Flying to Victory - Linkage Mag

TALK TO ALMOST any gearhead about engine displacement, and the conversation eventually veers into the thundering world of British speed record cars. These beasts roared to life with huge engines and streamlined bodies. Some of the cars were fitted with airplane engines. Three significant cars — the Napier-Railton and the Sunbeam 350hp and the Sunbeam 1000hp — still live in the UK.

The Napier-Railton Of the aero-engined cars, the Napier-Railton with its Napier Lion engine is the most versatile — and certainly one of the most successful. The car still lives at the Brooklands Museum, and it is always ready to run. It frequently roars to life at Goodwood events.

Brooklands driver John Cobb commissioned the car, and it was designed by Reid Railton, who was the designer of several large displacement record cars and boats. It was initially designed for competition in Brooklands races.

As Brooklands was a high-bank 2.7-mile cement speedway that was very rough, the design called for a powerful engine, a strong chassis and a compliant suspension that could keep the wheels on the pavement.

The Napier Lion engine is a unique design, which uses three banks of four cylinders each to make a 12-cylinder configuration This can be visualized as a 120-degree V8 with another 4 cylinders standing straight up between those banks. Designers called it a “broad arrow” layout, but in contemporary terms it would be a W12 engine. This engine was given a displacement of 24 liters and generated 535 bhp at 2,550 rpms with abundant torque — 1,300 ft-lb at 1,800 rpm. Sitting atop these three rows of four cylinders were heads with 4 valves for each cylinder actuated by double-overhead camshafts.

The Napier Lion engine was designed during WWI, and the engine was put into production in June of 1918, but with the armistice signing in November, the Lion had little chance to roar into airborne combat. However, the Napier Lion engine was a commercial success, and it was used in more than 160 different aircraft applications until the late 1930s, when more advanced engines made it obsolete.

The Lion, in both naturally aspirated and turbocharged installations, set many speed records on land, sea, and air and could be tuned to produce up to 1,300 bhp.

The design and construction of the Napier-Railton was quite involved, with the engineering fabrication firm of Thompson and Taylor building the chassis and drivetrain. Their shop was located on the infield of Brooklands.

Everything, save a Bentley steering box, was bespoke. The sleek aluminum body was formed by the craftsman at the prestige coachwork of Gurney Nutting. To keep the car under control, the suspension design was completed by using a beam axle in the front mounted above the leaf springs in an underslung configuration. The rear axle was controlled by cockpit adjustable dampers and the load was carried by dual semi-elliptical leaf springs cantilevered to the axle.

The drivetrain uses a 16-inch, single-plate clutch connected to a 3-speed wide ratio transmission with overall gearing giving it a top speed of 170 mph. No reverse gear was fitted.

To fill all the systems, it took 18 gallons of oil, 14 gallons of coolant and 79 gallons of fuel. The displacement is a whopping 23.944 liters. The car was built in 1933, and all that displacement cranked out the power — and the speed. The car set 47 speed records at Brooklands, the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry in France.

Allan Winn, retired director of the Brooklands Museum and steward of the Napier-Railton for decades, says that driving it takes skill and concentration to get it off the line and through the gears, but at speed it handles beautifully. He did note that with a turning circle of 72 feet and no reverse one must plan ahead.

After years of driving and demonstrating the car on many circuits, Allan says that the experience is majestic.

The bill that Cobb received when the car was finished in 1933 was £10,000 — or over 1.1 million 2024 U.S. dollars.

Two Special Sunbeams

During WWI, Sunbeam manufactured aero engines. Those engines were applied to two distinctive land speed record cars that Sunbeam constructed at their Wolverhampton Works near Birmingham.

Both cars are now in the care of the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu, UK.

The first car is known as the Sunbeam 350hp, and it was named after its engine power. It has a conventional powertrain layout driving the straight rear axle through a 4-speed gearbox, The 350hp used a typical suspension with semi-elliptical leaf springs at all four corners.

The engine installed in this car was an 18.8-liter V12 using components from Sunbeam’s Manitou and Arab aero engines. This is a massive engine with huge displacement. The crankcase was configured with the banks of cylinders at 60 degrees. Four cylinder blocks of three bores each were used. The cylinder heads had one intake valve and two exhaust valves — bumped by a single overhead camshaft. The cam drive used a dizzying array of 16 gears to time the cams to the crank.

1920 saw the first competition outing of 350hp at Brooklands, and by 1922 Jean Chassagne won the Easter Monday race, lapping at 114 mph. Malcolm Campbell arranged to borrow the car for land speed record attempts. In 1922 and 1923, Campbell made record runs that were thwarted by unofficial timing equipment. His speed for the flying kilometer was 138 mph.

