In 1966 I was working my way up the scale of sporting motorcars as money and ambition permitted and bought my first Daimler SP250. When they had been announced in 1959, I had not long been the owner of an earlier Coventry-made 2½ litre sports car, namely a Lea-Francis, so I was able to be a bit disdainful about the SP’s looks – although it did look as if it would go rather well.
Six years later I had used the LeaF up and had acquired a Wolseley 1500 for day-to-day commuting. It seemed time to investigate the SP since it was now readily available second-hand. A fellow-member of Verulam Auto Club, Ron Winder, had had one from new and had rallied it with mixed fortunes – including an “off” into a dry-stone wall which fell on the SP – so perhaps one might suit me. I bought a red A-spec, 9119 W, from Cass’s Motor Mart which, as it was in a mews off Belgrave Square, had a test circuit that was mainly a couple of high-speed laps of that Square (past the offices of the RAC Competitions Dept.). They took the Wolseley in part-exchange, which should have acted as a warning signal, but didn’t and I soon got a new clutch paid for under their warranty.
This was a much more technical car than the LeaF, so at first, I was in the habit of getting Alec Norman Garages, in Gamlingay, to do the maintenance. They were very good, but cost me rather more money than was prudent. Those were the days when you talked to the man who was going to do the work (Bob Young) who sometimes told you to ask the storeman (Jim Smith) if the part needed was in stock – and if it was, the job was done there and then. Otherwise, you were given a hack car to go home in (Gamlingay is 15 miles from my home (and everywhere else) with no trains since Dr. Beeching’s day). After my first major engine rebuild job, I went to collect the car expecting to have to pay on the nail, only to have them say they would put it on my account. When I pointed out that I hadn’t got an account, they opened one for me! I later found that most of their best customers were farmers who paid their bills annually when the harvest takings came in, so a man on a salary who paid each month was quite welcome.
With the passage of time, Alec’s workshop acquired a Manager in a white coat who was the man you had to talk to, and sometimes (if I stayed to watch) I saw an unsupervised apprentice doing badly what I could have done myself, so I took to doing more myself and eventually could claim to have done every job on the car except specialist machining.
9119 W was red, and increasingly scruffy-looking until the final straw when the bonnet opened at speed and broke itself over the windscreen. I had it repainted in the 1969 fashionable colour, Porsche Bahama Yellow, which I believed stood out well in poor visibility and therefore was a good safe colour. Later when I had a green SP I proved to myself that I was right, as I seemed to be able to sneak up unseen on other motorway traffic (which therefore reacted badly to being “caught napping”) whereas in the yellow one I was seen coming and allowed for.
Having bought a car like that just as the universal 70 mph speed limit came in, I was pleased to go to Germany and Italy where you could go as fast as you liked. One year when I had set out to tour on tyres that were near the end of their active life, I bought a session on the Autostrada del Sole heading north from Rome. I had enjoyed using the speed recommendations for the sharper bends at mph (they were of course in k.p.h.) when a couple of cars caught me up and of course, I had to join in until a rear tyre threw its tread and deflated in one easy movement. I had hardly got going again on the spare when I ran out of petrol as, if you plot the SP’s fuel consumption against speed, you find it has a sudden drop after about 75 mph and I had used a good couple of gallons more than I expected.
In 1968 a friend and I went touring Morocco and the SP was the best car we had between us. We drove hot-foot across France and Spain to cross from Algeciras and then had a more leisurely drive round Morocco, not always on paved roads. It was however a ‘yump’ on a paved road that tore the rear spring’s front hanger off the chassis, but a Good Man of Tetuan welded it back for us.
1969 saw a trip to Istanbul and back, again with some unpaved roads in southern Yugoslavia (as it then was) but nothing more severe than a good layer of dust resulted. I did some routine maintenance in the road one evening in Oradea in Romania and it’s a good way to gather a crowd. One man was pushed to the front, and it seemed he was the English speaker, though as he was a musician he found it hard to understand what I told him I was doing, let alone to translate it for the rest of them.
In April 1970 a chap called Brian rang me up because he had been told that I was breaking a Daimler SP 250 and had I a back axle? As I wasn’t, and I hadn’t that would have been that if he had not then offered me the car whose axle had broken, for £100.
