The 1924 Targa Florio Mercedes

Some people might say that I lead a charmed life and being asked to drive such a fabulous racing car is all it takes.  I should however point out that there is some luck and a lot of hard work involved.  No one is likely to ask a complete novice to drive such a car and so there is a long apprenticeship to be served.   Some of this has already been written about in the Features Section.

I will not go into the details of how the car was restored and what modifications had to be made, but the Vauxhall Apprentice School was very busy for several months!

This was a 2-litre twin overhead camshaft four cylinder engined car with a large supercharger driven via a clutch on the front of the crankshaft.   The supercharger was only engaged by a “kick-down” on fully depressing the accelerator pedal.   The car was a development by Dr. Porsche of the unsuccessful 1923 Indianapolis car.   The rear wheels were cambered in the same way as the front by means of a live rear axle containing two lightweight crownwheels.

The next meeting was the Prix Martime in Germany held as a road event followed by two races on the little Travering circuit outside Hamburg.   The road event was supposed to be on closed roads but I was not a little surprised to have a farm cat lumber out in front of me when doing in excess of 100mph.   This may have been the reason I misjudged the next corner and put the car in the ditch.  All this with the intrepid  Gerald sitting beside me.  We did not stop but the nearside front wheel had to be changed later.

The first evening was also the time for the drivers briefing for the next days racing and the lady in charge was also driving her Bugatti in our race.   As usual I had several questions and afterwards I was backed into a corner – “Herr Sutton you ask too many qvestions”.  We were convinced she wore leather underwear!

There were other races and Prescott hillclimb.   I had tried in vain to persuade Gerald to let me fix the blower so that for this type of event it was permanently engaged no matter what the throttle opening, but he would have none of it.   Readers may imagine the difficulty of judging the timing with so little distance between these very tight corners.  Of course I overdid it going into the semi-circle and lifted off and spun clockwise over the edge onto the rapidly sloping grass.  The car went up on two wheels and I thought it was going to roll all the way down the hill, but I managed to move my weight far enough across the car to bring it down on its wheels again!   The marshals emerged clapping “well held”.   Fortunately Gerald could not make practice that day and the car only ingested some grass through the blower so I did not give a detailed report.  It did however stick in my memory!  We won the class on the day!

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