"This is a Vintage Thing that nearly reached production but didn't.
I recently came across an Imp derived car that I’d never heard of. I wasn’t expecting to find one, either, because I was reading Turner Sports Cars by Peter Tuthill. These were sports racing cars of the traditional British front engine/rear wheel drive variety. In fact the Turner 803 was probably what spurred BMC to produce the Austin–Healey Sprite.
Unfortunately, the rear-engined Turner sports car never got built. The illness of the company’s founder, Jack Turner, brought about the voluntary liquidation of the company in 1966. By that stage Jack had drawn up an attractive little car with a Kamm tail and what looks like a front mounted radiator. Jack was a personal friend of Wally Hassan the Coventry Climax development engineer. Many competition Turners featured Coventry-Climax 1216cc engines so Jack would have been more than familiar with the Imp engine’s racing heritage.
Moulds for GRP bodywork were completed but they were sold on liquidation to the Watsonian sidecar company. Apparently, Watsonian were looking to diversify since demand for sidecars was dwindling, apparently as a result of the Mini. Now, I don’t know about you but I think the introduction of the Imp also had something to do with the demise of the motorcycle combination. But Imp engines were quickly adapted for sidecar racing and became the powerplant in many successful outfits. There was a Mini powered device called the Greenwood Mini but that was a symmetrical affair with two wheels at the front and one at the back. It was subsequently banned as not entering into the general spirit of lop-sided awkwardness beloved of conventional outfit crews. The Greenwood Mini was also hugely successful, which didn’t help either. Anyway, the Imp was good for sidecars – well, the racing variety, anyway – while the Mini was not.
Producing an Imp based sports car alongside its sidecars would seem to be a smart move by Watsonian in a kind of “if you can’t beat them join them” sort of way but the project ran out of steam without Jack Turner. The moulds were moved to Watsonian Sidecars but it would appear that they were subsequently broken up without ever having been used.
The illustration and information is reproduced here with kind permission from Peter Tuthill the author of Turner Sports Cars. For more information on the Turner Imp and the other cars made by this manufacturer I can wholeheartedly recommend Peter’s book, which is available at £11.95 from Peter himself –
peter.tuthill@tesco.net The Turner Imp came tantalisingly close to production on more than one occasion but remains another fascinating “what if”. If the success of the Turner 803 really did prompt BMC to launch the Frogeye Sprite, would the Turner Imp’s success have got Rootes to do their own thing and get the Asp prototype into production?"
