Here's the walk around chat if you're hard of hearing like me!
Now you’ll hear us mention throughout this video this is a 1929 car, but if you run it through a car checker, it’ll probably come back as a 1934 car.
This is because it’s a 1929 chassis but is sporting a 1934 engine and number plate, although the V5 confirms this is a 1929 car.
The Austin 7, although in my eyes looks very special and beautifully crafted even in our modern world, was actually designed as an economy car with the sole purpose of bringing more customers in the motoring world in a similar tactic applied by Ford with the Model T.
The car was made from 1923 to 1939 and incredibly for the time, 290,000 were made - which makes this car nicknamed ‘the baby Austin’ a proper part of motoring history.
Which meant naturally, it had to appear on IDRIVEACLASSIC at some point.
Interestingly though, the Austin 7 almost didn’t happen!
The car was created by Sir Herbert Austin and Stanley Edge at Austin’s home and they then pitched the idea to the board of directors at the Austin Motor Company who felt the car was too small to be economic and too far removed from what their customers believed Austin to embody as a brand.
Sir Herbert Austin was so adamant the car needed to be built, he threatened to take his design to the car manufacturer Wolseley and eventually the board of directors relented and Austin received royalties on every Austin 7 sold.
And to note, the Austin 7 was £165 new which is roughly £10,500 today allowing for inflation.
Despite the Austin board of directors being a bit reluctant about the car, the idea of smaller cars wasn’t a new thing and in fact, Sir Herbert Austin had been toying with the idea since 1921 when the horsepower tax was introduced.
The Austin 7s all sported the same engine from the factory - a 747cc straight 4 engine and body styles varied from 2 door tourers, saloons, coupes and cabriolets to a rather interesting 3 door van.
It’s a 4 speed manual box in this but the three speed and reverse was used until 1932, so I assume this is what this car would’ve had originally.
We’ve got synchro in second, third and fourth on this - although this wasn’t introduced as standard until 1934.
Now if you’re watching from abroad, you may know this as a completely different car because the 7 was sold under license across the world.
From BMW producing their first car, an Austin 7 under license named the BMW Dixi, in France they were sold as Rosengarts and Nissan even produced their first car which was based on the 7 design but cheekily this wasn’t done under license but later led to Nissan obtaining an agreement to build and sell Austins in Japan.
Now I mentioned this was a Cambridge Special.
The Austin Cambridge Specials were built by Bill Williams at Cambridge Engineering based on Cambridge Road, Kew Green, Richmond which was founded by Williams in 1934 and taken over by D.H. Thomas and L. Brown in 1958.
Bill specialised in competition Austin 7s, Hill climb and sprint cars. After the war he went into building traditional ash framed and aluminium panelled bodies for Austin Sevens, which by this point, were mostly clapped out and could be bought for as a little as a few pounds from a scrapyard and which Bill would transform from as little as £35.
A few companies went into this sort of market but he was the most successful by far and later expanded into tuning bits and wrote an interesting booklet called Rebuild your Austin Seven the Cambridge Way before writing a full on book titled Austin Seven Specials which this actual car we are testing today features in.
The last Cambridge Special was the LMW which Bill made for himself but never went into production.
ACV 401, Sally, the car we are testing was converted in the 1950s and there are around 60 Cambridge Specials which survive to this day.
I thought it was also worth mentioning whilst we did this video a little about what is defined as a classic car - because cars of this age although a ‘classic’ can be classified slightly differently.
The Veteran Car Club of Great Britain class anything built before 1905 as a veteran, and anything built between 1905 and the end of 1918 as Edwardian.
Whilst the Vintage Sports Car Club take the naming convention further as anything made from the end of world war 1 up to the end of 1930 as vintage and anything made from 1931 to 1940 as post vintage.
Which means classic cars are then anything made from this period or end of World War Two with no cut off date although some manufacturers like Jaguar class it as ten years whilst classic car insurers tend to pick either 20 or 25 years from date of that particular car’s manufacture date.
Before we test this, I caught up with the owner of the car, Guy, who told me a little bit about this wonderful cars history.
18 июл 2020
