It's a Speedwell Sprite built to order for photographer David Hurn, powered by a Fiat motor.
Quite so.
If I may be permitted to quote from the well-known and esteemed site I got it from:
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In its standard form, the Austin-Healey Sprite was a cheap and cheerful sports car, a roadster that used common off-the-shelf components to deliver big fun for a small price. As re-imagined by Speedwell Performance Conversions Ltd., the Speedwell Sprite GT was a streamlined, race-ready coupe that was built to order for a handsome price. That individuality made it perfect for its discriminating owners, and ensured that it would be cherished for decades to come.
Although few Americans are familiar with the Speedwell company, it earned a strong reputation for performance tuning from day one. Formed in 1957 by racers Les Adams, George Hulbert and John Sprinzel, it was a firm that modified 948cc Austin A35 (and shortly, Austin-Healey Sprite and Mini) cylinder heads for racing. Racer Graham Hill soon joined the firm, and Frank Costin (stylist of the Lotus Elite, of future Marcos fame) contributed aerodynamic body component designs. Speedwell's BMC A-series engine-tuning skills were famously applied to a Sprite-based land speed record car, the "Speedwell Streamliner" that set a 1,000cc Class G world record speed of 132.2 MPH at Belgium's Jabbeke in 1960.
While the standard Sprite's appearance had its own charm, it wasn't made for speed. Frank Costin created a new, sleek one-piece nose for the car, which was crafted in glass-reinforced plastic, as well as a fixed aluminum fastback roof that incorporated a curved windshield in place of the standard flat unit. When the "Monza" nose and hand-formed "GT" roof were fitted to a steel-bodied 1958-1961 Mark I Sprite, the fetching result was called a Speedwell Sprite GT.
The sight of an unusual red sports car for sale at a farm across the highway from Richard Rooks's Brookfield, Wisconsin, home in 1976 piqued the young man's interest. "I went over to look at it, and I had no information about Speedwells," Richard says. "I was driving a 1970 MG Midget, so I knew Sprites, and if the car was originally a Sprite, I was interested--I thought it had a magnificent body style for its time.
"It was worn down for being 15 years old, but it ran very well despite having a definite transmission problem: It would pop out of second and third gears every time you let up on the gas, so you had to make sure that your hand was pressing the gearshift knob," Richard explains. "I thought that it may have been a race car, since Speedwell was known for building high-performance racers, and I bought it with little to go by."
The coupe that Richard bought would turn out to be a very unusual example of a car that was special in itself. Instead of sporting four-wheel drum brakes behind standard Sprite pressed-steel wheels, this car had competition-style Lockheed front disc brakes behind 60-spoke knock-off wires. Instead of being powered by a 43hp, 948cc Austin-Healey engine with twin SU carburetors, it sported a 95hp, 1,491cc Fiat engine with a two-barrel Weber carburetor. These specifications were at the behest of a rising star of British photography named David Hurn.
"I'd bought a very pretty early Jaguar off of Len Adams of Speedwell," David recalls. "At that time, [the company] was him, engineer George Hulbert and racer Graham Hill. I got to know Len pretty well, and through him, I got to know Graham. In my chats with Len, I learned they were beginning to do these adaptations of Sprites and the original Minis. Over lunch one day, we were looking at what they were doing to a Sprite, and I said, 'I'd quite like one of them.'
"So I actually commissioned them to make this car from scratch; it was built to what I wanted. It sounds incredibly grand, but it wasn't that expensive to do because we weren't talking about trying to make something to a Rolls-Royce standard--the workmanship was pretty rough. For all intents and purposes, apart from the chassis underneath, they rebuilt the whole thing. I think they enjoyed doing it because they were all fun guys, and it was their idea of heaven, doing something like that."
When David took delivery of his pale metallic blue Speedwell Sprite GT, it featured a smooth bonnet with a small central air intake, wire wheels and exterior door handles and locks to protect his photography equipment. "The body was completely redesigned, and didn't look like a Sprite at all," he recalls. "The shape of the roof was unique because I had to get a certain amount of equipment in it; the top was molded so that I could get cases, which I had made, into what could laughingly be called the back seat."
This sports car would be a work-in-progress much of the time that David owned it, and after a short period, he spoke with the men at Speedwell. "For somebody who wants a flashy sort of car, it's a bit underpowered," he explained. "That's when one of them, probably George, said, 'Well, a very good engine to put in it is the Fiat engine, because it's got a lot of torque.' I had more money in my pocket than sense, and I flippantly said, 'Oh, that sounds great.'"
Although adding quarter windows to the GT roof and converting the front drums to discs were simple enough, fitting this new engine posed rather more problems: "One issue with it was that the engine wouldn't go under the bonnet; the bulges in the bonnet had to be made for clearance. Once the engine was in, it had so much power that it wouldn't stay fixed to the transmission--the torque kept twisting it! They had real problems trying to get the power from the engine to the rear wheels without it distorting the whole car.
"It was great fun to drive; there was no weight in it whatsoever, and it had a very powerful engine, so it went like a bat out of hell. And it was an extremely pretty car. At that time, there was no speed limit on British roads, so I used to belt this little car down to the film studios at some frightening kind of speed, and all the time it was under enormous strain. I didn't have it much more than two years, though--I gave it up comparatively quickly, because they'd never managed to sort out this problem with the torque of the engine and make it reliable; by that time I'd gotten rather grand and had bought a DB3 Aston Martin. I look back on the Speedwell with fond memories."
The Sprite went through a number of hands, including those of famous British race driver Gerry Marshall, before it made the trip overseas. While in England, "6943MM" went from blue to BRG to red, and its Monza bonnet gained five prominent ventilation ports in an attempt to regulate engine temperatures at speed, which is an issue that still dogs the car in the hands of its 33-year owner, Richard, although it doesn't hamper his comfort.
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