SUPER CHARGER

One man's passion project for the past 45 years, this Frazer Nash SS is now a highly competitive racer in historic events

- Mark Dixon

Looking back now, it seems so serendipitous. When Mike Gibbs got in touch to offer his Frazer Nash SS racer for a feature in Octane, he suggested that the nice people at Castle Combe circuit might be helpful in providing a location for some driving shots. Which they were, hugely. But it was only a few days after the photoshoot that Mike recalled Castle Combe having a connection with Frazer Nash that most people will be completely unaware of.

In the early 1960s, HJ 'Aldy' Aldington, the proprietor of AFN Limited - founded by Archibald Frazer-Nash in 1922, but taken over by Aldy and his two brothers in 1929 – was friends with a lady called Kitty Thomas, who had inherited the freehold of Castle Combe circuit. Like so many other racetracks, Castle Combe was originally a World War Two airfield, and it hosted its first motor racing event in 1950.

Aldington arranged for AFN to take a rolling three-year lease on the track from 1963 and various clubs staged races there for pre- and postwar cars, attracting crowds of up to 20,000 spectators and putting it on a par with Silverstone for high-speed action.

The Frazer Nash Car Club was, naturally, a key player at Castle Combe; indeed, Mike Gibbs was a competitor at its 1965 meeting. The Frazer Nash SS pictured here didn't actually exist then, although it was already a gleam in the eye of aircraft engineer and spare-time vintage car restorer Barry Peerless. He had ambitions to create a replica of one of the ultra-rare Frazer Nash single-seaters built by the works in the mid-1930s and was gathering parts with the help of a young Michael Gibbs, already a convert to the cult of the chain-gang 'Nash since buying his first, an Exeter model, in 1960. He still has the Exeter today.