made its first public appearance on the stand.

'Having proved its worth in the rigorous test

'of international competition of the highest order,

'the car becomes available to the discerning motorist.

'Graceful of line, small and pretty, and at the same time...'

Oh, for goodness sake!

Winning women's prizes was all very well,

but Austin Healey got the best press ever

when they recruited a woman who could beat the men hands down.

Her name was Pat Moss.

We never thought of ourselves as women, as a woman's crew,

we just thought of ourselves as rallyists,

and Pat was one of the very best.

My sister wasn't really interested in being the fastest lady,

they wanted to win outright.

She was of that mould.

Pat Moss owned her own Triumph TR2, a car she nicknamed Fruity,

after the sound of the exhaust.

But she needed sponsorship to compete in rallying.

She approached Triumph to say,

"I would like to do this major rally, could you support me?"

And they offered to lend her a car but no money, and she said,

"Well, I've got the car, it's the money, I haven't got the budget."

So Triumph lost Pat Moss.

In the PR game, Triumph had royally dropped the ball.

They'd lost the Moss name, a female driver, and a winner.

Pat would prove to be publicity dynamite.

I think they thought she was just another lady driver.

And she turned out to be a lot better than that.

Paired up with a new generation of Austin Healey,

they were about to take the rally world by storm.

When we first started with the Healey, I think it was a Tulip Rally,

and they were real pigs to drive.

With the press watching,

they entered the hardest rally in the world, the Liege-Rome-Liege.

Not for them the ladies' prize,

they were going all out to win the whole event.

It was a tall order given the demands of the race.

Four days, four nights.

One hour break, not per day, one hour for the four days.

Dust, carts without any lights on in the old Yugoslavia, but you see,

I'm getting excited taking about it now, it was absurd but marvellous.

Forget about speed records and poncy French races, if anything could

sell the raw thrill of the sports car, this rugged rally was it.

And there was a woman at the wheel.

We came out of Yugoslavia covered in dust and dirt,

and washed at a fountain in the first place in Italy that we came to,

and then we had to get on with it.

On the long, long drive back to Liege she was so tired and she saw

the telegraph poles, she thought they were men walking across the road.

And I saw flaming cars in front of us and told her to dodge them.

We were desperate, desperate, but we made it.

Pat and Ann didn't just make it,

they'd beaten all the best men in the world.

Never mind, chaps.

There are a lot of people, I'm one of them, who feel that Pat's win

on the Liege in an Austin Healey 3000 with Ann

was one of the greatest motor sport events,

certainly one of the greatest wins, of all time.

If anything was going to sell sports cars, this was it.

The atmosphere around a win was electric,

and for Pat and Ann victories meant glamming it up for the cameras.

Almost as much fun as winning the race.

Especially with the Healeys. It was a very glamorous era.

We were very proud to be part of it.

And they were beautiful cars, there was always a team

of three or four them in the rallies, and we always...

at the end of a rally, they always expected the girls to dress up,

and have our hair done and be as glamorous as we could.

There were lots of photos taken with these beautiful cars.

It was great fun, it was a glamorous time.

Monte Carlo is a glamorous place.

Part of the appeal of all the motor sport publicity was Europe.

The continent represented glamour, and the era's idea of the exotic,

and by the end of the decade,

thanks to rising disposable income, it was within reach of the middle classes.

Those who could afford a sports car could now afford

to emulate their icons, and go for a jaunt through Europe.

I remember the first time

when we first used to go to the continent in the car.

We used to drive down the A5,

and round Marble Arch, I wouldn't dream of doing that now.

-It was a lot of fun.

-It was, yes.

The continental wind blowing in your hair. It was really good.

For a British sports car, the sweeping roads

and mountain passes were a natural habitat.

Oh, there's always one!

Finally, you could drop that top, and not risk a soggy bottom.

