Elemental Spirit Part 1: A Power Partnership

From Sprite to Midget – profiling BMC’s diminutive sportsters.

Who would have imagined that the joyful, cartoonish little sports car introduced to the motoring media at Monaco on 20 May 1958, two days after the Grand Prix, was born out of the anguish and self-doubt of the most powerful man in the British automobile industry?

Leonard Percy Lord (1896-1967) was a brilliant production engineer whose breadth of ability led him to rapid promotion at Morris Motors, and then, after crossing sides, a fast-track path to Chairmanship of Austin in the early post-WW2 years. He had a consistent ability to see profitable gaps in the market, or target rival makers’ cars which could easily be bettered by his companies’ better specified new products.

However, Lord had two weak spots; North America and sports cars, and in the first few years of the 1950s learned hard lessons with unsuccessful Austin products, his anguish compounded by the success of Jaguar and Nuffield-owned MG.

The 1947-52 Austin A40 had sold well in the USA and Canada in the late 1940s, but only on its low price and a post-war market where demand for new cars far exceeded supply. The 1949-53 A40 Sports, a neatly styled four seat drophead coupe, developed and largely built by Jensen Motors, was neither sporty nor cheap. It proved to be a hard sell, and just over 4,000 were produced.

A far more egregious failure was the 1949-52 A90 Atlantic. Based on a chassis and drivetrain derived from the unremarkable A70 Hampshire Saloon, this gross two door coupe and convertible duo was aimed at the United States market, with styling by in-house Austin designer Riccardo Burzi based on sketches by Lord of what sort of car he believed would appeal to American tastes. In its short production life, only around 350 of the 8,000 Atlantics produced were exported to the USA.

Fortuitously, the highly regarded and well-connected sports car manufacturer Donald Healey had recognised the usefulness of the Atlantic’s 2,660cc overhead valve four-cylinder engine and associated drivetrain components to underpin his ambitious Healey Hundred sports car, which was displayed as a prototype at the 1952 London Motor Show. For Leonard Lord, the Hundred must have appeared as a gift from a beneficent deity. A deal was reached within days by which Jensen would build the bodies, assembly would take place at Longbridge, and the car would be sold as the Austin-Healey 100.

A new marque had been created, but more importantly, it was the beginning of a power partnership between the most powerful man in the British Motor Industry, and a sports car entrepreneur with a unique understanding of the global automobile market, as well as a solid engineering and competition track record.

Leonard Lord’s reputation as an ogre is overstated, but he was certainly socially awkward and often lacking in tact. Donald Healey was at ease in any company, and with his irrepressible enthusiasm, made friends as easily as Leonard Lord made enemies. Many of his acquaintances were highly valuable, particularly those in the American automobile import business and the world of motor racing.

Healey provided the focused design skills, Lord provided the production infrastructure, and the Austin Healey 100 lived up to its promise, with around 5000 cars being produced per year, over 90% of them exported to the USA.

Moving on to early 1956, at one of their occasional meetings Lord made a comment to Donald Healey along the lines of ‘sports cars are getting bigger^[a], perhaps there’s a market for a small one’. In fact, Lord had contemplated the idea some years before^[b], but now had Healey as an expert sounding board for his thoughts.

Healey pondered the notion on his drive back to Warwick, ideas were exchanged, and the Donald Healey Motor Company was contracted to produce detailed design proposals for a small sports car, with the internal DHMC code Q1. The fee for Healey’s input was considered to be very favourable compared with using BMC’s own internal design offices, which were operating at full stretch to replace almost all of the company’s mainstream products by the turn of the decade, and also to turn Alec Issigonis’ advanced XC cars into production reality.

There was also the matter of geo-political tension in the final quarter of 1956, but long before the Suez Crisis, Sir Leonard Lord had devolved oversight of the small sports car project to his assistant, a fellow by the name of George Harriman, who signed off the Healey design for production in January 1957. From then on, Q1 became ADO13.

Healey and his designers had been given a free choice from BMC’s parts shelves, within inevitable cost limits. They chose and adapted the A35’s 948cc A series engine, along with its gearbox and rear axle. The front suspension was A35 based, but with the Morris Minor’s rack and pinion steering. The Sprite’s rear brakes also came from the Morris, fully hydraulic, unlike the baby Austin’s hydro-mechanical arrangement.

The Sprite’s body and chassis were the work of Healey stylist Gerry Coker and engineer Barry Bilbie, who were design leaders for the Healey 100 series. The smaller car is often described as the first mass-produced British monocoque sports car, which is an over-simplification, as the structure is more of a combination of platform and tub construction, as shown in this illustration.

Coker and Bilbie’s design featured a non-structural one-piece front end, combining the bonnet, front valance, and outer wings.  This arrangement was a feature of many sports-racing cars at the time. The complex front bulkhead envelops the mid-front mounted engine and picks up front suspension loads, with chassis legs extending forwards to support the radiator and bonnet locking points.

