A high-flying car designer; Classic cars with Ian johnson this week: fairthorpe

Evening Chronicle (Newcastle, England), June 13, 2008

Byline: Ian johnson

WARTIME Britain owed a lot to Air Vice- Marshall Donald Bennett, who established the legendary Pathfinder elite bombing force.

Bennett had become a worldwide authority on air navigation with published reference works and was the youngest Air Vice- Marshall in the RAF.

But his fame did not end with such a lofty rank. Bennett went on to found an airline which linked the UK to Brazil in 1954, became an MP and then set up the Fairthorpe car company.

Fairthorpe was one of the pioneers in the use of glass-fibre bodies and offered a series of small, sometimes very sporty cars to capture the adventurous imagination of the British post-war driver.

Different was the name of the game for Fairthorpe, which started with a factory in the middle of Chalfont St Peter, Bucks. The plan was to compete against the products of Bond and Reliant and to introduce a car that would do 60 miles an hour and 60 miles per gallon.

First off the line in 1954 was the Atom, a microcar that was tried with a succession of small engines from BSA and one from Anzani. Worryingly, the company tried the big BSA 646cc Golden Flash engine in this, but it whizzed this mighty Atom to a then scary 75mph and the idea was dropped. The odd-looking Atom wasn't a great success Under new general manager John Green, who joined from Daimler, things began to change. He had very different standards of engineering and started working on the 1957 Atomotor. He coupled a BSA 650 motorcycle engine to a Standard 8 gearbox. Then the company had its eyes on the lovely Coventry- Climax 1,098cc, which produced between 75 and 100 horsepower and used it in the Electron, a very fast but relatively expensive two-seater. But in the late 1950s along came the Electron Minor, which started to make a profit for the company. This nippy sports car used Standard-Triumph running gear and became popular in kit form.

Then followed the Zeta, a tiny sports car with a Ford Zodiac six-cylinder engine, the Rockette with a Triumph sixcylinder and, afterwards, Bennett's inventive son Torix stepped in with a model featuring a novel type of rear suspension. One of the strangest Fairthorpes was the TX Tripper, offered between 1970 and 1976. It was a kind of buggy body on a Triumph GT6 chassis and had no doors. Only 20 were made and Fairthorpe closed down.

It was the Electron Minor that the punters loved. It went on to be quite a force on the competition circuit

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DISTINCTIVE - but some Fairthorpe efforts were more successful than others