I felt sure that there was money to be made by buying this other one and finding it an axle . . . . However, it seemed that there was an axle famine at the time so, when Brian rang again a week later, I told him no. He had found an axle; three of his Daimlers (the SP, a Major and a Century) were all broken down in Beaconsfield (where he didn’t live), so he had read a list of assorted part numbers over the telephone to a garage store in Cheltenham. The store keeper had said “yes” or “no” as appropriate and on checking the responses he had found that the SP axle had come up “yes”, so there he was with the last axle in the country. The price of the car went up, but it was now a goer, or would be when he’d finished fitting the axle. I said I’d come and have a look and chat; he sounded quite interesting on the ‘phone and had a lot of Daimlers.
At Beaconsfield we sat and drank Brian’s wine whilst he had dinner and kept up a steady flow of conversation ‑ well, monologue, as I hardly said a word for hours, which just shows you ‑ about the car and what he’d done to it and what was wrong with it. About how he’d found something on a farm in Wales which the farmer thought was probably a windmill, but which Brian had recognised as an old aeroplane, so for £17.10.0 he bought a Vickers Vimy (!), which he had restored but was not allowed to fly as he was not a licensed aeroplane engineer. About his antique shops and his radio manufacturing firm which had gone bankrupt. About his other cars (about 90 of them, we gathered).
I asked to see the car: 40 AXP was in a nearby yard with the back axle partly in. A dark colour, but in the half-light, I couldn’t see quite what, with a few patched‑up holes and tatty trim. I didn’t care for it as it was, but I said I’d try it when it was going, if he’d let me know.
Two days later he let me know. The car was awful. The engine puffed oil smoke and had no power; the steering was stiff, but the front wheels flapped about; the gearbox was noisy (even by the rather non‑exacting standards of SPs), and the cornering was poor. I said “no”. There was supposed to be a collection of spares which went with the car: bonnet, boot lid, steering box, windscreen, dynamo, starter, carburettors and brake servo were mentioned plus a few other things like a very necessary right‑hand door. I said “no”. The price, never high, came down. I made a (lower) bid. Not low enough, as it was accepted. So it was that I came to have two Darts, but if I sold it for what I’d paid 1 would have the spares for nothing, which seemed a Good Idea.
There was no MoT or tax, so I took it to Alec Norman’s where Bob Young found a wheel bearing gone and the steering box worn out. Also (which I knew about) the hand brake didn’t work ‑ it wasn’t connected. Steering boxes, like axles, were unobtainable so I took the one I had to Lione of Merton for overhaul; my date with Brian to get the spares (including that other steering box) having fallen through. One evening, I was trying to regain contact to make another date, when two policemen turned up who were also looking for Brian. I couldn’t help them and felt that, if they couldn’t find him, I had little hope, so wrote the spares off there and then ‑ the policemen checked that the SP had been his to sell, which helped, but I didn’t really need two of them. Some days later however, Mike Smith (who had been with me on that Morocco trip) happened to ask how much you could get an SP for, so he was promptly offered my purple one (I’d seen it in daylight by then, so could name the colour), and we agreed to open negotiations when it was legal and working.
July and an MoT followed, but some running about made me realise just how much oil and petrol it used ‑ I joked that it used more oil than petrol until I found out just how much petrol it did use! The mixture was much too rich and the power was low, which gave 22 m.p.g., with luck, to my yellow one’s easy 27: the left-hand carburettor wouldn’t adjust, which turned out to be due to a loose jet guide, the ignition was about 20º retarded and the throttle linkage gave one butterfly a 5‑10º lead on the other. All these were susceptible to kerbside maintenance and things were definitely less bad. The cornering on Dunlop RS5s was abysmal compared with the yellow one’s Michelin XAs (makes one wonder again how anyone and any car ever survived on those tyres) and the ride was very much harder.
I lent it to various friends, and, after a while agreed a price with Mike: he was out of work so had to defer actual purchase, but I lent it to him to go to Scotland in, and it came back with a three‑speed gearbox. When we dismantled it we found the usual countershaft gear failure, and the usual gap in Daimler’s stock of spares. Acting on a hunch of mine, Mike went to the local Triumph dealer with the broken bits and asked if they had any of these (not telling them what it was from, of course). They had. The rebuilt gearbox was quieter than any I’ve heard before or since, and that left only the engine to fix: Mike at this point lost hope of paying me for it in a reasonable time, so we sold it (clearing a reasonable sum over what it had cost us, at a price which now seems incredibly low), never to be seen again (well, hardly ever!). I had owned it for ten months and within the month was opening negotiations for my third (green) Dart. At around six times the price of the purple one it was, as it happened, a Bad Buy, so I had to keep the yellow one to keep me mobile whilst the worst was fixed.
