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The silver streak rides again
Exclusively for The Sunday Times, Andrew Frankel was allowed to drive Britain’s most celebrated prewar record breaker – which still has the power to terrify
This is frightening. I am about to do something no journalist has been permitted before. I am sitting at the wheel of arguably the most important racing car this country produced before the war. We are poised to set off around Brooklands, the track on which it made its name, but which has not been used since 1939.
The car, a world record breaker, is called the Napier-Railton and it has a 24 litre aircraft engine in the nose, a nervous driver in the middle and a team giving it a push start at the back. Oh, and no front brakes.
I am a large chap and not used to being dwarfed by the machinery I drive, but the Napier-Railton seems impossibly vast, its nose stretching off into the distance. Each of its cylinders has the same capacity as a 2 litre family car and there are 12 of them at my disposal. At full chat, they’ll burn half a gallon of fuel in one mile.
I slot the gearlever back into first and wait. The car was made to be as light as possible, but even so weighs two tons, or about the same as a Mercedes-Benz S-class limousine. Slowly we start to roll and when someone shouts “Now!” I gingerly lift the clutch and the Napier engine thunders into angry life.
The ride is staggeringly bumpy. Even though I’m now travelling at a fraction of the speed achieved in 1935 by John Cobb when he broke the world land speed record, I’m being bounced clean out of the seat. All that’s between me and a multi-million-pound accident is my grip on the huge steering wheel.
The smallest tickle of the accelerator (which, worryingly, is in the middle with the brake on the right) is all the encouragement this beast needs to leap off around the banking – old photos show the car with all four wheels off the ground.
Sure, the track surface has deteriorated over the decades, but I found new respect for the man who wrestled this monster around the banking at such velocities. Drivers of lesser calibre than Cobb had lost their lives going clean over the edge.
As a serial record breaker, the car has done 12,000 racing miles, and like so many racing cars actually becomes easier the faster I drive. The ride smooths out, the engine is less truculent and the absurdly heavy steering suddenly becomes manageable in my hands.
It accelerates like no car I have ever experienced. Today the engine is red-lined at less than 2000rpm, or little more than idle speed for a modern car, so there is little sense of engine speed rising. It just grows louder and louder while you’re hurled at the horizon. The wind assaults your face and brings tears to your eyes if you’ve forgotten to wear flying goggles while you hang on grimly and try to survive. This is one of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve had in a car.
So what it must have been like in its heyday in the 1930s is beyond imagining. On paper the fact that the Napier-Railton once lapped this track at 143.44mph doesn’t look too impressive – until you remember the date. This was 1935, when the top speed of an everyday runabout, the Ford Focus of its time, would have been little more than 40mph.
Recall, too, that the circuit was so heavily banked at each end you’d have needed a rope ladder to climb it. Cobb tackled the banked sections at more than 130mph, which meant he needed to come close to 160mph on the straights, or not far short of four times the top speed of a contemporary road car. Today’s F1 cars rarely reach twice the speed of the slowest Focus.
This Napier-Railton is an icon of British motor racing, owned today by the Brooklands Museum. It will run again at this week’s Brooklands Centenary Festival before being transported to Goodwood’s Festival of Speed. Because it is unique, its value runs into millions.
The engine is called a Napier Lion and is the same as that used by the Supermarine S5 monoplane to capture the Schneider trophy in 1927. The Railton part of the name comes from Reid Railton, the man who designed it for John Cobb. Apart from its gargantuan size, the engine specification sounds like that of the latest design for a state-of-the-art supercar: a W12 formation, twin spark plugs and four valves per cylinder as well as twin overhead camshafts.
The car itself is pared to the bone. The bodywork is ultra-thin aluminium and, because it has neither wipers nor lights, nor does it have a battery. There’s no starter motor either, so its only electrical requirement is a supply of sparks for the engine, generated mechanically by twin magnetos, just as you find on all piston-engined aircraft. The front brakes were omitted to save weight, the gearbox has only three gears and there is no reverse. Slowing down or going backwards are not what it was designed to do.
What it was designed to do was break records. That lap of Brooklands broke the outright lap record for the track and, while others tried to beat it right up to the outbreak of war, none did. The record stands in perpetuity.
Not content with this domestic record over one lap, Cobb and his team headed over the Atlantic and proceeded to drive the Napier-Railton flat out on the Bonneville Salt Flats for 24 hours nonstop. At the time the 24-hour average speed record sat at 127mph. Cobb and the Railton raised it first to 134mph and then, in 1936, to a preposterous 150mph inclusive of all stops. When Audi won the Le Mans 24-hours in 2006, the winning car averaged 138mph.
Today the Napier-Railton is much as it was then. Since its retirement from active service it has been a movie star (Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a 1951 film about a racing driver), a test bed for deploying parachutes and a museum piece, but the engine, gearbox, chassis and the body from the cockpit forward are unchanged. When I sit in the cockpit, looking along that huge bonnet to the banking beyond, these are precisely the sights that would have greeted Cobb more than 70 years ago.
Driving this car was something I’d dreamt of as a child. It is one of the crown jewels of Britain’s motor-racing heritage and simply watching it run is a privilege. If you need further convincing, go to Brooklands or Goodwood and see for yourself
GLORY DAYS
The Brooklands Centenary Festival, June 16-17, celebrates 100 years of the birthplace of British motor sport (details, www.brooklandsfestival.co.uk).
On its 2.75mile banked oval track of concrete, 100ft wide, the principles that still govern motor racing worldwide were developed.
Among Brooklands veterans showing at the Goodwood Festival of Speed will be:
1908 Mercedes Grand Prix
1909 Benz 200 ‘Blitzen Benz’
1922 Delage II ‘La Torpille’
1930 Bentley Speed Six
1931 MG C Type Montlhéry
1934 Derby-Maserati