At the rear, a substantial bulkhead behind the seats incorporates fixing points for the quarter elliptic leaf springs and radius arms above. Nothing behind the bulkhead serves any structural function – the rear bodywork only had to support itself and could be built as lightly as its designers dared.

If further evidence of transitory thinking is required, it is to be found in BMC’s plan for construction of the bodyshell. The platform was fully constructed by John Thompson (Motor Pressings) in Wolverhampton, then sent to Pressed Steel in Cowley, where the superstructure panels were produced and assembled atop the base unit. This all reads like separate chassis thinking in the unibody era. The completed bodyshells were then delivered to a BMC factory – of which more later – and fitted with the drivetrain, suspension and trim.

The quarter-elliptic rear leaf spring suspension was a bold departure from the semi-elliptic longitudinal leaf orthodoxy of the time and is possibly the most surprising element of a low-cost parts-bin car. The 15-leaf springs, rigidly clamped at their leading end and combined with fully trailing arms were intended to provide far better lateral location than conventional semi-elliptic springs, without recourse to additional location links such as a Panhard Rod, or Watts Linkage.

The Sprite name was Donald Healey’s apposite choice^[c], previously used for a series of well-regarded pre-WW2 sporting Rileys. In a cruel irony, that revered performance car marque had been recued from bankruptcy by the Nuffield Organisation in 1938, but was heading towards badge-engineered irrelevance under Leonard Lord’s Nuffield-phobic BMC just as Austin-Healey’s star grew ever brighter.

The ‘Frogeye’ headlights defined the first-generation Sprite in the public eye as a toy-like fun car, but Healey and Coker had envisaged a purposeful, aerodynamic, diminutive sports-racer, minimal to the point of rawness, with an air of the Speedster about it, a product to appeal to young Americans whose wage packets – or more likely parental allowances – would not stretch to a Porsche 356.

The Q1 prototype as presented for BMC’s approval had pop-up headlights which lay flat in the bonnet surface, in a style similar to the Porsche 928, until they were raised by the driver through a system of rods and levers operated from the dashboard.

So it may have been, but for the intervention of Len Lord. With tooling already in production, BMC’s chief declared that the cost and complexity of the pop-up lights were not acceptable. Gerry Coker had parted from Healey in 1957 to bring his talents to Chrysler in the USA, and his successors Les Ireland and Doug Thorpe’s only option was to do a hasty re-work, with the headlight pods permanently set atop the bonnet, inboard of the front wings. To their credit, their solution, with scalloped recesses in the bonnet surface in front of the headlamp pods, looked convincingly intentional. Thus, the Sprite was landed with its cute anthropomorphic ‘face’ through a combination of the over-ambition of Healeys designers and  Leonard Lord’s characteristic suspicion of untested innovation.

Long after the event, Donald Healey was embittered about Len Lord’s imposition, claiming that the mechanical actuator mechanism devised to raise and lower the lights was “perfectly satisfactory” and “would probably have added no more than £1 to the cost of each car”.

As previously noted, BMC management oversight of the ADO13 project was largely devolved to George Harriman, Leonard Lord’s assistant. Harriman was an easier individual to work with than Lord but lacked his boss’s incisive mind and instinctive talent for cost-effective production engineering. Had Len Lord been more hands-on, the one-piece front end and quarter-elliptic leaf spring suspension may also never have reached production.

BMC’s management had decided that the Sprite would be built at the Austin works at Longbridge, but that was to change when the ADO15 Mini project was approved for production. In a logical move, the MG factory in Abingdon was given responsibility for assembly of the new sports car alongside the MGA, and from late 1957, the Austin-Healey 100.

Despite Austin-Healey being a pet project of Len Lord, and on the wrong side of the Austin / Nuffield divide, the MG engineers were reported to have worked with their Healey counterparts in a positive spirit. However, MG were not prepared to adopt the Sprite without ensuring it met their technical standards. They considered the Healey organisation’s proving regime to be far less rigorous than their own and had reservations about the Sprite’s insubstantial tail assembly.

Six pre-production cars were fitted with boot racks carrying a 50lb. simulated luggage load and driven over a cobbled test track. Confirming MG’s concerns, the rear wings distorted very early in the test period. Additional reinforcement was hastily designed and fitted to completed bodyshells and the small number of finished cars, and a potential warranty and reputational disaster was averted.

MG’s involvement came at a late stage, and the Sprite was a true Healey design. At the time, the Healeys, Donald and his son Geoffrey, Barry Bilbie, Gerry Coker and his styling office successors were masters of the art of the British sports car. Just look at the interior view. It’s an ergonomic and passive safety nightmare, but it shouts out, ‘Drive me! Have fun!’

