Tommy Sopwith's 'Sphinx'.

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When Dragone Auctions published the catalogue for their auction on June 4th we immediately recognised one of the cars from our story about it  back in 2014.
Tommy Sopwith was just 19 when he joined Armstrong Siddeley as a post-graduate apprentice in the development department of the company which was the car and aero engine division of the Hawker Siddeley Group whose chairman was his father Sir Thomas Sopwith .
By the time he was 20 he was racing his own Jaguar XK 120 at Goodwood club races and in 1954 decided to build his own racing car. 
He bought a J2R chassis from Sydney Allard using tubular construction, swing-axles at the front with coil springs and de Dion rear end. The engine was a highly tuned Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire 3.4 litre with specially designed crankshaft to withstand 227bhp at 5100rpm using 100-octane petrol with 9.5 : 1 compression ratio, and he had sufficient faith in the company's electrically operated preselector unit to use one in his racer.
The car took just 3 months to build and although he recieved no official help from the company, most of the staff were only to keen to help in their spare time, and the body he designed had all the gorgeous curves of '50s sports/racing cars. Very Aston Martin DBR1.
 Sopwith named the car ' Sphinx',  and his racing team 'Équipe Endeavour' after his father's J-Class racing yachts which competed in the America's Cup.
In its first season, the 'Sphinx' won four races and came second in four others, but Sopwith's ambition took him on to  Cooper-Climax and Cooper-Jaguar for 1954 so , after taking out the engine, he sold the 'Sphinx' to Brian Croot who fitted a 3.8 litre Jaguar engine and raced it successfully until the late 1960s when Croot retired and sold the car.
Apart from a brief appearance at an auction in the nineties, it has been hidden from public view until recently resurfacing in a French estate having enjoyed an 'older' restoration but still retaining the patina of a seasoned racing car.
In later years, Sopwith wrote...  "In many ways it was a horrendous car, but it beat a number of C-Type Jaguars from time to time."   However, that won't put off the next owner who we hope will return the car to competition and allow this *lost racer* to once again take the chequered flag.

Text Robin Batchelor, pictures courtesy Dragone Auctions.

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