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The
first 5hp Vauxhall car rolled out of the south London
factory of the Vauxhall Ironworks Company in 1903, while
Edward VII was king, and some six months before the
Wright brothers made the world’s first powered flight.
Vauxhall made its debut in motoring competition, successfully competing in
a sporting hillclimb later in 1903. So, as Vauxhall technology developed
at a spectacular pace, competition showed the way, and underlined every
technical advance.
Within a year of that first hillclimb
appearance, Vauxhall’s entry in the 1904 London to Glasgow Trial had
proved both its performance and its reliability by losing only seven marks
out of a possible thousand over the gruelling marathon.
It was a medal-winning performance, but
the biggest winners of all, then as now, were Vauxhall’s customers, as the
lessons filtered down to the ordinary customers’ cars. Even before
Vauxhall production moved from London to Luton in 1905, steering wheels
were replacing the original tillers, and from just one cylinder in 1903
you could have four by 1905 - when Vauxhall’s competition cars for the
Tourist Trophy also had six gears. Further proof of Vauxhall’s sporting
credentials came in 1908 when Percy Kidner’s ‘12/16’ Vauxhall finished the
RAC’s 15-day, 2000-mile International Touring Car Trial without any
penalty, without a single breakdown or any kind of repair work,
replacement or adjustment, without adding oil or water, without even a
tyre stop - the first car ever to complete the Trial distance with no
unplanned stop of any kind. And after the event, Vauxhall showed off the
car at one of the most famous motor sport venues of all, Brooklands.
The
famous high-banked concrete speedbowl of Brooklands was the first
purpose-built motor sports venue in the world, but it was also a
magnificent proving ground for the British motor industry - and a
showplace for winners like Vauxhall. It was built on a marshy part of
pioneer enthusiast Hugh Fortescue Locke-King’s huge Brooklands estate near
Weybridge in Surrey, and when it opened, in July 1907, it was one of the
wonders of the motoring world.
In
1909, stripped A-Type touring cars scored half a dozen wins at Brooklands,
driven by Trial-victor Kidner, AJ Hancock and Vauxhall director Rudolf
Selz - and the list of successes was growing fast. In March 1909 the
famous Test Hill was opened - a challenging 352-foot run with a gradient
of up to 1-in-4. Kidner’s 20hp won a certificate on the Hill’s opening
day, at an average of 15.9mph, and in 1920, after the interruption of the
war, Major Pierce Jones’s 30/98 set a new record at 24.9mph - the pace of
progress.
And
Vauxhall were the first to recognise the emphasis Brooklands’ high speeds
and clever handicapping system placed on science versus brute force. So,
late in 1909 Hancock had raced a slim, streamlined, single-seater version
of the 20hp to a string of records including a flying half-mile at an
average of 88.6mph - earning his car the nickname ‘KN’, because it was ‘as
hot as pepper’!
Having steadily pushed the record on, in
October 1910 KN achieved almost exactly 101mph over a flying half-mile -
the first time a car in its class had ever beaten the ‘ton’, and showing
that aerodynamics were just as important in those golden days of racing as
they are in today’s range of production Vauxhalls, whose slippery shapes
make them not only super-efficient in terms of maximum speeds but also
help make them stable at speed, quiet even at motorway cruises, and very
frugal on fuel - all part of the competition heritage. And if you visit
Brooklands now, and look at the crumbling remains of the old high-banked
circuit and the evocative restored buildings, it’s fascinating to think
that a car like today’s 3.2 V6 Vectra, with a top speed of 155mph, is more
than 10mph quicker than the all-time Brooklands lap record, set at
143.4mph by John Cobb’s massive, aero-engined Napier Railton in October
1935, four years before the legendary track closed for good.
But
if Brooklands is now just a nostalgic museum, another of
Vauxhall’s early hunting grounds is still very much in
business, and again bursting at the seams with memories
of pioneering Vauxhall achievements. That’s Shelsley
Walsh, widely recognised as the oldest motor sport venue
in the world to have been in continuous use (wars apart)
since the day it opened. And for the 1000-yard hill near
Worcester, that was in 1905 - the year when Vauxhall
moved to Luton.
Like
Brooklands, Shelsley was created to avoid the perils of
competing on the public road in the early days of the
last century - discovered by the Midlands Automobile
Club on the estate of Squire Taylor, who
enthusiastically backed their ideas of using his steep
and unsurfaced farm track as a competition venue! So the
first meeting was held on a warm August day in 1905 -
the year Vauxhall first went racing, in the Tourist
Trophy. Like Brooklands it had a great social
atmosphere. For the opening, Squire Taylor laid on a
huge picnic in the flower-decked cart sheds at the
bottom of the hill, with music from the Worcester Civil
Military Band, and uniformed waiters from the Birmingham
clubs. The ladies wore long skirts and broad, veiled
hats; the gentlemen wore ‘stovepipe’ trousers, high
collars and deerstalkers - and the very first car to
compete on the hill failed to make it to the top!
The
quickest climb that day took 77.6 seconds, but by 1913 a Vauxhall driven
by Joseph Higginson had reduced the hill record to a spectacular 55.2
seconds - and his 4.5-litre car turned out to be the forerunner of the
30/98 - not only one of Vauxhall’s greats but one of the great sporting
cars of all time.
In 1923 a Vauxhall recorded one of the
hill’s very few dead heats, in 52.8 seconds - against a Bugatti!
In 1929, with the awesome supercharged
Vauxhall Villiers Special running with 250bhp and twin rear wheels for
added traction, multiple Shelsley record holder Raymond Mays reduced the
hill record to a sensational 45.6 seconds - and Mays’ performances with
the mighty, screaming Vauxhall Villiers were part of the reason why the
BBC chose Shelsey, in 1932, as the venue for its first ever live radio
broadcast of a motor sports event.
In 1924 Vauxhall Motors withdrew from
motor sport and became part of General Motors the next year.
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