Henry did no more than tear his drawings in half which Gremillion then adapted into the Bamford & Martin single cam, 16-valve, lower-half in return for what was described as a substantial bag of gold coins! Gremillion persuaded Henry to let him have details of the 3.0-litre Ballot engine. The talented Frenchman had been a pupil of the great engine designer Ernest Henry, now at Ballot. had all developed large capacity 16-valve units for racing and speed record activities – the genesis of the Aston Martin powerplant is believed to be considerably more colourful.Ĭount Zborowski’s close friend and fellow racer, Clive Gallop, had an acquaintance with Peugeot engineer Marcel Gremillion. While 16-valve race engines had been successfully developed for a few years by 1922 – Peugeot, Bugatti and A.L.F.A. Incredibly, by today’s standards at least, the car was driven by road to the race meetings it competed in.Īs ever with Aston Martin, the engine itself has a story behind it. The car weighed in at 750kg, had a top speed of 85mph and carried two seats – one off-set, as per the Grand Prix regulations of the time, to accommodate the riding mechanic who was an essential member of the team not least because part of his job was to pressurise the fuel tank via a hand pump. The first Aston Martin Grand Prix car, featuring this 1,486cc unit, was good for around 55bhp at 4,200 rpm. Zborowski supplied around £10,000 for the project – a small fortune at the time – with the money going toward not only the cars but also the creation of an entirely new 16-valve twin overhead cam four-cylinder race engine. Working with Lionel Martin and his team they hit on a plan to build two cars to compete in the 1922 Isle of Man TT (Tourist Trophy) event.
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With a fortune that in today’s money would comfortably class him as a billionaire, Zborowski had ample resources at his disposal which, allied to his existing knowledge of Aston Martin as a driver of some the brand’s earliest side-valve open wheel racers, gave him the confidence to commission not one but two race cars from the business. This fabulously wealthy son of a Polish Count and an American heiress had an unquenchable thirst for speed, and a strong hankering for motorsport. The Aston Martin name had been established on the hillclimb courses of Great Britain and Lionel himself had notable success at the wheel of his own car, but he knew competitive Grand Prix racing around Europe would bring the wider fame he craved for his company.Īt the start of the ‘Roaring 20s’ that dream moved toward reality when Martin was introduced to a young racing driver, Count Louis Zborowski. From his earliest days at the helm of the fledgling sports car firm, Aston Martin co-founder Lionel Martin dreamt of putting the name of the business he had created with partner Robert Bamford into the headline-grabbing arena of Grand Prix racing.
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