Aston Martin
Halford Special
The Halford Special was a Grand Prix racing car of the 1920s built by engine designer Major Frank Halford on the chassis of an early Side Valve Aston Martin tourer. It was one of the most advanced British-built racing cars of the mid-1920s and had many racing successes. Halford himself was a freelance engine designer who did work for both the de Havilland Aircraft Company and Napier & Son.
Text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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History
In 1922 Bamford & Martin company (that later became Aston Martin) produced cars to compete at the Brooklands racing circuit, for Grand Prix racing, and to set world speed and endurance records. Two works Team Cars with 16-valve twin-cam engines were built for racing, a record car known as the Razor Blade was built, and a number of other cars were built for customers for racing. One of these customer cars, chassis number 1916, registration number OR1, was later re-built as the AM Halford and then again as the Halford Special. The early racing history of chassis number 1916 is not fully documented but what is certain is that it was crashed in 1924 and Major Halford bought the chassis and installed an engine of his own design and built a new two-seater body for the car. Major Halford built two 6-cylinder in-line engines for the car. Each had an aluminium cylinder-block and crankcase with steel liners, with rubber seals at their base. Bore and stroke were 63 mm and 80 mm giving 1.5 litres, the Grand Prix formula for 1926. The cylinder heads were cast iron with two camshafts, twelve inclined valves, and two 12 mm plugs per cylinder. Drawing on his aircraft design skills, Frank Halford proposed using a turbocharger, but it proved unreliable in tests. (This was probably the first turbocharged road racing car until Renault developed the Alpine turbocharged car in 1968 that went on to become successful Grand Prix cars in the 1970s. A turbo diesel qualified on the pole at the Indy 500 in 1952, and the turbo Offy first appeared at Indy in 1966 in the Huffaker cars). When first raced at Brooklands, at the 1925 BARC meeting in August, the car appeared with a two-litre Roots-type supercharger mounted on the front of the crankshaft. At its first race in 1925, with the 95 bhp engine, t
Sections adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); text is shortened. Read the full article for the complete history and citations.
More photos
Sources
- Wikidata — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5641891CC0 1.0 · retrieved 2026-10-01
- Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halford_SpecialCC BY-SA 4.0 · Text © Wikipedia contributors; revision 1336839908 · retrieved 2026-10-01
- Wikimedia Commons — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Halford_Special_at_the_Goodwood_Festival_of_Speed_2007.jpgCC BY-SA 4.0 · Photo: Iain Cheyne · retrieved 2026-10-01
- Car Model Index — https://models.autoculturesociety.com/Compiled record. Sources that do not permit reuse are not copied; this index is credited instead.