If you have a top-down, not friendly on the hairdo,

though we went all the way to Spain in the 3A with the top down,

my wife reluctantly accepted this diktat,

and put a scarf round her hair, and got on with it!

The British sports car was becoming the height of cool.

From Monte Carlo to the streets of Rome,

everyone wanted to be seen in one,

and they were becoming the must-have accessory in the chicest films.

When Fellini released La Dolce Vita, it wasn't an Italian car

being driven by the lead character, but a Triumph TR3A.

A British car in an Italian film, for goodness sake.

Think how awfully unhappy Fiat must been about that.

It was so nice to see that British sports cars appeared

in films all around the world.

To Catch A Thief, we've all seen the film, what was in the film?

A Sunbeam Alpine.

I mean, we all remember Grace Kelly, but it was a Sunbeam Alpine.

Now, that car, the film was set in the South of France,

surely it could been a French car, that it was a British car.

BRAKES SQUEAL

Nice.

By the late '50s, sports cars were still a hefty expense.

In 1957 the average house price was £2,000.

The cheapest of the big brand sports cars was an MGA, and that cost £840.

But people on a tighter budget also wanted in

on some louche driving action.

For them, joining the gang meant buying a second-hand car.

Or for the more adventurous, donning a workman's overall, and building your own.

You could buy a chassis,

and you could put a fibreglass body on, a Ford 100-E engine.

If you couldn't afford the four, 500 quid

for a second-hand sports car, or £800 for a new,

you built your own.

That's how much people wanted sports cars then.

They were terrible, really.

And the results were terrible, and if anyone saw you driving

the result, they probably thought you were terrible.

But what they tapped into was that there wasn't really

a very small, very economical sports car that you could buy,

that wasn't one of these plastic horrors.

Yet in 1958 a new budget choice would emerge, and suddenly

anyone who could afford a car could also afford a sports car.

Leonard Lord and Donald Healey had been busy.

Their aim was to create a new model that came in at a similar price

to an ordinary saloon, but creating a sports car dream

at a cut-price called for some blue sky thinking.

They came up with all kinds of wild ideas.

One of his ideas was that the backend and the front-end

would be identical, and only the middle bit would be different.

So you could just make one section, shove it on the front,

or shove it on the back. Didn't really work in practice.

'I'm John Bolster, motoring correspondent and ex-racing driver.

'I'm quite often asked to try out new cars,

'and this day I've been invited to Silverstone

'to see to see something extra special.'

What John here had come to see was the Austin Healey Frog Eyed Sprite.

So cute!

This was the sports car that brought the dream to a wider public.

The Sprite got its nickname, "Frog Eyed,"

from those front headlights, which made it look somewhat amphibian.

It was a real pocket-sized sports car,

that didn't need assembling in your garage.

The sprite cost £679, a tiny bit more than a Morris Minor,

but a whole lot more desirable.

If you talk about the democratisation of the sports car in England,

you have to look at the Austin Healey Frog Eyed Sprite.

Now this really brought sports car motoring to the masses,

like probably no other car. It was, I think, £649,

it would do 83 miles an hour.

It was a proper innovation, on many, many levels.

And it was so clever, you know, the front section,

you would have the wings and the bonnet all lifting

as one piece, so you didn't have to have

complex separate bonnet and then front section,

and at the back, to save money, didn't bother to put a boot lid in.

So if you had a suitcase, you would have to tuck it in,

behind the seat, underneath the back,

but as a two-seater sports car,

that's the kind of compromise you'd be happy to make.

And in Speedwell blue, which was a lovely, kind of baby blue,

it was a pretty, pretty little car.

And automotive historians always say that the most successful cars

are the cars that have these humanoid faces.

It quickly got this nickname as the Frog Eyed Sprite,

because of these two headlights sitting on top of the bonnet.

Again, it was another brilliant little cost-saving device.

Donald Healey had wanted to have flip-up headlights,

which obviously involved quite a bit of technology

and faffing around under the bonnet to make them work.

