Doug Nye: Gordon Murray's new toy, “the jet‑age racing car”

Well, last Sunday I loped over to Murray Towers in my sparkly new Land Rover and there it was – the former Brabham and McLaren designer’s proud new acquisition – a most beautifully presented little 500cc Formula 3 Cooper-JAP Mark V.

As long as I have known him – and that extends back 47 years now – Gordon has been entranced and intrigued by compact, lightweight, exquisitely simple cars, clever cars, and in its own way the little ‘one lung’ Cooper ticks every one of those boxes.  And there’s also a family box that it ticks, because, during Gordon’s childhood in Durban, South Africa, just such a little Cooper was one of the cars that his engineer/mechanic father cared for and prepared in a local garage business.

And so the pioneering rear-engined, chain-drive Coopers such as this were a formative influence upon the aspiring young engineer, and their shape and configuration would re-emerge as a distinctive reference in – for example – his famous Rocket road-going one-man fun car.

But there’s far more to Gordon’s little 1951 Cooper-Norton Mark V, because during its long life it wasn’t ‘just’ a 500cc Formula 3 racing car. In fact, it also spent many years in the most extraordinarily way-out guise – wouldn’t you know it where Professor Murray is concerned? – as Ulster enthusiast Jim Meikle’s pulse-jet Cooper… “the jet-age racing car”, no less…

Cooper chassis number ‘MkV/12/51’ was built new in 1951 to the order of Buckinghamshire farmer, Derek Annable. He specified its finish as “cream with red upholstery”, to match his mother’s Bentley, which we believe also served as his tow car. While it would originally have used a JASP single-cylinder engine, he had also ordered a set of Norton engine mounts for it – in expectation of acquiring a ‘double-knocker’ Norton engine for it at some time. The Bracebridge Street company in Birmingham would not sell its engines separately, insisting on selling only complete bikes, power unit included – an extremely expensive option.

Derek Annable was a reasonably competitive driver in his little cream-coloured Cooper – typically in September 1951 taking two 3rd places and a 5th at the Half-Litre Club’s Brands Hatch race meeting. In the final of the Open Challenge, Annable finished 3^rd, but only after “the worst accident yet to occur at the Kentish track” as ‘The Autocar’ reported. Battling for the lead, young Bernie Ecclestone in his sister Cooper 500 collided with Andre Loens’s JBS, ricocheted off and crashed through a fence and into a spectator, breaking the poor victim’s thigh. Mr. E himself escaped with a shaking.

Derek Annable eventually ordered a new Kieft 500 and advertised his Mk V for sale. In April 1952, the little car was acquired by Jim Meikle in Ireland who initially made it available for instructional use at a race-driving school at Kirkistown aerodrome. He ran the Irish tapestry company in South Street, Newtownards, Belfast and after its brief period as a school car the Cooper was equipped with a Ford engine to comply with the Irish 1172cc Formula. He named the car 'The Slug' and went racing. A water pipe fitting for the Ford engine survives in the frame today, at the base of the rollover bar.

It was in the mid-1950s that Jim Meikle embarked on his mind-stretching Pulse Jet programme. He fitted a SNECMA pulse-jet engine into the frame and radically altered the bodywork with an elongated fuselage-cum-tail section wrapping around the pulse-jet engine’s tailpipe.

The conversion was completed in the winter of 1956-57, and Billy McMaster of ‘Autosport’ went to see it at Meikle’s home in Bangor, County Down. He wrote “If the onlooker is not accustomed to inspecting power units of the jet age, a stiff drink should be taken before Meikle removes the engine cowlings. The first impression is that the creator has procured a disused drain pipe and bent it to form a U-shape, with one leg shorter than the other. Then, as if regretting the ‘unbalance’ of the picture, he has added another length of drain to equalize the length of both legs”. A gap between the two lengths of pipe provided the all-important air intake. The jet would run on either multiple alternative fuels, including petrol or paraffin, starting being easier on petrol. Fuel consumption was around one gallon for two minutes running. A starting blast of compressed air at 60lbs psi was required, injected into “the gap” whereupon the jet would start almost instantaneously.

Once the jet was ‘resonating’, Meikle would have to hold the car stationary on the foot brake. McMaster: “With the jet running, the sound is that of a single-cylinder small-capacity motorcycle engine revving at about 10,000rpm. There is no undue amount of ‘blast’ from the exhausts, despite their fearsome appearance and, apart from an occasional blue flicker, no flame blast. One queer point Meikle reports as the result of running the jet is that while near neighbours raised no objection whatever, residents living about half-a-mile away were indignant”. Yes, well, that changed with development, and by adjusting fuel/air mix Meikle finally included glittering yards of bright exhaust flame in his truly deafening demonstration runs.