The green one was a C-spec on its third registration number; 6798 PP having been allocated when a personal plate had been removed. I was worried by the oil pressure when I test drove it but was reassured when it was pointed out that the later gauge read 0-60, rather than 0-40, psi so half-scale was not as terrible as I had thought. First instinct was correct, however, and it had big-end failure almost at once and what was worse it had had that before and had been bodged-up for sale by filing a bit off the cap and crunching it all together to take up the slack.
A new con-rod was ordered from Coventry and the rebuilt engine seemed quite good enough. Sometime later I was able to buy a cheap spare engine for about the price of that con-rod. It was a V8-250 engine that had had frost damage to the block which had been increased by an attempt at arc-welding the crack. The whole thing was in pieces so I could load it all into the green car, something I couldn’t have done with an assembled engine. The handling of the overloaded SP was not really to be recommended.
I then sold the yellow car to an acquaintance who worked on oil rigs in the North Sea and whose motoring consisted of a 600-mile dash from Hertfordshire to Aberdeen every six weeks and the return trip four weeks later and not much else. It leaked oil from its back axle, so I told Alastair to make sure it was topped up regularly – of course he eventually forgot and 600 miles at good speed without oil did for the gears.
I think it was the green car that developed a strange clonk in the back axle which turned out to be the side tubes moving in the main forging. Bob Young attempted to weld it up but without much success so I managed to buy a new axle from Jim’s stores the day before VAT came into force.
The C-spec has cill beams which add chassis stiffness, but were cunningly designed to catch and trap water which rusted them away. Mike Riley (I think) had some replacements made in thicker metal, so I had a pair of those. Getting the rusty remains off was quite a task and I didn’t want to do that again so I modified the pair I had by welding cover plates on the open ends and then sloshing lead-based primer around the inside. It would have been better to use Waxoyl, but either that wasn’t available then, or I hadn’t heard of it.
* During the summer of 1974 I was shown an advertisement in Autosport offering a Daimler SP 250 Estate ‘needs completing, only £450’ which didn’t exactly impress me, save as an example of what people will do to spoil a more or less satisfactory car. By October it was advertised in Exchange and Mart for £200 and merited a telephone call which revealed that the body really needed throwing away, but at all events I felt it merited a trip to East Croydon for inspection.
At the foot of the back garden of the old bungalow at the end of a new row of houses there was this Thing: imagine an SP 250, and then replace that image piecemeal as the perpetrator had done with the original. There was no body forward of the scuttle, but a proprietary fibre‑glass bonnet intended for an E Type Jaguar had been narrowed to fit; there was no top to the rear bodywork and the top of a Bond three‑wheeler estate had been bonded(?) to what was left (rather well done actually). The rear seat had been cut out to make a footwell for the rear passengers who had now a seat where the petrol tank used to be. In that state it had been finished and used, but then the second owner had decided he wanted a racing car, so had stripped out all the interior except the front seats and dashboard (all of which he painted black), removed the wiring to the lights and petrol tank and had the wheels widened to 6″ and 7″ (from 4″) and fitted with racing tyres.
If you ignored the look of it, it seemed to be mechanically quite sound – a battery was found, the contacts of the fuel pump cleaned, a pint of fuel poured in the brake fluid tin that did for a petrol tank, and the starter operated to produce a single cylindered start, followed eventually by the other seven. It sounded well (so far as the open racing exhausts would allow), the gears selected and motion ensued; it was switched off and the (low) offer was made on the basis that the parts would fetch well over that sum if I lost interest and broke it up. Once more, perhaps I should have offered less, as I became the owner of ARK 1C instantly at my offered price.
After buying, but before getting the heap, I just missed a complete body being sold cheaply, but got seats, heater and petrol tank from the same car at a rendezvous with a Winchester policeman in a plain van in a dark car-park in Stoke Newington. I had decided that re‑bodying as a sports car was the best bet, as not only did I not want an SP 250 Estate (even complete and going) but I doubted anyone else would. At least I could sell a sports car if I didn’t like it.
Back in September Mike Roper had raced his SP 250 at Lydden Hill and worn most of the tread off the tyres; not long after, he lent it to a friend who drove it into a tree at Hanger Lane, the tyres having little grip on a wet road. The tree came in through the passenger door and finished up where the driver should have been, cutting the body (of the car) in half and bending the chassis so badly that no component aft of the front suspension pillars retained its original shape. The driver recovered, but the car (insured Third Party, Fire and Theft) didn’t, so I bought the bodywork and a few wheels from the luckless owner. Including the green SP 250, and give or take the odd shred of fibre-glass, I now had about 2½ Daimlers
I had started taking the estate body to bits beforehand, once I knew I was getting Mike’s body, and had separated Bond from Daimler with a handsaw, resulting in a Daimler SP 250 pick‑up and a new garden shed. Handling even half a Daimler body is a bit tricky single‑handed, so a small rope‑hoist was used to take the weight and assist generally; the old rear was cut off with a jigsaw attachment on the electric drill, the new rear was offered up and cut along a similar line to fit. At this point elegant variations in body shape was evident even on bodies as close as numbers 303 and 381, and a certain amount of distortion had to be built in to achieve a match.
