1936 Lagonda LG45

This car took part in the Pre-War Team Challenge Race at the Aston Martin Owner Club's meeting at Oulton Park in May 2017.

It's the 1936 Lagonda LG45 of Richard Reay-Smith being inspected in the scrutineering bay before the start of the day's action. In 1933 Lagonda introduced the M45 with a 4,453cc Meadows engine, and three lightweight short chassis cars with more highly tuned engines were prepared by Lagonda main agents Arthur Fox and Charles Nicholl for the 1934 RAC Tourist Trophy race at Ards finishing in fourth, fifth and eighth places. Shortly after this the M45R, or Rapide, model was introduced by Lagonda  with the same short chassis and tuned engine. In 1935 one of the TT cars entered by the Fox and Nicholl team and driven by John Hindmarsh and Luis Fontés won the Le Mans 24 Hour race outright. Just before the Le Mans win Lagonda had gone into administration and was taken over by Alan Good who stopped production of the existing models and replaced them with the LG45 which had a revised version of the M45 chassis and a 4,467cc engine based on that of the M45R. Fox and Nicholl were commissioned to produce cars for the 1936 Le Mans race and they produced four cars, two four-seaters and two two-seaters, but the Le Mans 24 Hour race that year was cancelled because of a general strike in France in May and June. The two four-seater cars were broken up later that year but one of the two-seaters did compete at Le Mans in 1937. The car pictured above, DFY 187, is chassis 12210 and was originally bodied as a saloon but was rebuilt by Lagonda specialists Bishopgray in 2008 as a replica of one of those Le Mans cars.