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The
Hartin Fastback XK150S
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THE REAL CAR :
A very small number of you may know of
this unusual XK150 if you were at the XK 50th anniversary,
at Donnington park. Or purchased Classic Cars magazine ( October
1995 ) which featured the car.
Here is a bit of the history of RPM 935 (
very fitting number plate RevsPerMinute, read on ) and why it
ended up at Hartin Bros. for re-styling.
Henley's of London delivered the standard
XK150S Fixedhead with overdrive to Cooden Engineering
of Bexhill-on-sea, on March 3rd 1960. It started life Black with a
Red interior, a week later Eric Richardson’s name appeared on
the logbook.
Eric Richardson was a Surrey solicitor (
may be he was linked to this company ), and he was soon to become
quite famous at the Browns Lane Technical Service Department !!.
Instantly he was contacting his local
Jaguar dealer who, in turn had to contact Browns Lane about the
possibility of making the car go quicker. He asked if a
speedometer with an higher reading could be fitted ( he obviously wasn’t happy that the car could only reach
132mph !!, that was fast in 1960 ).
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Mr Richardson’s car was one of the new 3.8 litre cars, with a
reported 265bhp ( the 3.4’s were 250bhp ), anyway he wouldn’t
settle. He believed that a taller
final drive would achieve him the higher speed he wanted, he
needed to sustain this high speed for long distances. This was
important to him because he had to travel long distances at weekends from his home to work.
At the end of the same month he bought
the 150, March, he contacted a G.G. Pindar. He was the Technical
Service Manager at Jaguar Cars ( he also sent a copy to Lofty England !! ). He wrote : I can travel almost 1,000 miles in a
weekend, is it possible to fit a speedometer for higher speeds
than 140mph when the rpm exceeds 5,000. He also stated that is old
car ( a modified 2.5 litre Riley ), could achieve a time of 36
minutes, along the full length of the newly opened M1 motorway
to Crick !!!. He said he would be grateful if they could let him
know the maximum rpm permissible, for half-hour bursts in the car. |
Mr Pindar of Jaguar’s Technical
Department politely replied : Maximum rpm is 5,000, but going to
5,800 briefly between the gear changes would be fine, and yes they
could supply an higher reading speedometer which read to 160mph.
He also went on to say that, he need not have any concern, because
he would find road performance to be very satisfactory without
using excess rpm.
By now Richardson’s ideas were becoming
an obsession, he played with the higher final drives ( but Jaguar
had got it right ). It was now 1962, he decided to keep the 150
although he had growing children.
Here is where Hartin Bros. come in, he asked them to modify the
car into a practical four seater, but they must save weight at the
same time
( didn’t he ever give up !! ). Hartin produced the
sleek fastback by hand from Aluminium, with a lighter perspex rear
window ( but it still came out at around the
same weight, about 1.5 tons !! ). He
fitted stiffer Alpine Rally springs, and wait for it, a whopping
speedometer reading 200mph !!, a very long 2.88:1 final drive, and
this convinced him the 150 could do 200mph !!! ( it didn’t ). |
Click on a picture and a larger picture
will open in a new window.
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Mr Richardson never lost his enthusiasm
for the car, he had to change the worn out engine in 1964
( wonder why !! ), but still kept adding the miles on.
Classic Car magazine at the time calculated
that 650bhp !!! would be needed to achieve Mr Richardson’s
200mph.
After this the car had several owners,
until Richard Galvani bought the car at Brooks auction at Donnington
in 1990. Many would have been tempted to change the car back to
how it left the factory, but Mr
Galvani of Cambridge Motorsport thought ( quite rightly ), that it
needed restoring with the unique
Hartin Bros Fasback.
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