WORKS WONDERS

Works Wonders is a top competition manager's nostalgic view of a golden age of motorsport, the Fifties, and Sixties. It was a time when you could buy a car from a manufacturer's catalogue, take it to a tuning shop, stick a set of numbers on the side and go racing or rallying with it.

If you were good enough, you might even beat the works drivers in similar cars: and if that happened there was a good chance you would be invited to join them for a future event. A measure of professionalism had entered what previously had been essentially an amateur sport, but it had not been allowed to corrupt it.

As always, winning was the ultimate objective, but it was not the tense and humourless business it would later become because in those days there were fewer commercial pressures on drivers to perform out of the car as well as in it: there was still time to have fun on the way to victory.

Those were the days of the great rallies like the Monte Carlo, the Tulip Rally, the Alpine, the Liege Rome Liege and the Acropolis, and it was a classic time for the endurance races like the Le Mans 24-Hours and the Sebring 12-Hours.

It was also a time when groups of enthusiasts would band together to tackle world time and distance records with production cars, and it was a time when motorsport was more accessible than ever before or since.

During this period Marcus Chambers was centre stage in International motorsport as the competition manager, firstly of MG. Then of BMC, with the Austin Healeys and finally, following a short period in the retail motor business, of Rootes and Chrysler, with cars such as the Sunbeam Tiger, Hillman Imp and Hillman Hunter.

In this major expansion of his earlier book, Seven Year Twitch, the author tells an absorbing story of an incident-packed competition career and recaptures vividly the unique atmosphere of the sport during the period when it provided many examples of outstanding personal achievement against the odds and was enhanced by a deeply etched code of sportsmanship and mutual assistance between competitors and rivals in times of difficulty.

Illustrated with a fine selection of period images showing various cars in action from the little Austin A35 to the big Austin Healeys along with MG A and MG Magnette, list just a few. Finally, an appendix listing BMC successes in International rallies and races 1955-1961.