Campbell then purchased the car from Sunbeam and christened it Bluebird after a blue repaint. Over the winter of 1923/1924, Bluebird was taken to Boulton Paul aircraft fabricators for streamlining. The radiator was fitted with a narrowed cowl, and a long tapered tail was added to the car. These modifications, along with fitting high-compression pistons, made Campbell the first man over 150 mph, clocking 152.883 mph over Pendine Sands in South Wales on July 21, 1925.

Ian Stanfield led the restoration team at the National Motor Museum that restored the 350hp Sunbeam back to the look of its glory days with Malcolm Campbell. The car is fully operational. We were fortunate to see it started by the crew and watch “Stan” take it around the grounds at the museum last September in preparation for a visit to the Goodwood Revival.

The Sunbeam 1000hp

Maj. Henry Segrave took The Tiger, a smaller Sunbeam-built record car with a 4-liter supercharged V12, to Southport Beach, just north of Liverpool, for a record run. In 1926, he took the land speed record from Campbell by 1.46 mph at a speed of 152.33 mph. After this record, he asked Sunbeam chief engineer Louis Coatalen for an even faster car to break 200 mph.

The bar was raised by designing and building a two-engine dedicated land speed record car. The initial concept for the car was conceived by Coatalen and the design was detailed by Captain J. S. Irving. The goal was to break the 200-mph barrier. To do that, they needed more power that any one Sunbeam engine could deliver.

The last two Matabele II engines in storage were integrated into the design. The second series of the Matabele engine was the aero engine modified for racing boats.

The Matabele, yet another war orphan, was a 60-degree V12 engine with four valves per cylinder with dual overhead camshafts. This design used two aluminum six-bore blocks. The total displacement was a whopping 22.4 liters. The Metabele II engine used a single magneto per bank, while the aero engines had dual ignition.

Tying the output of two engines, mounted in line, to the drive wheels presented plenty of design challenges.

Counter-rotating engines are not unusual in airplane installations. They use the opposite rotation to offset engine torque in multi-engine planes. The pair in 1000hp were opposite-rotating engines, so the output ends of the engines were set in the car facing each other. The power was shafted to a gear case with three meshed gears. Directly behind the gearbox was a case housing a right-angle gear drive with shafts going to the side of the chassis and fitted with chain sprockets to drive the rear wheels. This was a solid drive with no differential. The gearing gave a calculated top speed of 212 mph. Using a chain drive to the rear wheels allowed the rear axle to be bowed around the crankcase of the rear engine. A semi-elliptical leaf spring supported each end of the beam axles.

Extensive wind tunnel testing was done on one-tenth scale models to determine the shape of the aluminum body. It was determined that the tail configuration needed to be extended to eliminate lift on the rear of the car, resulting in a 23.5 foot overall length. As the body shape evolved, the fabricating crew gave it the nickname “Slug.” Some of the wind tunnel testing was done at the Brooklands facility.

The car was finished early in 1927. After stationary testing, it was driven about 1,000 feet and put in a crate for shipping. For the car to reach 200 mph and then slow down, it would take a run of about nine miles, and no area in the UK was long enough to handle that run.

Daytona Beach, with its 10-mile stretch of beach in sunny Florida, was used by American drivers to attempt speed records — and had the length with the timing verification organizations required. So, Segrave, the car, crates of parts and crew members boarded the RMS Berengaria for New York.

Upon arrival in Daytona, the team began sorting the car and solving issues with steering gear, shifting, braking, and overheating issues. After fettling with the machine, the crew had it ready to run by March 29, 1927.

While 30,000 wide-eyed spectators watched from the dunes along the beach, Segrave fired his brace of mighty engines and headed into the land speed record books with a flying mile at 203.792 mph and 5 kilometers at 202.675 mph.

Sunbeam and Segrave became the first duo over 200 mph. The Sunbeam board of directors and engineering group were quite pleased with their £5,400 investment, which in today’s money equals $360,000.

Bringing 1000hp back to life

The present-day restoration of the 1000hp is exciting. Doug Hill, Ian Stanfield, Michael Gillett, Mitch Caws, and the rest of the mechanical wizards of the National Motor Museum have stepped up to the challenge of restoring the 1000hp. It will be restored operationally and visually as it was that day in March 1927

The goal is to bring it back to Daytona on the 2027 centenary anniversary to do a demonstration run. Linkage is following this project closely, and we will have updates.