It was only to be expected that some of the stars of Hepolite Scar, the motor trials track near Bolton Woods, should be members of the family who gave it its name.
William Hepworth formed E Hepworth and Son in 1907 with his brother George Edwin and their father Elijah. In 1910 it became a private limited company, Hepworth and Grandage, and was to remain a dominant force in the city's engineering life for almost a century.
The trade name for their motoring parts was Hepolite.
Another brother, Joseph, was to become MP for Bradford East. But in the 1920s the brothers were all speed freaks. George Edwin was a keen motor boat racer and formed the Northern Motor Boat Club in 1930. It was to become a prominent charity-helper. The club often used Harold Park lake for its meetings. George gave up the sport in 1932 for medical reasons.
But all three brothers liked to cut a dash on wheels. They ran a team of three Alvis 12/50s and entered them in rallies, trials, sprints, sand races and freak hill climbs.
Hepolite Scar was certainly a freak climb, and too much for an Alvis on one occasion. Joseph Hepworth is credited with having spotted the scar and suggesting it to Bradford and District Motor Club. Later he drove one of the earliest racing Jowetts to success up the tricky hill.
But one of the best-known names to tackle the scar was Captain Archie Frazer-Nash.
Despite the Hooray Henry name, and the fact he was a son of the Raj, born in India in 1889, Frazer-Nash was not some dilettante playboy-racer.
The family returned to London from India around the turn of the century, and Archie's mother was one of the first women to qualify as a doctor. She had practised in India.
The young Archie was sent to Finsbury Technical School. He gained a City and Guilds Diploma in Mechanical Engineering and went to serve an apprenticeship at Willans and Robinson - later English Electric - in Rugby.
In 1909 he left and went to work for the Vilcar Company, where he learned valuable workshop skills. Then he teamed up with an old school pal, Ron Godfrey, to produce the Godfrey & Nash cycle-car in his mother's stables.
The First World War took a slice out of Archie's life, but in 1919 the firm of GN Ltd moved to Wandsworth. It was there that he improved the cycle-car under his own name.
Frazer-Nash then had the brainwave that made his reputation - the chain-driven sport car. They became a bit of a legend, not so much for their performance as for the noise they made. 'Like tearing calico' was one description.
After a takeover, F-N started importing German BMW cars in 1934, although a few chain-driven cars were still made right up until 1939, in which year Germany started exporting grief rather than cars.
Frazer-Nash's contribution to the war effort was the hydraulic gun turret fitted to Blackburn Botha and Avro Manchester aircraft.
After the war Frazer-Nash came up with a sophisticated sports job which came third in the Le Mans 24-hour race. In 1951 came the high point - a Frazer-Nash became the only British car to win the Targa Florio, an endurance test on the twisting mountain roads of Sicily.
Production ceased in 1959.
But the Targa Florio must have held few terrors for a machine which saw its earliest successes in the muck and shale of Hepolite Scar...
Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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