FRAZER NASH. Nash Of all the many vintage sports cars I've never owned, the one I yearn for is t

Nash Of all the many vintage sports cars I've never owned, the one I yearn for is the chain-drive Frazer Nash. It was a frantic, spiky, spidery, ner-vous, quick machine, a sort of high-strung motorcycle with four wheels.

If you were to bolt a pair of motorcycles together and then sit down between them, controlling their front wheels with a steer-ing wheel, you'd get a sensation not unlike that of driving a Frazer Nash. Writing about other, more mundane motorcars, you can set down a chronicle of models and model changes in some sort of sensible progression.

But not with Frazer Nashes. For there were so many models: Boulogne, Colmore, Exeter, Fast Tourer, T. T. Replica, Falcon, Le Mans Replica, In-terceptor, Ulster, etc., etc., and so many dif-ferent engines— Anzani, Meadows, Gough, Blackburne, four and six cylinder, super-charged and unsupercharged— that the mind boggles at sorting them out.

Further, the Aldington Brothers would screw together al-most any combination of engine, chassis, and body you wanted. Still, a Frazer Nash was uniquely a Frazer Nash, unlike any other car because of a multiple-chain drive which incorporated its means of changing gear. Furthermore, a Frazer Nash had no differential gear or much in the way of springing. Four quarter-ellip-tics helped keep the car from being shaken to pieces on rough roads; obviously, the com-fort of its driver and passenger was of sec-ondary importance to its builders.

Agility was a strong point, but the driver had to keep his wits about him, for the steering of many Frazer Nashes required no more than seven-eighths of a turn from lock to lock. Certainly many of these characteristics were common to other sports cars of the twenties and thirties, but the Frazer Nash had something they didn't have—its won-drous and fearsome chain drive.

Roughly, here's how chain drive worked.

From the clutch behind the engine a short drive shaft led to a pair of bevel gears in-side a cylindrical casing. From the sides of this casing protruded a pair of shafts carry-ing a series of four sprockets and dog clutches.

At the rear was another shaft join-ing the rear wheels, and another set of four sprockets. Each sprocket on the front shaft drove a corresponding sprocket on the rear shaft by means of a roller chain. The four sprockets on the rear shaft varied in size and thus gave four gear ratios.

To select any gear — by means of the gear lever and a trick linkage—you merely had to slide one of the dog clutches into mesh with the side of one of the sprockets on the front shaft, locking it to the shaft.

You were then in the gear you wanted to be in. The rest of the sprockets and chains then turned freely. This sounds formidable, but it was really very simple. Gear changes could be made easily and with lightning speed.

Furthermore, if you didn't like the gear ratios your car came with, or if you wanted special ratios for competition, installing new sprockets on the rear shaft was a cinch. Reverse had a small counter-shaft of its own. Most Frazer Nashes had a wonderful look, too.

The radiator was set 'way, 'way back of the front axle, which was gripped by the very ends of the quarter-elliptic front springs. The front semicycle-type fenders had a slight sweep aft but their inner sides did not meet the chassis.

The driver could actually see his right front brake drum. Skinny outside ex-haust pipes curved outward from a strapped-down hood. The narrow, fabric covered body had a clean sparseness about it and there was no attempt to hide the chassis frame; brake-rods, for example, were nak-edly exposed. Its rounded behind sat partly over a big gas tank with a huge filler stick-ing out of its middle.

Most Frazer Nashes look as if they might have another pair of seats under their ton-neau covers. But they don't. That's where all the chains and sprockets live. There were, however, a few early cars with minimal rear seating. The fly-off hand brake and gear lever are outside, and even if you're sybaritic enough 118 to erect the top when it rains (which most chain-gangsters don't) , you'll end up with a cold and wet right arm.

Unless, of course. you own a bit of British wearing apparel called a "dri-sleeve," which was, in the thir-ties, advertised for just such a contingency. On the road, a Frazer Nash is a pretty twitchy mechanism. On corners in the wet, the rear wheels always slide (remember, you have no differential) .

When it's dry, you make them slide if you want to get around rapidly. But you can straighten up fast with that seven-eighths-of-a-turn steering. A late Frazer Nash with, say, a 11/2-litre Blackburne engine like that installed in the 1934 model pictured, would approach 90 mph and go from 0 to 60 in under 14 seconds.

Cars with more puissant power plants would naturally go faster, but, except for competition jobs, there were very few of them. The Frazer Nash was not only a delight to handle and an outstandingly safe car be-cause it went exactly where it was pointed, it was also a simple car on which a man could do his own work.

Further, a Frazer Nash was comparatively cheap to buy. The cheapest Frazer Nash in the early thirties, with a four-cylinder L-head Meadows engine and three speeds, could be bought for £325, about $1,600. Even a supercharged, over-head-valve-engined Boulogne with four speeds cost only £500, about $2,500. It's hard at this date to understand why more of them weren't snapped up when you compare it with the MG Midget, which wasn't in the same league and at that time cost over $1,000.

The Frazer Nash was the direct descend-ant of the G.N., a sporting cycle car which had two cylinders and a chain drive not too unlike its offspring. Although the primitive G.N. had been successful in competition and was much loved by a small coterie of "in" types, the day of the cycle car had waned.

Captain Archie Frazer-Nash (note the hy-phen) and H. R. Godfrey who were running G. N. Motors, Limited, left the company in 1922, not long before it foundered. Archie Frazer-Nash formed a new com-pany and in 1924 the first Frazer Nash (no hyphen) appeared. The early cars—three were built in 1925 — had French-built Ruby or British Plus-Power engines. By 1925 the 11/2-litre, 40-hp Anzani engine was "stan-dard," and in that year forty cars were built.

In 1926, Frazer Nash's biggest year, forty-four Anzani-engined cars left the works. Later on, the 50-hp four ED overhead-valve Meadows engine became "standard," and in 1933, twenty-seven cars had Meadows en-gines, nine had twin-overhead-camshaft, 11/2-litre, 75-hp Blackburne engines. All to-gether, from 1924 until the very last chain-drive Frazer Nash was assembled to special order in 1938, only about three hundred and fifty cars were built.

In 1928, Captain Frazer-Nash left the company and later on designed the famous "more-power-to-your-elbow" aircraft gun turret, which did much useful work against the Germans. The company then came under the control of H. J. and W. H. Aldington.

The Frazer Nash had been successful in competition under Archie Frazer-Nash, and continued so under the Aldington regime. A. F. P. Fane in a Frazer Nash blown single-seater at Brooklands Track took the Moun-tain Class F record at 78.30 mph in 1935.

In 1936 Fane lapped Brooklands at 121.77 mph. In 1937 Fane took the Shelsley-Walsh hill-climb record in 38.77 seconds. The fol-lowing year Raymond Mays in an E.R.A. took the record back; he was a hundredth of a second faster.

And in 1932, 1933, and 1934 a gaggle of Frazer Nashes did themselves proud in that toughest of rallies, the Alpine trial, winning four coupes des glaciers. But, as early as 1933, the viper that finally was to kill the chain-drive Nash was already about to sting. In that year the Aldingtons bought the British rights to the German B.M.W. Soon the Frazer Nash-B.M.W. be-came the company's chief concern. In 1936 only sixteen chain-drive cars were sold, in 1937 two, in 1938 and 1939 only one each year. The postwar Frazer Nash used a modern-ized version of the B.M.W. engine built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company Limited in England. No chains, though.