History

Letter from AustinThe recreation of a special test car has been a dream come true for owner Martyn Corfield. He has wanted to own one of the original works special cars for years.

“I have always longed for one of these cars and to be able to restore it to full competition status. After many years searching I came across a letter from the Austin works to Donald Healey stating that the original streamliner 200mph car and its sister 24 Hour endurance car were scrapped in the late fifties after the Bonneville salt had made them unsafe to use. That scuppered my plans for a long time and although I did manage to acquire one of the original endurance car Dunlop callipers and one of the original 2.69 crown wheel and pinions together with an original undertray and black faced speedo (which was adopted to minimise glare in the desert sun) this proved to be as far as I could go in terms of original items.
Then one day I heard a rumour of ‘the last known factory lightweight chassis’ which I purchased after verifying its likely originality with two known Healey specialists. This chassis is lightened in the ways that the works used and was being used in the seventies to underpin another project. This seemed the best place to start a recreation. I knew that if I was to attempt an endurance record I would have to re engineer the car to a safe and competent standard and as such an old parts just would not do the job even if they existed.

It was my objective to set about reconstructing a car capable of not only replicating the 1954 achievements, but also a car that embraced the spirit and style of the original vehicle (no modern tricks). So I sought professional help from the best Healey competition experts that I could find and put the project in the hands of Jeremy Welch” Says Martyn Corfield.

Martyn Corfield
Martyn@goodfoodchain.co.uk