Description
By: John Baggott .
For Donald Healey, head of a small firm manufacturing sports cars, and for the history of British motor sport, the 1952 Earls Court Motor Show was a fateful occasion. It was there that Healey showed his new car, the Healey 100, which so appealed to Sir Leonard Lord, the head of BMC, that before the show was over the two men entered into an agreement by which BMC would produce the car in volume. The Austin-Healey was born and the rest is history.
That history was made to a significant extent by the motor-sporting achievements of the car. At the end of 1954 a high-performance version of the 100 — the 100S — was launched and it immediately made its mark in circuit racing and in the record books. When the six- cylinder version of the car — the 100-6 — was introduced the success continued.
But it was the 3000 — the next development of the six-cylinder Healey — that really put the car on the motor-sport map with its participation in rallies. Operated by the BMC Competitions Department at Abingdon, the 3000 rally cars achieved numerous successes between 1960 and 1964 at the hands of Pat Moss, the Morley brothers and Timo Makinen, among others.
Production of the 3000 ended in 1968, but this would not quite be the end of the story. The Healey SR/XR37 raced at Le Mans three times and the Jensen Healey was built in collaboration with the Healey company in the early 1970s.
This book tells the story of the big Healeys and the Jensen Healey in race and rally, both when the cars were new and as part of the historic scene. It includes detailed information on specific vehicles, with little-known cars raced by clubmen at one end of the scale and famous works record and rally cars at the other. Illustrated by photographs gathered from private collections across the United Kingdom, this is a valuable addition to the Healey literature.