The front bodywork was rather more difficult, as I only had the tree damaged front to work with. In ripping itself off the chassis, the inner wing valances were badly damaged and the nearside one was declared past hope and a new panel was bought; it is not easy to clean out an old panel, well bonded in, to make way for new, but at least I could operate with the front body upside down and gravity working in my favour when it came to bonding in the new panel.
Having got the main body sections together, visible progress slowed suddenly: firstly the continued laminating of various joins and filling of outer profiles left the whole looking much the same, but secondly May arrived, and with it the motor sport season – starting badly with four race meetings to handicap in five weekends. A reasonably full season of grass Autotests in the Green Daimler took several Sundays, and the requisite maintenance and overhaul of that car and the commuting Ogle left little spare time.
Odd jobs like repairing the rather second‑hand rear seat upholstery and making door trim panels passed a few summer evenings – the door trims were modelled on the later pattern with solid pattern pockets at the forward end.
One problem to be overcome was the paint already on the various bits of bodywork: Mike Roper’s car had had silver paint that seemed to rub off rather easily and the heap had been painted matte green. Where the paint was really bad I risked paint‑stripper to get it all off, but elsewhere just sanded it down with an orbital sander, filling the chips and hard‑top scuff‑marks as I went past them. Primer showed that my preparation was less than I had hoped, so I set to work to rectify what I could now see. More primer went on and was flatted off, and then colour – Fiat Sierra Red in fact, although a friend reckoned it was red oxide primer – which showed up even more surface defects than the primer. Some while before I had realised that I was not going to finish up with a Concours d’Elegance winner anyway, so I felt I could put up with a poor paint job, so long as it looked well from a distance.
Paul Kennedy had negotiated re‑chroming with the Letchworth Polishing and Plating Co. so I took a car full of assorted metal (his and mine) in on 19th December: they would fit it in between their normal work – say about six weeks including Christmas.
By the end of January, I had as much colour on as I felt I needed, so it seemed time to put the engine and gearbox back in. I considered taking them to bits to see what I’d got, but thought it would be simpler to try them first and see (see below, however! ).
With the engine in place wiring seemed worth starting: the estate’s harness had been cut short at each end, but was more or less complete in the middle; the one that came with the silver body had (like the body) been broken in half by the tree and had had other damage but had nearly complete ends. A surreptitious graft half way along the side gave a rear end with little missing, and the front was attached with the junction‑box and ‑block that came with the estate – untidy, but electrically sound. Earth wires in the SP 250 harness emerge in pairs at things like the petrol pump – when you cut off the tag they both connect to, things downstream have no earth! After a lot of problems like that (ignition warning light came on with the sidelights as well as with the ignition) I got everything to work so far as could be tested.
With a whole body to do and a low threshold of boredom, I took to cutting and polishing the paintwork by degrees doing an hour at a time amongst jobs. Polished, it looked quite a lot better, but the ripples showed better too.
My local parts factor supplied rear brake pipes including a (rustproof) Cunifer one for the long run along the chassis side‑member through the out riggers – definitely a recommended modification as rot will otherwise cause loss of brakes when one needs them most. Exchange and Mart provided a hood frame for £1 in Orpington – just before a trip to Lydden Hill so it only cost six miles of motoring to get it – which for an item just not available was pretty good: it paid for E. & M. for the year I reckoned.
A call on Speedy Cables provided a handbrake cable and bonnet release cable, so I could now close the bonnet for the first time. It turned out to fit remarkably well.
In early April the plating was actually done, and by the end of April a check list showed only 48 hours of work left: a running check kept later showed this to have been about 25% optimistic, but it was just possible I might finish it by June so I set to work to try. In the end I booked it for M.o.T. on July 2nd when I took the green one for its M.o.T. Now an oddity of the system is that you can only drive an untaxed car if it is en route to a prearranged M.o.T. test, and you are then committed to present it , no matter what reveals itself on the way. Suffice it to say I presented a car with unbedded-in new brakes, stiff steering, a sticking throttle, a speedometer that read 140 at anything over a walking pace and (though irrelevant) low to zero oil pressure and an engine knock plus the noisiest first gear I’ve ever heard. Nonetheless it passed, so what to do next? I drove home and started work on the snags: the steering was adjusted and became (slightly) lighter; the speedometer turned out to have a small screw stuck to the magnet which dragged the aluminium cup with it by friction rather than by induction; the throttle was fitted with more springs and the linkage was arranged to not tangle with itself.