The car was most memorably demonstrated in this form at Kirkistown as well as at Goodwood during the June 10^th, 1957, Whit-Monday Meeting – and, I am told, Reims – before being shipped to the Irish tapestry company’s New Zealand subsidiary, in Manukau Road, Pukekohe, South Auckland.

Of the car’s Goodwood outing, Gregor Grant wrote: “Jim Meikle gave the crowd a thrill when he turned a couple of laps with his pulse-jet-powered Cooper, the thunderous roar of which was deafening…it easily surpassed that of the old 16-cylinder BRMs. Belching sheets of flame due to a leaking valve, this novel machine was the first of its type ever to appear on a race circuit; not since the rocket-propelled Opel of pre-war days has a vehicle with no drive to the road wheels been seen in action…”. Or so he wrote…

On January 11^th, 1958, the evidently fearless Jim Meikle then demonstrated his Cooper-SNECMA ‘MkV/12/51’ as the world’s first pulse-jet powered car at the NZIGP Event at Ardmore, Auckland. Later that evening he ran the car again at Auckland's Western Springs speedway. Now despite their compact size, pulse-jets are shatteringly noisy. At Western Springs it was reported that the shattering blast did just that to all the light bulbs around the track and that the noise could be heard in Penrose, five or six miles away. Local lore in Pukekohe also tells of Jim Meikle firing up the jet car inside his tapestry factory and setting fire to it…

Through 1958 the Meikle Pulse-Jet Cooper was also demonstrated in Sydney, Australia, at the Empire Speedway, Brisbane, Rowley Park Speedway, Adelaide, Tracey’s Speedway in Maribyrnong, Melbourne, at the famous Speedway Royale – where Jack Brabham had learned his racing – back in Sydney, and finally at Toowoomba.

While Jim Meikle’s demonstration of the car at Goodwood had reputedly been heard clearly in Midhurst, on Selsey Bill and – some say – even at Bosham and Portsmouth – a still, balmy Australian evening must have seen it awakening koalas and possums up to ten miles distant.Pre-event publicity warned spectators to bring earplugs. The pulse-jet was started on a fuel mix of benzine and compressed air.

In 1960 the car was acquired by ‘Cocky’ Cormack – promoter at Western Springs Speedway – and it seems that Gil Nichols leased the car from Cormack to tour Australian speedway circuits in a series of ear-splitting demonstrations, sponsored by Golden Fleece Petroleum.

On its return from Australia to New Zealand, the car was stored for a decade or so in an Auckland warehouse, still on its Irish-built trailer before being bought in 1981 by Grant Cowie of Christchurch, South island. He quickly traded it in favour of one of the Works Austin 7 'Duck' Racers – and the Cooper passed to Ian and Bev Garmey who returned it to Auckland where it was carefully, and most sympathetically, restored to its original 1951 Formula 3 Cooper-JAP 500 specification.

Much of the Ulster-fabricated body simply disintegrated when removed from the chassis. Only the car’s original nose had been used for the Pulse Jet Car – but even this had age-hardened and was only useful as a nose pattern for the new aluminium body. But when Gordon recently acquired it the car was accompanied by not only a stack of related documentation and photography – fully establishing its provenance – but also by the original SNECMA pulse-jet engine and salvaged nose & side panels remain with the car.

The Garmeys then owned and raced the car for more than 30 years in New Zealand, before in 2013 Ian Garmey restored it once more and sold it back to the UK in April 2015. A document with the car explains how “The chassis is still absolutely original Cooper, and nothing has been renewed. Only one tube, top right alongside the engine was cut to remove the 6-foot long jet unit – that same tube was then welded back into place. The factory chassis plate is still in its original position, it has been removed and then replaced, using identical drive-screws, for cleaning and powder coating the chassis. The car is currently running a set of “soft” engine mounts – these are aluminium with U40 composite inserts which absorbs some of the engine vibrations from the solid mounted JAP. The set of original engine mounts are with the car and can easily be refitted. We are trying to be kind to 64-year-old chassis rails!”. Now there speaks a man who cares…

And, I cannot tell you, in Gordon Murray, this slimline veteran with such unique history has found an owner who just loves it to bits. As he showed me around the car I was much reminded of my old Springer Spaniels. If he’d been one of them his tail would positively have been a blur…

Boyish enthusiasm? Some septuagenarians never lose it… and his boys at Gordon Murray Design are eager to fire up the pulse-jet some day soon. So for anyone within a ten-mile radius of Shalford, just south of Guildford, whose hearing provides a low threshold of pain, my advice is to brace yourselves…

Archive Photos from The Revs Institute (USA) - to explore this fantastic archive click on https://revslib.stanford.edu, and Search ‘Goodwood’. Colour images courtesy of The GP Library