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"Specialist Sports Cars
The good, the bad and the ugly of a very British breed"
by Richard Heseltine

reviewed by Nigel Warner £19.99 152 Pages hardback 1 85960 690 3 Haynes Publishing

The title tells it all as far as the content of the book is concerned. This is a Large-format hard backed book consisting of 152 pages. It is easy to read and is one of those books that you can either pick up when you have a spare 5 minutes or just plough through from cover to cover. Since reading the book I have found out that Richard Heseltine is a journalist on Classic and Sportscar (I only flick through it in the newsagents to see if there are any articles of interest) and, according to a colleague at work, has had experience of driving a good few of the cars featured in this book.

The book covers some well known marques that are still going today such as Lotus and TVR, some I had heard of but have since fallen along the wayside and others that I had never heard of before. The marques covered include Berkeley, Britannia, Clan, Costin, Deep Sanderson, Diva, Elva, Fairthorpe, Falcon, Gordon-Keeble, GSM, Lenham, Ogle, Peerless/Warwick, Piper,Probe, Rochdale, Tornado, Trident, Turner, Unipower and WSM with some others covered in a smaller way in the last section titled “Those who also served”. It's the first book I've come across that describes Britain's small specialist sports car makers as a whole.

Berkeley B60's debut at the 1956 Earls Court Motor Show

Cutaway of the Berkeley B90

After the introduction and acknowledgements the book goes through the marques in alphabetical order, which are also usefully printed down the outside edge of each page, so it makes it easy if you are flicking through trying to find a specific manufacturer. Each of the marques different models are described from their conception through their development, listing out the changes and how successful they were, to the reasons why they folded. The book seems to be well researched and well stocked with lots of nice black and white period pictures, some colour pictures and also some pictures of the cars advertising brochures.

At the beginning of each marque there is a small box of text that contains some brief details about the car. For example at the Berkley B60 box contains the following.

Most of the makers sections cover 4 pages with the more successful such as Lotus covering 10 pages.

So to sum up I found this a very interesting and well laid out book that would make an excellent Birthday or Christmas present for someone interested in classic cars or treat yourself and find out lots of information you didn't know about Britain's smaller car manufacturers.

(Photographs courtesy of Haynes Publishing)