It’s odd the way Autopuzzles leads you into areas of motoring history that you have never really thought about before, and midget speedway racing is just one of those for me. I thought it was principally an American thing, but apparently enjoyed some popularity in the UK in the late 1930s.
The man behind the wheel is Harry Skirrow, driving a Skirrow Special, which he designed and developed himself. What is not apparent from the photo is that he only has one arm. So read on….
Skirrow was born in 1906, and began his working life in a bank, but soon left to open his own motor garage in Ambleside, in the English Lake District. He became successful in motorcycle racing, but he lost part of his left arm in a shooting accident (I don’t know any details). However, with the aid of a prosthetic forearm fitted with a hook, he carried on riding and driving.
In 1935, he went to a Midget Car Speedway meeting at the Belle Vue Speedway in Manchester, and decided to built his own midget racer. Despite the success of this car, he wanted to improve on it, and designed a chassis, eventually settling on a chain-driven four-wheel-drive transmission system (drawing below). He sold his garage at Ambleside and moved to London and rented a workshop. He got the London firm of J.A. Prestwich to produce a 1000cc air-cooled v-twin engine based on two 500cc speedway J.A.P. units, with the cylinders fitted on to a single crankcase. There was a separate carburettor for each cylinder, and for racing purposes it was set up to run on methanol. This became known as the J.A.P. 8/80 engine. The car was very successful, and Skirrow not only started producing them, but also got involved in speedway track management, and was instrumental in forming a national midget car racing league.
This venture was abandoned in 1939 after a summer of bad weather which caused a number of fixtures to be rained off, and with the onset of WW2, and after his house in London had been destroyed in a bombing raid, Skirrow moved back north and set up a small plant making aircraft parts.
There was no immediate resumption of midget racing after the war, and Skirrow opened a market garden in Devon, then sold it and ran a garage in London, while still being based near Torquay. He continued to work in various jobs into his seventies, and died in 1991, aged 84.
The book Midget Car Speedway by Derek Bridgett describes him as "Perhaps the least known and most underrated racing car constructor in this country".
