The Austin "Brookland"
By Lasse Swärd, of the Swedish
Newspaper "Dagens Nyheter ",
translation by my good friend Göran
Olsson, of Stockholm.
Reproduced by kind permission of
Lasse,
contact: lasse.sward@dn.se
: This is a
sports car that is really something: Austin Brookland from 1930.
Come along for a guaranteed different
test drive.
Driving pleasure in its purest
form
More gas, you have no power at all
below 3000 rpm, Staffan Kjellberg shouts
over the sharp din of the engine. The
car is standing in an upward slope,
and first gear is engaged, but when I
let up the clutch pedal I get an
embarrassing stop. One can’t drive an
old car in the same way as a new.
Particularly not a racing car such as
this one, an Austin Brookland Racer
Special from 1930.
No, depress the clutch and roll
backwards a bit to get the machinery going
again. The engine, a 4-cylinder machine
of 748 cc and giving 32 hp,
willingly starts with a cough. More
power (gas), much more and an even more
aggressive style. Bang, here we
go.
The photographer, who is crouching down
on the gravel-covered riding path on
Djurgården in Stockholm, jumps
out of the way at the very last moment to
avoid the car and the gravel-spray from
the big wire-wheels.
3500 rpm and now things begin to
happen. All metal panels vibrate as I
thunder along through the pale and
light spring foliage. The wind is tugging
at my hair and it smells of leather,
oil and unclean exhausts. Press the
brake, full lock to the left and back
the same way again. Double-declutch
and engage second gear, maintain
rpm.
The primitive and hard to manage car
conveys driving pleasure in its purest
form. The steering, through the string
wound steering wheel, is of an
extremely direct kind, like a go-cart.
Visibility is perfect in all
directions as it is an open car, not
even hindered by a windscreen. To be
sure there are two little glass
windscreens, so called Brookland windscreens
that one can fold down, but they are
merely there to guide the slipstream.
The rev-counter is the only instrument
of importance in a racing car. It is
big, and placed in the middle of ones
forward field of vision and marked red
over 4000 rpm. Best to stay just short
of that I’m thinking, after all the
car is from 1930.
32 horsepower can seem as a joke in a
racing car, but in this one it is
quite enough. As the car only weighs
320 kg. With a full tank! That makes 10
kg per horsepower. As a comparison we
can take one of today’s Volvo cars,
the S60 2,4. It hauls around 11,1 kg
per horsepower. No wonder the man with
his two dogs that I caught a glimpse of
on the neighbouring path, stared
with gaping mouth when I swished
by.
The brake is hard to find among the
extremely small pedals in the cramped
space on the floor. It can’t have been
given a very high priority when the
car was conceived, more like something
of a bad excuse. There is a slack
wire running to the primitive drums at
the rear. But who cares about brakes
on a competition car?
There are no blinkers and no safety
belts or any other modern equipment.
This type of veteran car is exempt to
such rules. There is a pair of
headlights at the front. But they can
also be removed. But then one is only
allowed to drive from sun-up to
sundown. But by then one must surely have
made it to the finish!
Austin was a very common make on the
racetracks in England in the 30-ies.
Model Seven was basically an
inexpensive car for the people, given a host of
special bodies. Brookland Race Special
was frequently seen at the legendary
Brookland racecourse and this very car
has with great success participated
in a number of races. At the beginning
of the 70-ies it won a number of
victories in Historic Racing, driven by
Paul Cooper. In 1975 the car was
sold to Sweden.
Tomorrow, Sunday, it will be possible
to see it in action in the
Gärdesloppet at Djurgården
in Stockholm in a competition together with other
similar vehicles. As in the very first
Gärdesloppet 1922, 29 cars
participate. They drive a 2,5 km track
clockwise in three heats of three
laps each. The winner is not the
fastest, but the one who manages to achieve
an ideal time of 250 sec. per lap. That
means an average speed of a very
modest 35 km per hour.
The time taking is done using the same
sort of technique as in real Formula
1 races, with sensors on the cars, and
deviation from the ideal time means
penalty points. Only cars from 1940 and
earlier can participate, the
exception being if the driver is a
World-champion or GP-winner. Eric Carlson
“på taket” (“on the roof”) is
competing in a SAAB 92 from 1949, with chassis
no. 4, rolled out from the Saab museum
in Trollhättan. He is coming with his
old “mate” Gunnar Palm as navigator
(map reader).
The first Gärdesloppet was driven
on a day in February 1922. In sunny
weather and a temperature of minus 5
deg C. The arranging people had cleared
the course from snow and had doused it
with water, sprinkling sand in the
water to freeze, in order to provide a
good grip. The finals turned into a
dramatic race for seconds between the
silversmith Eric Flemming in a Stutz
and the later well-known car company
owner Hans Osterman, who laboured in a
difficult to manoeuvre
Minerva.
On the fourth lap he thundered past
Flemming doing more than 100 km per hour
and thus the victory was secured for
him. His average speed was just over 72
km/h, a breathtaking speed in view of
the race being held on normal roads,
and the most dangerous curve was at
Karlaplan where the present day
Fältöversten is situated. The
race drew a huge crowd, with the then King
Gustav V and the crown prince Gustav
Adolf among the honorary guests.
The races tomorrow are a part of a
greater program at Djurgården. Staffan
Kjellberg, who organizes the event,
calculates with at least as many
visitors as earlier years, about
10000.
Göran says: I hope you enjoyed the
article. Any factual faults or other deviations from
“the straight and narrow” is as they say
in the film texts “purely
coincidental and absolutely
unintentional”, the same easy way out I claim
for my translation!
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