And when the accountants looked at it, and just said,

"That's too expensive," he just thought,

"Let's put them on top of the bonnet."

You know, at a stroke, creating one of the most distinctive looking cars on the road,

and a feature that everyone loves about it.

You look at the front of the Frog Eyed Sprite,

and you see these two wonderful eyes, and this little grin,

and you want to give it a saucer of milk.

It's just a beautiful, pretty little car,

that was cheap and was accessible, and you look at the ads,

and there is suburban Britain,

with the girls with their Puchong skirts,

and the blokes, the lotharios, with their ties and sports jackets,

with patches on the elbows,

loving this little Frog Eyed Sprite, because it was sweet,

and again, it gave that hint of sexuality,

that hint of speed, that hint of power, but it was accessible,

cheap to run, non-threatening, and just a lovely, charming,

matey little sports car.

Healy's stripped-down design had captured the essence

of sports car magic, and brought with it

a whole new generation of drivers, eager to join in.

Here was a car that didn't cost very much, and it worked.

And what it offered was not that much in the way of performance,

but a lot of excitement, because the doors are that thin,

the steering wheel's here, the windscreen's that big,

you really feel like you're doing 100 even when you're doing 40,

so it had everything.

They're tiny little things with 998CCs but so much fun.

They weighed as much as a packet of cigarettes.

The power went to the rear wheels.

We had a four-speed gearbox and a steering wheel and three pedals

and it was fun. You could kick the rear end out,

you could have proper sports car fun in it.

They were dreadful. I mean, dreadfully reliable,

they rusted to bits. You only had to show them a damp chamois

and the ferrous oxide would peek through.

It would also, I remember,

a friend of mine had one and when we drove on wet roads,

the water would come through the floor

round the pedals where the pedals went through the floor.

Water would gush in so you'd end up with freezing ankles.

But yeah, it was fun.

It was about as much fun as you could have in those days

with your trousers on.

It was, of course, exactly the sort of car that young men lusted after.

I was a single man living in Coventry,

actually working at Jaguar when I knew I could never afford

an XK150 or an E-Type that I was helping to design.

But I could afford a Sprite, so I bought one.

It's the sort of thing I could go to events with.

It was the sort of thing I could go to hopefully impress a girlfriend.

She was never going to be impressed by an Austin A35

or a Morris Minor, I can tell you that.

But some of them were as impressed as hell by a Sprite.

The Sprite was also perfectly timed.

The arrival of easier consumer credit meant that it was within reach of younger owners.

It came about at a time when credit was starting to be available

so it was one of the new cars of 1958 that would actually be

affordable to those who didn't actually have the ready cash.

It came along at the right time.

It was very much in that Macmillan, "You've never had it so good", period,

you know, and certainly from the point of view of sports car choice, you never HAD had it so good.

Healey had created a car that offered a taste of sports car pleasure.

But the little Sprite hit the roads at a time

when driving in Britain was changing.

VARIOUS HORNS BLARE

The freedom of the open roads was disappearing.

The country was doing well and car ownership had gone up

by a staggering 250%.

MORE HORNS

Exasperating, isn't it?

But you know, it's really no joke, this business of traffic jams.

As the roads filled up, the sports car paradise

of the early '50s started to fade away.

The Government unveiled a new project to tackle the traffic problem.

It is in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age

in which we live in.

In 1959, the ribbon was cut on the first motorway.

Jaguar test driver Norman Dewis took a keen interest

in this new sports car playground.

I went down there when they officially opened it.

I think it was Lennox-Boyd who cut the tape and opened it

and, of course, we all went straight off down

and the strange thing was that halfway down, the police

stopped everybody because a woman coming in from London

had come up the wrong side and started coming up the wrong way on the motorway.

The M1 is a kind of Wild West motoring environment.

You've got this road with no speed restrictions,

with no barrier down the middle, just a strip of grass.

