Description:

• Unique road-legal sports-racer by Paul Emery
• 1460cc Coventry Climax FWB engine
• Extensive period competition history
• Sympathetically restored during current ownership

Paul Emery was one of the unsung heroes of the UK’s vibrant post-war motor-racing scene. A talented engineer and driver, he had worked with his father during the 1930s and entered his first race in 1936 at Donington Park. 

Following the war, the Emeryson company built cars for everything from the 500cc Formula 3 category to Formula 1. In 1960, with financial backing from Alan Brown, it moved from Twickenham to the old Connaught premises in Surrey and Paul designed a 1.5-litre Formula 2 single-seater that was also adapted for use in Formula 1. At the end of 1961, however, the race team’s assets were acquired by Hugh Powell and it morphed into the Scirocco-Powell outfit.

Emery’s Formula 2 design also formed the basis for this unique road-legal sports car, which was built in 1961 for Ray Fielding to drive in hillclimb events. Its specification included a spaceframe chassis, a 1460cc Coventry Climax FWB engine and a Cooper-ERSA gearbox, plus disc brakes all round and rack-and-pinion steering. 

The independent suspension comprised double wishbones up front, and lower wishbones at the rear with the driveshafts acting as upper links – a layout that had also been used by Lotus.

As David Roscoe wrote in Motor Racing magazine while it was being built: ‘Sports bodywork is to be fitted to this car and the merest hint of a passenger’s seat will be added to keep the scrutineers happy that this is in fact a sports car.’

The end result certainly made a highly effective hillclimb machine, with Fielding winning his class on the car’s maiden outing at Prescott in 1961. He followed that up with an outright win at Craigantlet and finished sixth in the RAC Hillclimb Championship.

For 1962, the Emeryson was sold to Gerry Tyack, who continued to rack up class victories in hillclimb events before selling it to Graeme Austin. He raced it through 1963-64, and it carried on competing in the hands of subsequent owners John McCartney and Georgia Baillie-Hill. 

In 1971, it was bought from Baillie-Hill for £300 by Richard Falconer, a young trainee architect. Falconer used the Emeryson on the road, where he said it would ‘out-accelerate anything [away] from the lights.’

During the mid-1970s, it was also used in circuit racing. Falconer drove it to meetings, whereit would be raced by his friend Martin Young, and Falconer would then drive home before it got dark because the headlamps weren’t wired up at that time. At Thruxton in 1976, a very special guest driver took the wheel – Paul Emery, who was making his final race outing 40 years after his Donington Park debut.

The Emeryson was off the road for much of the 1980s, before being refurbished by Rhoddy Harvey-Bailey in 1991. After once writing that selling the car ‘would be like losing a member of the family’, Falconer finally parted with it in 2017. Its new owner then had a sympathetic rebuild carried out. 

The original 1950s Climax FWB engine was rebuilt by Tony Mantle at Climax Engine Services, while the four-speed Cooper-Knight-modified ERSA gearbox was checked and serviced by JP Race Shop at Silverstone. The car’s overall set-up was then fine-tuned by Brazell Engineering and a custom free-flow exhaust system was fabricated by Mike Hausman in order to meet the 105dB noise limit at events such as the GRRC sprint meetings at Goodwood. 

Neat touches include an eight-day clock from a USAF P-51 Mustang fitted to the dashboard, and ‘JCM 700’ was featured in the March 2024 issue of Classic & Sports Car magazine. 

Now being offered for sale at the Classic Motor Hub, this one-of-a-kind Emeryson boasts an unbroken history and comes with an extensive file that includes scrutineers’ tags from the 1960s, the original logbook, a workshop manual for the Climax engine, invoices and documents dating back to when Richard Falconer bought the car in 1971, and a collection of photographs and results sheets. 

This compact and lightweight ‘racing car for the road’ not only survives as a tribute to the talent of Paul Emery, it is just as exhilarating today as it was when it first took to the hills more than 60 years ago.

Website:

https://classicmotorhub.com/emeryson-1961-for-sale/