Eric

I can't be sure but some 30 years ago, I competed in the RAC Historic Rally against an Imp purporting to be the ex-Rosemary Smith car. It was dark blue and had wider wheels than the car shown in your photograph above.

 

From Model Cars - January 1968

 

Always my favourite Imp, the George Bevan giantkillers driven by Bill McGovern, mine is starting to look a little 'used', perhaps because it is

 

Thank you for the replies.
Tifosi, that is a very nice model. 👍
Who's shell is that please?
I have a George Tuner shell earmarked for this project.

 

Thank you for the replies.
Tifosi, that is a very nice model. 👍
Who's shell is that please?
I have a George Tuner shell earmarked for this project.

Pretty sure mine is a George Turner, built it so many years ago hard to remember.

 

I love these cars

 

Nice little cars...who makes them (the slot version)?

 

George Turner Models make resin kits including a widened version with big arches.
www.georgeturnermodels.com

 

3D resin printed WImp on a 3D filament printed chassis

 

Nice body and nice chassis. The only thing I would change is for the pod screws to be accessible from the bottom.

 

Hello Eric, you probably know that the Rootes' Works cars were dark blue with white side flashes so probably Rosemary's car was similar. I happen to be reading Rosemary's biography just now - will check to see if the colour is mentioned.

Leo

 

Thanks for your post Leo.
We recently visited The Scottish Tapestry at Galashiels. Well worth a visit and the immortal Imp is portrayed in one of the panels. Quite amazing work.
Eric

Hello Eric, you porbably know that the Rootes' Works cars were dark blue with white side flashes so probably Rosemary's car was similar. I happen to be reading Rosemary's biography just now - will check to see if the colour is mentioned.

Leo

View attachment 285312

 

The former dress designer from Dublin, Rosemary Smith, during the 1960s.

 

Hello Eric,
Have reached the end of Rosemary's biography and didn't find any direct mention of this Imp :-(

Leo

 

Hello Leo,
Going with your earlier post I think it will be dark blue.
Thanks
Eric

 

The Hartwell imp was a Hartwell car,not a Rootes works or a Fraser imp ,it just happens that Rosemary was driving it,not the usual pilot.
The info I've read is that the Hartwell car was black, the first Rootes works cars with 1963 KV or VC reg plates were Loch blue, the later works cars EDU ***C and JDU ***E etc were the later darker blue ,Oxford blue.
I might have seen, can't remember, a works car 63 reg in Tartan red, certainly at least one of the privateer cars on the 64 Monte were the very light blue ,Skye blue.
Funnily all the imps I seem to remember as a kid were Glenalmond green.

 

I've had four Imps in my time, and three of them were in the same light blue!

The fourth was a Husky estate, a lovely car and the best everyday Imp version to my mind, but that one was dark blue.

 

I was a (small-time) customer of Hartwell's in the '70s, in those days they were located in Holdenhurst Road. IIRC GRH5 was used on several Hartwell-owned cars, the company owner being George Hartwell. Ray Payne was their engine-building wizard, and he regularly competed in the company's cars. Team Hartwell, as the tuning arm of the dealership was called, had corporate colours of white over orange and they often - but not exclusively - ran cars painted as such.

 

I Had a Sunbeam Stiletto, lovely little car once I had put a bag of cement in the front as ballast (!)
I sold it to Cars and Car Conversions magazine who buzzed the motor beyond 7000rpm on the test drive, I put the price up £50 for that...

 

Hello Peter, did you really put a bag of cement in the front? I know that this has become a mythical part of Imp history but in my many years with Sunbeam Imps, I never came across anyone who actually did that. Most of us kept a tool-box in the luggage compartment but cement or paving slabs never featured.

Leo

 

Yup, a full bag of dry cement snuggled down into the boot/petrol tank area very nicely and pretty much cured the 'understeer in, oversteer out' on wet days...

 

Hello Eric, yes the picture you shared at the top of the this thread suggests that it was really an ex-works car and that absolutely ties in with Rosemary's legacy. Albeit that Hartwell worked in conjunction with Rootes, hence the registration mark.

Leo

 

Two bags of cement in the boot of a mk 4 Corrina helped in the winter.

My boss after Poly in 1980 had a mk 4 estate, 2.3 V6 Ghia with power steering, it handled like Frank Gardner said of the 69 917 at the ring, 10 pounds of horse5hit in a five pound bag.

Had a mate at poly in 79 who had a 66D reg commer imp van, green ,with maroon interior, bag of cement in the boot, it'd be a pretty rare vehicle now.

The post office tried an imp van, they turned it down as it had toooo sprightly a performance.

I bought some imp panels from a guy in Cheadle about 25 years ago, he had many moons ago bought an ex Fraser run imp, minus engine, he was telling me about all the illegal suspension mods.