You've got people pulling over to have picnics.

You've got people doing U-turns.

It's just... It doesn't bear thinking about and then you've got

somebody in an Austin Healey down at the North Circular thinking,

"Right, let's see what it can do."

With no speed limits and long, uninterrupted straights,

the motorway was somewhere sports cars could be taken to their limit.

Aldous Huxley said speed is the only truly modern sensation.

In other words, it's the one we as human beings have manufactured.

The rest of it is from nature.

And 1950, you've got this general reaching-out for technology.

We wanted to go into space, we've got jet transport,

planes and there is a need for speed.

So constantly, there's this kind of arms race going on.

The motorway made it easy to reach top speed

and 100mph no longer seemed quite so special.

To blow your socks off, a sports car needed to go much faster.

A new age of speed called for a sports car to match

and Jaguar had just the thing in mind.

They would make a car that went faster than everyone else's.

Taking a gamble, they closed their racing team and started to focus on

making a new two-seater sports car that could do 150mph.

The one, the only, Jaguar E-Type.

Oh, that's lovely.

This was the sports car

that had it all.

Designer Malcolm Sayer had made aircraft during the war

and Le Mans-winning race cars for Jaguar.

Now his job was to design a sports car with star quality.

Malcolm Sayer, the aerodynamics... Great man, one of the best designers

on body shapes, he came up with the idea

and it was basically the principle of the single-seater fighter.

You have the cockpit, then you have a subframe

that bolts on the bulkhead that carries the engine,

and the prop and all that or whatever.

And that was... He based it on a single-seater aircraft.

Norman worked with Sayer to develop the fledgling sports car,

taking what the designer had learned from aeroplanes.

I worked with him a lot in wind tunnel and on the test track

doing cooling and low-drag body stuff, you know, trial and error.

In those days, it was all hands-on.

You didn't have computers doing it for you.

More than anything, the Jaguar team

wanted a car that could do 150 miles an hour.

To sell such a beast to the public meant passing some strict road tests.

It was legislation brought in that you'd got to make sure

that the car was safe if the tyre burst.

That was the legislation. So what do we do?

We've got to burst the tyre at 150mph.

So I sat with Dunlop and we talked about it.

And they came up with this crazy idea. One of their blokes said,

"Norman, if we get a marksman on the side of the road

"and we put a marker up so you know that he's going to fire the shot into the tyre..."

I said, "No way! If he misses," I said, "That's the end of me."

Not that Norman didn't like a challenge.

With the car almost ready, where better to do the final

high-speed testing than on the wild frontierland of the new motorway?

What I did then, we started to get up at five o'clock

early Sunday morning and go down on the M1

and I had a stretch of road from...

Northampton to Newport Pagnell. I used to get on there

and straight down to Newport Pagnell, over the slip road,

back up and do this, get as many runs as I could

by about six o'clock in the morning and this was going well.

Every Sunday, we were doing this

and then I had a phone call from the Superintendent of Police

of Northampton and I knew him quite well, actually,

and he said, "Norman, I understand you're doing tests on the motorway."

I said, "No, no, no."

Jaguar's big moment had arrived.

In 1961, the time had come to unveil their E-Type creation to the public.

Quite suddenly, Geneva motor show, March '61. Good grief, what's this?

The most beautiful car in the world appeared - bang - from Jaguar.

The E-Type.

Of course, the crowds of people around the E-Type, they couldn't believe it.

The press people were there.

This car is literally a poem in steel and still

one of the most beautiful cars ever made in the world. Full stop, end of sentence, rule off.

When Enzo Ferrari first saw the car, he said, "What a beautiful car.

"We've made nothing better than that."

He said, "There's only one thing wrong with it, Norman." I said, "What's that?"

He said, "It hasn't got a Ferrari badge!"

And it didn't have a Ferrari price tag.

Here was a sports car icon which made even the Italians blush,

from a factory in Coventry.