The Donald Healey Motor Company took responsibility for uprating the A series engine. Engineer Roger Menadue, a Cornishman like Healey, ran the experimental department at Warwick. His ministrations, which comprised a pair of 1⅛” SU SU H1 carburettors^[d], a re-profiled camshaft, stronger valve springs, and stellited exhaust valves raised the 948cc engine’s power output to 42.5bhp at 5000rpm, while giving decent low-end torque with a figure of 52lb. ft. at 3300rpm. For comparison, the same engine in A35 tune only managed 34bhp^[e]. The Sprite weighed just 1328lb (602kg), 240lb less than the two door A35, despite having the same basic drivetrain and a similar footprint.

In its home market, the Sprite’s launch price was £679 after tax, £109 more than a two door A35 saloon. No mass-produced car at the price could compete with the new Austin-Healey’s performance; 80mph top speed and 0-60 mph in just over 20 seconds. However, in low–wage, highly taxed, finance-restricted late-fifties Britain, the price of any new car would have been well beyond the reach of most of the young enthusiasts the Sprite courted. In the USA, there was no such inhibition, and Donald Healey boasted of taking 1500 American orders per week.

Healey conceded that the Sprite’s unintended cuteness contributed to its immediate success following its launch in May 1958. In 1959, its first full year, around 21,500 examples were sold, falling slightly to 18,665 in 1960. Not that anyone worried unduly. Donald Healey’s instinct had been proved correct, helped by his vigorous promotion of the car which carried his name.

Motorsport also played its part in establishing the Sprite’s reputation. Barry Bilbie’s idiosyncratic chassis design had the virtue of being an ideal blank canvas for racing car developers, most notably John Sprinzel, who had won the 1958 British Saloon Car Championship in an Austin A35 developed by his Speedwell Company. In the following year he won the British Rally Championship in a Sprite, and in 1960 achieved a class win in the 12 hours of Sebring race in Florida and took second place overall in the British RAC Rally and third overall in the Liège-Rome-Liège rally in Healey-developed Sebring Sprites.

Sprinzel had a complex but fruitful relationship with the Healeys, and contributed to the design of the Sebring Sprite, which had a lightweight alloy hardtop coupe body on a modified version of Bilbie’s chassis, with upgraded suspension and braking, including front and rear disc brakes.

That inner structure was not just useful for racing. It also facilitated future design variations and restyling. Well before the turn of the decade, the next chapter of the Sprite story was already being drafted.

To be continued.

_{[a]  Was Len thinking of the recently introduced MGA, which cast a considerably larger shadow than its TF Midget predecessor?}

_{[b]  Around the time of the 1952 merger which created the British Motor Corporation, Leonard Lord instigated studies for an inexpensive open-topped sports car using the recently introduced Austin A30’s powertrain and suspension components. In-house Austin stylist Riccardo Burzi produced sketches and scale models which impressed Lord sufficiently to approve work on engineering and production drawings. The A30 Sports project – unofficially known as the Red Devil – advanced far enough to deliver a well-finished road-going prototype, but Lord vetoed further development, citing misgivings about the proposed construction, which comprised a tubular space frame supporting a glass-fibre reinforced plastic body.}

_{[c] ‘Imp’, also a former Riley name, was the first choice, but Rootes Group had already registered it. BMC also had to make an agreement with The Daimler Company to use the ‘Sprite’ name, which had been applied to a mid-sized Lanchester saloon, fated never to go into production. The Lanchester Sprite (c.1953-55) had the possibly unique distinction of being produced in Mark 1 and Mark 2 versions without a single car being sold to the public. According to the JHT website, three Mark 1s and ten Mark 2s were built.  Although the Mark 2 appeared in Daimler / Lanchester price lists, none were sold, and the running prototypes were used for many years as factory hacks.  The unitary-bodied Mark 1, which looked like a mash-up of a Morris Oxford Series 2 and a Singer SM1500, had one feature in common with its Austin-Healey namesake – the entire bonnet and front wings were a single structure hinged from the front bulkhead.}

_{[d]  The smallest instruments SU produced, but for BMC, Standard-Triumph, and Rootes, twin carburettors were absolute holy writ for a proper sports car.}

_{[e]  Before the Healey-developed twin carburettor engine, BMC A series production was concentrated in Longbridge. The new variant was built alongside the C series six at the Morris Engines factory at Courthouse Green, a northern suburb of Coventry, establishing the plant’s new purpose as the site for the specialised A series engines required in the Mini Cooper era.}

_{Reference sources: Men and Motors of “The Austin”. Barney Sharratt. Haynes Publishing 2005/ The A-series Engine Its First Sixty Years. Graham Robson. Haynes Publishing 2011/ Donald Healey My World of Cars. Peter Garnier with Brian Healey. Patrick Stephens Limited 1989/ MG The Untold Story. David Knowles. Windrow and Greene 1997/ Triumph Cars-The Complete Story. Graham Robson and Richard Langworth. Motor Racing Publications 2004/ Brick by Brick – The Biography of Leonard Lord.  Martyn Nutland.  AuthorHouse 2012/ Classic and Sports Car September 1983}