 

The post office tried an imp van, they turned it down as it had toooo sprightly a performance.

Eh? The Imp Vans had low compression engines and could hardly pull the skin off a rice pudding when fully loaded! The GPO must have been hyper sensitive!

One good move for any Imp variant was to swap the rubber doughnuts immediately outboard of the transaxle for those of the Lotus Elan if any serious tuning was intended. The tougher doughnuts would last for ever, whereas the stock ones could spit their metal tubes out with serious consequences.

 

The standard post office van at the time would have been a Morris Minor van, don't know if they were 848 or 998, so even a detuned imp van would seem a rocketship.
Some of the prototype development imps had big valve heads, they were quicker than a minx ,that had to change.

 

I had one of those heads, or a big valve head anyway, in my first Imp. With a Weber DCOE and an Abarth exhaust it pushed out 70 b hp or so, but the fuel consumption was horrendous!

 

I've never known an MoT station pick up headlight height unless the car is so obviously radically altered. I had a Ginetta G15 and the headlights were about 6" too low for the Construction & Use Regulations minimum (24" to centre IIRC). They were mounted in housings on vertical slides which you were supposed to lift up and lock in place with wing nuts mounted behind the lights. Yea right! No one ever did of course, It caused no problem and I never heard of it being picked up at an MoT. I think that if it looks like it has been unmodified from the original manufacturer's design,it is assumed to be ok and goes unnoticed.

The flip up lights on the Lotus Elan were there for the same reason.

Curiously there is quite a lot that is not required for an MoT but is under C & U regs, like mudguards (US fenders).

 

I had a Forward Control SIIa Land Rover for several years. The headlamps were, technically, too high to be legal (one of the distinguishing features of the later SIIb is lower, legal, headlamps). It was never an issue at MoT time.

As for Imps, weren't the first production cars rather faster than later ones? IIRC Rootes detuned the engine in an attempt to improve reliability. Can't remember exactly, but an original 45 bhp vs a dialled back 39 bhp rings a bell. Not much, but significant in so small and light a car.

 

HRH Prince Phillip had been booked in to open the new factory at Linwood, so open it had to be with cars being assembled.

Engineering development had asked for a delay to sort out various issues, management said no.

Amongst these issues the imps front lights were too low , but the front panel had been tooled up ,hence the hastily raised ride height.

Although the imp had early production issues,as indeed did the sponge that is an early mini, the main issue with Rootes,Triumph,Ford and Vauxhall was the political social engineering of the early sixties

Linwood, Speke, Halewood and Ellesmere were not where the respective companies wanted to be, but it was a case of move away from their traditional locations or no planning permission.

In Rootes case ,the workforce had previously been building ships or locomotives, shift work to assemble imps was a bit of a shock to them to say the least.

 

In Rootes case ,the workforce had previously been building ships or locomotives, shift work to assemble imps was a bit of a shock to them to say the least.

At R&D in Cowley we'd have a sample Imp shell taken from the Linwood production line to check every month, and the variability of the strength was ludicrous! We'd find spot welds that were under depth, panels that were only attached by 3-4 welds when the spec said 15, welds that were so off-line they might as well not have been there etc etc.

It took a long time before the word got through to the management at Linwood that they just had to get the job done properly. And that was just the bodyshells, goodness knows how many faults the whole cars had!

 

 

Good Afternoon,
I am just after a bit of guidance. Does anyone know the colour of the Hartwell Imp GRH5 as driven by Rosemary Smith in the Dunboyne Saloon Car races 1965.
Picture of car (not in that race) attached. As far as I can find out it is either black or very dark blue with a white roof and side flash.
Thanks
Eric View attachment 285237

Nobody who ever drove one of these as their road car, in real life, would ever want to be reminded of this nasty little thing, surely? I inherited one from my grandfather in the 70s … oh dear. 😉

 

I remember watching British Saloon Car Championship races at Brands Hatch in the early 1970s. Up front were exciting races between Mustangs and Camaros, with the occasional Escort in the mix if it was wet. Near the back, Bill McGovern nearly always won his class in his well-prepared Imp. In a crazy system worthy of F1 at its worst, points were awarded according to class results so, year after year, the Imp was declared to be the champion……🤔

 

I tend to think that the Imp also suffered from being released into a motoring world unfamiliar with the care and feeding of all aluminium engines, especiallyiquid cooled ones. Certainly, aluminium had been used in various engines previously*, but most that I can think of were fairly specialist and unlikely, at least when newish, to fall under the care of the local, non-specialist garage., or owners more accustomed to the forgiving nature of cast iron.


*Yes, I know about the prewar tendency to use a separate ally crankcase under an iron block and head, and the widespread use of ally in motorcycle engines quite early on. Neither application generally involved putting aluminium in direct contact with potentially corrosive liquid coolant.