Government Meddling

In a recent letter to Vintage Racecar, David Carroll mentioned that he owns an HRG. Regardless of anything else, like what it might do to your dental fillings, the “Hurg” is one of the most elegant cars of the 1930s.  It also reminded me about what government decisions have done to cars. I don’t mean fallout from policy, like the Depression, and the present problems; I have in mind conscious decisions made by governments.

If you look at the production figures of specialist British car companies, like Allard, Dellow, Frazer Nash, HRG, and Lea-Francis, you will see that they slide from 1952, and the companies are all but gone within a couple of years. In most cases there was a final last-gasp attempt at survival which failed. AC would have gone as well, but a Tojeiro chassis and Allan Turner’s radical revision of Touring’s “barchetta” created the Ace.