Suddenly, here was a British car that would do 150mph,

a car that looked as if it was straight out of a spaceship,

a car that was being sold at an incredible price.

As I recall, even with the dreaded purchase tax,

an E-Type cost just about £2,000,

which was something like half of an Aston Martin price

or a quarter of a Ferrari price.

It changed everything.

A car that you could legitimately say was the nearest you could

get to buying a racing car and you're a private man living in your

lovely, lovely '60s house on these new estates in Hemel Hempstead.

And it's absolutely heart-stoppingly glorious to look at.

Because the E-Type was so beautiful,

everyone wanted to be associated with it.

Because it was sold at such a reasonable price,

an incredible number of people could afford one

and so it meant that if you were the man

who had opened a clothing shop in the King's Road,

you could probably afford an E-Type.

It was just amazingly - as I believe is an expression -

it was amazingly accessible and for that reason,

it set all the standards of being beautiful, of being trendy,

of being desirable and all the right people wanted to be seen in them.

They were besieged with orders.

Frank Sinatra went to the New York Show,

saw it and said, "I want that car and I want it now."

And even Frank couldn't have one.

No car before or since had ever come as close to distilling exactly

what you want out of a sports car.

That thing that makes you feel 150% more sexually attractive

at the wheel in that car than without it.

And legion of the jokes,

it was the greatest crumpet-catcher known to man. It's as simple as that.

There was always that sort of phallic symbolism.

There were always arguments that, you know, chaps who were

maybe a little bit deprived in the gentleman's area would need

a big sports car with a very long bonnet.

If the bonnet's got a bulge on it, even better.

That, quite obviously, is exemplified by the E-Type.

It was a great big chap's thing.

Predictably, men went crazy to get their hands on one.

Jaguar had found the perfect way to make a man

feel like he measured up against his peers.

It might not have been the cheapest but the E-Type was the fastest,

the best-looking and most desirable of our mass-produced British sports cars.

It was a complete revelation in mass production.

You look at it and even now, you think this is a hand-built,

bespoke car, but these things were rolling off the production line

faster than you can imagine. The pressure on Jaguar to produce them,

but they weren't hand-built, they were thrown together,

in the nicest possible way, but for them to actually offer consumers

a car that radiated such specialness - it looked, felt and drove better

than a DB4 and that was a car that was almost three times the price.

Put it next to a Ferrari 250 GT, which was £10,000,

and it still looked better.

This really was a complete production line revelation. That they could do it.

And everybody was saying, how did they do it for the money?

And they did it because they cut corners and didn't do rust proofing

and there were bits and bobs which were less than brilliant,

but in terms of that vision, of, "Let's make a sports car

"that makes you literally wet your trousers for 2,000 quid,"

that was the impulse which made them so successful.

When you consider we sold it for just over £2,000,

that included tax, I think we undersold it, really.

I think we should've charged a bit more for it.

With the E-Type leading the way,

British sports cars were on top of the world.

Britain had redefined the stylish, fun and affordable

open-topped two-seater.

We could not make sports cars fast enough. Our trousers were on fire.

These cars were coming out of Midlands factories literally

hundreds and hundreds at a time, on Bedford Transporters

being shipped down to the docks over to America.

-ANNOUNCER:

-The Triumph TR4A

lets you know what a real sports car is all about.

Triumph Spitfires battled with MG Sprites and Midgets

for entry-level wallets. TR4s and Healey 3000s

sat parked on the drives of those that weren't short of a few bob

and if the E-Type was just out of reach,

there was always the MGB,

the biggest selling sports car of them all. Speed and glamour

had been democratised.

You were defined as a member of this lovely, new, suburban,

successful society if you had a nice sports car

and if your wife had a pretty MG Midget or an MGB or an Alpine.

You had all the social forces, the clear roads, the greater disposable income,

the need for change, the optimism of the '50s and '60s.

This was the era of the sports car.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd