The Austin A40 Farina is to us Club members a very special little car but while to the general public who sees one, it’s “just” another 1950/60s family saloon, very few of them have any idea of the outstanding impact this car helped make within the British motor industry then and in later years.
It was BMC’s first model to carry the designer’s name – Farina – and it established the format of a two-box shell, leading to the development of what is now the commonplace hatchback configuration. The cars could carry precious family loads as well as business ones. A40s also became well-loved family members and the marque hailed the start of a long and proud history of BMC successes within the saloon car racing and rallying world.
Several Mk1s were supported as Works cars by BMC who hoped their fame in international rallying would impress enough continental motorists to purchase one. Today, race-prepared A40s continue to be formidable opponents although their rally glory days are gone. The team of Pat Moss (Stirling Moss's sister) and Anne Wisdom became a popular couple in the rallying world – Pat always claimed that race track events were boring compared to the unknown hazards of the open road!
And for the open road, nobody can touch the amazing journey that three university students undertook when driving a Mk1 across Europe, Iran, Pakistan, India and Africa just to attend a friend’s wedding in Johannesburg! They travelled 20,000 miles “for a glass of champagne” in 1960 and their book, 20,000 miles - the Cambridge 1960 Indo-African Expedition, remains in print today, telling a story which simply couldn’t be duplicated these days, such are the tragic on-going international crises gripping some of these areas.
A modified Mk 1 was an important element at the USA’s NASA Space Center in Cleveland where the electric A40 proved the value of a hybrid in city traffic back in the late 1960s, thus helping to pave the way towards today’s rapid developments in electrical vehicle research. Professor Karl Kordesch used his own ‘daily driver’ to prove its viability, although today perhaps a better known invention of his was the D-sized Ever-Ready “Energiser” battery which he and two colleagues perfected in 1960 and which, along with the transistor, was a great step forward in powering smaller electrical components.
On the social scene, Terry Smith’s longest-running Wessex Group has celebrated its 30th anniversary, while other members have followed his example, creating their Northern Group, SouthWest Group, and the West Midlands Group, all of whom provide friendship, advice and a very warm welcome extended to visitors.
Our quarterly full-colour house magazine Farina News, our website here, and the official Facebook page all contribute in their own way to providing the glue which bonds us all together. For readers who wish to learn more of the A40’s history and development, two special editions of FN were published commemmorating the marque’s 60th birthday in 2018. FN154 and FN155 contain between them 104 information-packed pages and have seemingly become collectors’ items...
The Club is a proud member of the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs which fights on behalf of all classic vehicle owners against the slow spread of increasingly restrictive useage of their classics, whether it be the spread of Controlled Emission Zones or the threat of harmful ethanol levels in petrol.
Modern cars are now packed with a boggling array of systems all designed to keep their occupants safe, but the downside is the increasingly complex and expensive number of spares needed to maintain them. The Austin A40 Farina is a much simpler beast and our founder, Cynthia Hiller’s primary concern was to ensure members would always be able to maintain their cars in a roadworthy condition: today her Club is the envy of many much larger organisations when it comes to our spares service. Member Derek Minter has not only established an off-the-shelf delivery of all routine service items fully guaranteed and at competitive prices but also initiated a growing selection of hand-made repair panels from a few highly-specialised steel-working companies in the West Midlands. The steel used matches the cars’ original pressings, which assures a close fit and clean weld with minimum finishing needed. The panels are not cheap but, compared to others offered for sale on the internet, they are far superior and available only to Club members, usually off-the-shelf.
“Familiarity breeds contempt” they say, but each and every A40 driver who takes their A40 daily onto the public road or along to weekend Shows, are all aware of just what a unique and important little piece of history they are currently possessing. With, we estimate, only around 800 cars still surviving, the Austin A40 Farina deserves its crown.
- The easily-accessible items in a Mk 1 engine bay make for simple servicing.