The Real Allard Story. "Hang on and shut up."

                 It's tempting to see these cars as holy relics;  vessels of  memories, style and dreams.  Emblems of their art and time.
 
                  Well fuck nostalgia.  My Allard J2, (soon to be available for viewing at Amelia Island Concours D'Elegance next March), was a wild beast you rode bareback, no helmet, no seat belt, no nothing, your butt a few inches off the pavement, the pavement visible in the spaces between the aluminum floor panels.  The doors an aluminum skin that came all the way up to your hip bone, the louvers on the hood broadcasting heat, the front wheels bounding, visible under their vestigial cycle fenders.  And you knew why open wheeled racers loved open wheels.  OK, touch another and one of you will soar.  Yeah, well forget that because you could see exactly what your wheel was doing, skimming the inside curb, then looking up for the short straight and lunging into the next corner. This car beat Ferraris in its time. This was the car to have to win Torrey Pines and Watkins Glen.
(click on images to enlarge).

 

        Sydney Allard was the first and greatest-of-all-time British Hot Rodder, sticking whacking great American V8s into a clever Brit Chassis.  Ol’ Sid was a racer. This car was a racer and what a racer was like a half a century ago.  Wagnerian roar, spinning wheels, no radio, no heater, no top, no roll bar, no sensors except you behind the wheel and no nothing between you and the machine and the road and your foot flat to the floor with the next corner rushing up like it was in love with you.  It had the same engine and weighed less than the Shelby Cobra of ten years later, so was around the same honking heart stopping performance.

The brakes were huge inboard finned aluminum drums at the back and even more huge drums at the front.  There must be a God if I can have this much fun just by putting my foot down and I put my foot down.  I was 28. And I believed then as I believe now, God drives an Allard.


             Allard made, by any measure, hardly any cars.  Going to race in the Targa Florio they took three Allard J2xs, and the one Cadillac V8 they could sneak through British customs  Crash a car in practice, no problem. Yank (no pun intended) out the Cad V8 and stick it in another.  Sidney Allard won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1952 in an Allard.  He invented or at least was the first importer of Drag Racing in England.  He got his start racing in the 1930s by sticking a whacking great air-cooled Steyr aircraft engine into a Bugatti chassis with double wheels bolted on each side at the back  to blow every body away in English Hill climbs.  They all cried foul, sacrilege.  Sydney said that’s racing. And stuck two whacking great Steyr air-cooled V8s, side by side, in the same car. He built his own Steyr Allard right after WWll, chalking the outline of the chassis on his garage floor.  Needless to say the car was virtually unbeatable.

Sidney behind the wheel of his Steyr Allard

             His last car was the Allard GT, an elegant coupe.  The hood a little too short, the roof a little to high to say it was just like the Jaguar plus 2 coupes that were prettier and cheaper a few years later.  It was 1958 and Sidney had them stuff a full race Chrysler Hemi V-8 in it.  Sydney was dying from cancer and his wish was to get into the Monte Carlo Rally race high up into the Alps, floor it and sail over cliff into the darkness.  

But by the time the Monte Carlo Rally began, he was too sick to drive.  The full race Hemi would not idle below 3,000 rpm.  And then, at around 3,001 rpm all of its 400+ horses came to life all at once full whack. They crashed it twice trying to get out of the garage.  Sydney would have pointed it at the door and floored it.

 
            (The author apologizes for the several repetitions of “whacking great” in the above, but that’s what Allards were and are.)

The Ressurection of FBA 685 Part ll

              Those were the Allard days, my friend.  There were a dozen of us. We'd meet at the Chelsea Potter Pub on the Kings Road in London, and drive FBA 685 down to Sutton, in Surrey to camp in a farmer's field. We'd follow the stream that ran alongside the the meadow to a waterfall on those hot summer afternoons.

 

             In the evening we'd walk down to the village pub, throw our money in a pot, and sing.  At closing time the publican would pull down the shades and we would carry on.  Adam and Tony and Richard played guitars and Sandra sang.  We'd all join in for the chorus. We were trendy, we were a pop group.  We were all going to be world famous.  We'd stagger uphill to the meadow, confident that if we just got our heads in the right place we'd be young and beautiful forever.

               Those dreamy days fade like old photographs.  But some cars get a second chance. We restore them because they are not just cars, but rolling time machines that bring us back to when we were were just beginning.

                 The Allard  J2 would accelerate so hard time would almost stop.  When I first bought the car I took it to the Allard Ford Dealership in Brixton, where the late Sydney Allard built his cars.  The craftsmen who had built Allards were cutting sunroofs in Cortinas then.  They came out and ran their hands lovingly over the soft curves of FBA 685.  "Proper motor car," they said. "Don't make them like that any more."

                I'd just bought the car with an old flathead V-8.  I asked the men if I should put in a new lightweight Ford Cobra V-8.  "Will it make it go faster?"  "Much faster I said.  "Oh well, stick it in, then.  That's what Sydney would have done."

                 I sold it to Otto Bowden,  a collector in Florida to pay for a round the world trip home from London.

 

Last year FBA 685 turned up again.  Another Florida collector, Martin Stickley found it in a metal shed in Jacksonville where it had been stored for decades.  It had been tarted up with red wire wheels and the awful white sidewalls General Curtis LeMay used to run on his J2X. FBA 685 was dull, tired and layered with dust and gunge.  But Stickley is now restoring it better than new and with any luck FBA-685 will be the star of the show at the 2011Amelia Island Concours D'Elegance next March.  And I will be among the slow moving fans, admiring, smiling, remembering the time.  (Click here for video of Allards at LeMans)

                 (to be continued.  The Blog, as you probably know, takes off for the weekend.)