Need a specialist to look after your Allard? Well, a good start would be Allard.
The company has never completely gone away, still run by the son and grandson of its founder, but its profile has risen again with a new series of continuation cars taking shape.
The brief history is this: Sydney Allard started competing in 1929, began selling Fords in 1930, built his first special in 1935, then discovered Ford flathead power and post-war was making his own sports cars in a garage in Clapham; the first production car was the J-type of 1947.
In ’49 he won the British Hillclimb Championship, and in ’52 beat Stirling Moss to victory on the Rallye Monte-Carlo in a P1 – the only person to win the event in one of his own cars.
Original bucks are invaluable for replacement panels
In US club racing these were popular mounts, their torque and light weight an advantage on point-and-squirt airfield circuits.
Carroll Shelby won several events in the USA in his J2 before going on to build the Cobra.
In the early ’60s, before his untimely death at 56, Sydney was a prime mover in the birth of British drag racing, and along the way there have been adventures with supercharged Anglias, Escorts and Capris.
