Kieft F1 Car

I'd read about the Kieft F1 car some years ago, how construction started in 1954 but the car was never completed. I'd also read many years later that someone had bought the car and was intending to finish the project and race the car in appropriate historic racing events. So when I went to the SeeRed meeting at Donington Park in September 2005 I was most interested to see the car in the paddock.

Unfortunately the meeting was a two-day event which I attended on the Sunday and the Kieft, then owned by Bill Morris, had been driven by Gregory Snape in the Ron Flockhart Memorial Trophy race on the Saturday, so I didn't see it race. There's a comprehensive history of the car on this Bonhams website in which it says that tests in 1954 of the Coventry Climax Godiva V8 engine showed it to produce only 240bhp against the 260-270bhp claimed by the rival Ferrari, Maserati and Lancia power units which caused Coventry Climax to abandon its Formula 1 racing ambition at that time. What the article doesn't say is that the figures claimed by the Italian manufacturers were wildly optimistic and they achieved at best 230bhp, so the Kieft would probably have proved extremely competitive in 1954 (until Mercedes Benz entered the fray, that is). The car must hold a record, however, for the longest time (48 years) between the start of the project (in 1954) and its first race (in 2002).