The engine and gearbox would have to come out again (the main bearings were awful), but in the 350 miles it did before I started that job the car felt better than I expected, so the prospect was not too bad.
I took the crank to my local machinist without realising that grinding the centre three mains required a thinner wheel than normal, and he had to dress one down to fit. I can’t remember the detail of what else needed to be done, but I built up as good an engine as I knew how (aided by that scrap V8-250 engine), and the second-best gearbox (after that one in the purple car).
Having rebuilt both engine and gearbox I then had two SPs in good working order which seemed more than I really needed. What was more, I still found that combining daily commuting with interesting and by now slightly old cars I was back to the treadmill of spending the weekend maintaining the cars so that they were fit to get me to work for another week. I decided that if I was to have more than one car, I could have one that was old enough to be interesting and to use for sporting activity, and one that was newish and suitable for day-to-day use.
In 1979 I bought a 1938 Lea-Francis Sports for VSCC rallying and a 1978 Alfa Sud ti for the rest, and sold the SPs which were advertised in Driving Member. A local Lanchester owner, Tim Farr, took an interest and, offered the choice of the two, wisely opted for the green one. He and his wife seemed to enjoy it thoroughly, and she still regrets selling it (family reasons, as so often, caused the sale). I gather that it is now being restored in Australia.
The Sierra Red one was then advertised in Motor Sport, and duly sold to someone who posed as a private individual, but turned out to be a dealer. He sold it on, claiming to have specially sought it out in the wilds of Hertfordshire – not only could the unfortunate purchaser could have saved himself about 20% if he’d read my Motor Sport ad. himself, but he would have had an honest description of the car’s chequered history before purchase, rather than in the Hunton Bridge pub afterwards.
I sold most of my accumulated spares to friends in the DLOC, and some years later sold a large proportion of what was left to a man in Hazlemere whose cheque bounced and from whom the Small Claims Court got no redress.
Many years later I was selling a few items on eBay which included an original SP250 publicity leaflet and hence made contact with a German SP enthusiast who took almost everything I had left, whether he wanted it or not, at a rendezvous at a motorway services area.
Mind you, even 35 years after selling my last SP, I still find the odd identifiable bit from time to time, most recently some of the fibre clamps for the ignition leads.
Allan Lupton
( see also DM vol 44 no:4 page 20/21 – The Handicapper’s Tale )
*An addendum to ARK 1C from Bill Munro (Carbodies) in April 2024 when I wrote to Bill after receiving from him the picture of ARK 1C as an estate car.
I don’t know Alan Lupton, so I can’t say anything about what part he played in ARK 1C’s story. I first came across it, or rather what was left of the original car in the yard of Spa Engineering, a body repair and BMW Isetta specialists in South Norwood, south London in about 1965. Spa was run by John Bennet and Teddy Peddle. John had just become the chairman and the British Hot Rod Association. I and my schoolfriend Pete (we were both 16 in 1965) were hot rod mad and finding the heartland of British hot rodding on our doorstep was a dream come true. We took to haunting the place and eventually we were recruited to help produce the association’s stationery, on a small Adana hand printing press. We also helped run a series of scale model drag races and static model rod and custom shows at the Philips Sports & Social Club in Purley Way, Croydon. These were run to help Pete Bartlett test and perfect the timing apparatus he’d built for drag racing. Along with Roy Phelps a relative of John Bennett’s, who ran a company called Fibreglass Repairs in nearby Bromley, John and Teddy formed a company called National Dragways, which was the company behind what would become Santa Pod Raceway.
ARK 1C was, as you might calculate from the year I mention, 1965, new, but it had been severely damaged in a crash. It was bought by one of Spa’s repair people, Bert Shires, who set about rebuilding it. Bert was a family man and wanted a car that would carry his two small children. From Fibreglass Repairs, he bought a GRP E-Type bonnet and narrowed it to fit the Daimler chassis. He took the roof from a Bond 3-sheeler estate car and moulded it into the boot. He then sprayed it green and for a while it was his daily driver. I moved away from my involvement with Spa and the BHRA, under parental threat (O-levels, or else…) and heard no more. I found that image on a Facebook page, taken by a man whose name I cannot recall, but who has complied a huge number of images of early British drag racing on his own website.
