Stop me if you've heard this before. An English manufacturer sends an underpowered, lightweight sports car to America for a heart transplant. In goes a hulking, muscular Detroit V-8 and, hot damn, you've got a road rocket of the first degree, capable of leaping tall Ferraris with a single bound and carting home every trophy in sight! Of course, Mr. Shelby did this in the '60s, but a decade earlier another Anglo-America hybrid had done the same thing with almost the same results. Meet Sydney Allard and his wonderful, if not treacherous, Allards.
In 1930 Sydney Allard was a typical car-crazed 21-year-old Englishman whose father bought him a very nice present: a Ford dealership in London! Allard was immediately impressed with Ford products, and even more so when the famed "flathead" Ford V-8 came out in 1932. He began competing in "Trials" using Ford sedans. Trials events were a particularly sadistic British invention combining the worst elements of off-road racing and a swamp buggy course. Their objective was to splash through streams, climb muddy embankments and, in general, go where no Morris Minor had gone before. Allard was a trials star, first in near-stock Fords and later in cars of his own design.
In addition to managing his Ford dealership, Allard continued building one-off trials and hillclimb cars based on as many Ford parts as possible. His first special used a frame and parts from a wrecked Ford roadster dressed in a body salvaged from a damaged Bugatti Grand Prix car! Allard tried a variety of engines, including modified Ford flatheads and an odd Austrian-built Steyr V-8. This air-cooled engine with hemi heads was purchased as war surplus (it was intended to power trucks and power generators) for about $5. With a major increase in compression ratio it became a winner.
After WWII Allard went into serious car production. There was a shortage of cars on the home market, and since he had access to Ford parts Allard based his new models on proven FoMoCo running gear. He designed the cars himself, launching the Allard Motor Company in 1946. The first line up included the J1 racing car, the K1 two-seat convertible and the L1 four-seat tourer. All used the torquey Ford flathead V-8 to good effect. However, the J1 proved to be too slow for serious racing, so Allard went to work on something more potent.
Moment In The Sun-The J2In 1949 Allard replaced the J1 with the all-new J2. It was a basic (some say crude) sports car with a simple ladder frame. In front a Ford beam axle was cut in half and pivoted off the inner ends to make a split-axle independent suspension system (similar in concept to the split I-beam suspension used in Ford trucks for decades). Out back, Allard fabricated a DeDion suspension system. A cigar-shaped aluminum body barely covered the mechanicals, with cycle fenders in front and what looked like truck fenders tacked on in back. Simple but functional, the J2 was seriously quick, easy to repair, and tough as nails.
Although Allard also sold cars in England, the principal market for the J2 was the United States. This was brought about by the faltering postwar English economy, which desperately needed overseas sales to survive. If Allard did not sell enough cars to America, its steel ration from the government would be reduced.
With this in mind Allard looked for American engines that could be made to fit in the J2 engine compartment. Although Allard offered modified Mercury flathead engines with aftermarket aluminum heads and other tuning aids, they were soon surpassed in the power race by the recently introduced overhead valve engines from General Motors and Chrysler. Allard experimented with the Ardun overhead valve conversion for the flathead (its designer, Zora Arkus-Duntov, was an Allard works driver), but it was insufficiently developed to be reliable.