English Racing Automobiles
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English Racing Automobiles (ERA) was a British racing car manufacturer active from 1933 to 1954. Recently it has resumed production with Tiger Sportscars.
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[edit] Origins
ERA was founded towards the end of 1933 in Bourne, Lincolnshire by Humphrey Cook, a young man who was irritated that no British car had won a major continental race since Henry Segrave a decade earlier, and who hoped to produce a British car with the ability to win Grands Prix. However, by 1933 Grand Prix racing was becoming much more expensive thanks to the very large sums being spent by wealthy and government-backed works teams such as Auto Union and Alfa Romeo.
Because of this, ERA instead aimed its first efforts at the smaller voiturette class of car. Raymond Mays was both a company director and driver, and the company's works were established in a yard behind his house.
Mays had prior experience of racing several kinds of car including Vauxhall, Bugatti and Riley. The ERA was essentially a logical development of his White Riley. They were powered by a six-cylinder Riley-derived engine of varying capacities (1100cc, 1500cc and 2000cc), supercharged and unsupercharged. The marque's first race was at Brooklands on 22 May 1934. By the end of the year ERAs had scored several victories in fields containing many more established marques, and through the mid- and late 1930s ERA came to dominate voiturette racing, with drivers of the calibre of Dick Seaman driving for the team. As soon as 1935, in a major race at the Nürburgring, ERAs took first, third, fourth and fifth places. The two Siamese princes, Chula and Bira, whose trio of ERAs became famous as Hanuman, "Romulus and Remus" drove for their own team, operating from The White Mouse Garage. They were not works drivers.
The more modern E Type ERA appeared just before the Second World War but was not fully developed.
[edit] New start
The Second World War brought a halt to motor racing in Europe, and the team's Bourne site was used to produce aircraft components; when things got under way again in the late 1940s Mays had moved on to the BRM project.
The ERA marque restarted operations in Dunstable under new ownership: Leslie Johnson bought the company, along with one of its three pre-war E-Type single-seaters, in late 1947.
A new 1.5-litre Grand Prix car, the G-Type, raced in the first two years of the Formula One World Championship but never realized its potential. The team used a Bristol engine for 1952, when Formula 2 teams contested the Championship. Stirling Moss drove, but results were disappointing. Moss said: "It was, above all, a project which made an awful lot of fuss about doing very little. By this time I was very disillusioned by the Clever Professor approach to racing car design. I would eventually learn that even the most brilliant concept could fail if the team concerned lacks the manpower and organization and money to develop the inevitable bugs out of it."
Johnson sold the cars to Bristol—who used them as the basis for an assault on Le Mans that would bring them several class wins in the mid-1950s—and focused the company on research and development (R&D) engineering.[1] He eventually sold it to Zenith Carburettor Ltd, which itself was then purchased by Solex, another carburettor firm. Although renamed Engineering Research and Application Ltd, and still primarily an R&D operation, ERA still did a small amount of race preparation, and in the 1980s put its name to the ERA Mini Turbo, a turbocharged version of the Mini capable of 115mph.
[edit] World Championship record
| World Championship record | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | Team | Driver | # of GPs |
| 1950 | ERA | Cuth Harrison | 3 |
| 1950 | ERA | Bob Gerard | 2 |
| 1950 | ERA | Leslie Johnson | 1 |
| 1950 | ERA | Peter Walker | 1 |
| 1951 | ERA | Bob Gerard | 1 |
| 1951 | ERA | Brian Shawe Taylor | 1 |
| 1952 | ERA-Bristol | Stirling Moss | 2 |
| 1952 | ERA | Stirling Moss | 1 |
[edit] Today
Almost uniquely for historic racing cars, the vast majority of pre-War ERAs still exist with continuous and verifiable provenance and are still competing in historic despite the youngest being nearly seventy years old. The cars are still often driven competitively, and they are particularly associated with the Shelsley Walsh hillclimb thanks in large part to Mays, who won the first two British Hill Climb Championships in 1947 and 1948; indeed an ERA has for many years held the hill record for a pre-war car.
Also, ERA-badged vehicles are still manufactured by Tiger Sportscars. Currently, there are two models available - there is the larger, twin seater ERA 30, road-legal and based on the Lotus 23 and Lotus 30.[2] There is also a track-only single-seater known as the ERA HSS or just ERA SS. Both of these cars are permanently open-topped.[3]
[edit] Exhibition
There is a permanent exhibition about Raymond Mays' contribution to motor racing, including his ERA days at Bourne Civic Society's heritage centre in Bourne. It is open on weekend and bank holiday afternoons.
[edit] Bibliography
- ERA Gold Portfolio, 1934-1994, Brooklands Books - compilation of historic and contemporary articles on ERA and includes the full text of John Lloyd's The Story of ERA
- ERA: The History of English Racing Automobiles, David Weguelin, White Mouse Press: expensive and scarce but hugely detailed and profusely illustrated book covering the contemporary and historic career of all the cars.
[edit] References
- ^ Maréchal, Christian: "Learning Curves" Classic and Sportscar magazine, June 1996.
- ^ Tiger Racing :: Sportscars For Road And Track :: Tiger ERA 30
- ^ Tiger Racing :: Sportscars for road and track :: English Racing Automobiles HSS
[edit] External links
- The ERA story
- The post-war ERA-Bristol G (R1G)
- A modern outing in an ERA (From the magazine Automobile)
