GN CYCLECAR
Two car-mad young men have a dream to create their own brand. They put their design together in a parent’s garage, and hey presto! – they have a popular product and an emerging motor business. So simple – and today so impossible. But not in 1911 when Archibald Frazer-Nash (1889–1965) and Ronald Godfrey (1887–1968) had just left Finsbury Technical College, London, with diplomas in engineering and set up their own company, Godfrey & Nash (GN). Their car had a two-cylinder air-cooled motor, more like a motorcycle than a car, and accordingly came to be known as a ‘cyclecar’. By 1920 Archie had set up on his own, building more substantial Frazer Nash cars based on the same basic architecture.
One feature of the designs was that, instead of a gearbox, they used chains and sprockets of different sizes to give different speeds. These ran between an intermediate shaft under the driver’s seat, to the back axle, and you ‘changed gear’ by dog clutches that shifted the drive from one chain set to another. This was quick and effective. Moreover, the car had no differential gear, because the rear axle was a single piece, and drivers of GNs considered that the cars cornered best with plenty of throttle.
The GN and Frazer Nash cars epitomized British sporting cars in the period – spindly and rakish, getting performance from lightness and simplicity. Super-sporting drivers turned them into improbably frantic hill-climb ‘specials’ that often beat works entries from MG and Austin, such as Basil Davenport’s GN Spider, which was always suffused, in the race paddock, with the fragrant aroma of methylated spirits – the fuel it ran on. GNs and ‘Nashes’ also helped cultivate the generations of competitive owner-mechanics who became the backbone of that unique British institution, the Vintage Sports Car Club. An anonymous member even memorialized the inventors with this charming doggerel:
Nash and Godfrey hated cogs,
Made a car with chain and dogs.
And it worked, but would it if
They had made it with a diff?
The GN team at Brooklands for the 200-mile race in 1922. Archie Frazer-Nash is by the central car wearing a cardigan and his characteristic knitted helmet.
Some home-tuned variants of the GN – such as Basil Davenport’s sprint and hill-climb special Spider – were fearsomely quick. Davenport in the original Spider 1 at the speed trial on the sands at Skegness, Lincolnshire, c.1920.