Through the 1920s, Basil Davenport terrorised bigger and more expensive cars in his GN Spider special and, 100 years later, current owner Jim Edwards is continuing that tradition. Having accepted the challenge of rebuilding Spider’s Frazer Nash V-twin engine for previous owner David Leigh, Edwards was the obvious candidate to take over Spider when Leigh decided to sell it around four years ago.
Based in an old mill building in Middlewich in Cheshire, Edwards is something of a throwback to another time. He is a gifted and intuitive engineer who has built an enviable reputation for his work on pre-war cars and engines and is the ideal enthusiast to be the latest custodian of this outstanding piece of speed event history. The car is still road legal and Edwards has been known to startle a few locals with a quick test run up Middlewich’s high street.
Back in 1923, Davenport had a singular focus: he wanted to be the fastest man up the 1000-yard Shelsley Walsh hillclimb, beating more powerful and more expensive cars in the process. Spider is the machine he used to attempt that. It is based on a Narrow GN cyclecar chassis and was first built with an 1100cc GN engine. It has little in the way of front brakes and just a handbrake is used to slow it down.
Edwards explains: “He didn’t put a foot brake on it because, for one thing, there’s no room in the footwell as the body is so narrow. At Shelsley with the gradient, you don’t really need brakes at all. You’re only braking for Bottom Ess, so that’s all done on the handbrake and that takes a bit of getting used to.
“Basil started with a two-valve 1100cc GN engine and he ran that for a year or two but it wasn’t quick enough. He was good friends with Archie Frazer-Nash and went back and said he needed more power because he was going after the Shelsley record.”
The answer was sitting on a shelf in the Frazer Nash workshop: the engine, freshly removed from a Brooklands special called ‘Mowgli’.
“I think it was the first four-valve overhead-cam engine they made with chain drive,” says Edwards. “Mowgli was a car that was built for high speeds at Brooklands and had three different capacities. It ended up being a 1500cc and that’s how Basil bought the engine.”
In 1926, Davenport was the first driver to break 50 seconds for the Shelsley climb and then pared it down to 46.2s across four years, but never got below 40s as Hans Stuck rewrote the record at 42.8s for Daimler in 1930. Into the 1930s, Raymond Mays and ERA became dominant and Spider could not match the pace. However, 70 years later, Leigh finally took Spider to the top in less than 40s.
“Because Basil was doing sprint events, he was revving it a lot higher, up to 5000rpm rather than 3500, as it did at Brooklands, and he just blew it up,” explains Edwards. “That’s when he started the process of developing it and turning it into his engine rather than Mowgli’s. In the early days he was rebuilding it after every meeting just because it was so highly strung and on the ragged edge.”
"Because it’s so sort of wacky, no one wanted to touch it. But I was younger and brave enough to do it"
Jim Edwards
Davenport purposely didn’t clean it. For his own amusement, he liked to turn up with this scruffy special and beat everyone.
“You’d have all these highly polished factory racers and stuff, and then he would be right up there in the running for fastest time of the day,” smiles Edwards. “In the 1920s, he was towing it to Shelsley and back behind his road-going GN. So you can imagine how filthy it would have got and I’m sort of upholding that.”
As Davenport turned his attention to his next project, Spider II, the original was dismantled in 1930 and put into store. Much later, with the encouragement of his mechanic Ron Sant, Davenport put it back together and owned it until his death in 1979. Sant took over the car before Leigh campaigned it for the better part of two decades.
Leigh drove Spider superbly, notably at Shelsley, but when the engine needed attention he happened across Edwards – who was gaining a name for working on the vee-twin engines in Morgan three-wheelers. Leigh entrusted the rebuild to the young engineer.
“I met a friend of a friend and he said, ‘I think I’ve got a job for you’,” Edwards recalls. “‘Do you fancy rebuilding the engine on Spider?’ That’s where my friendship with David started, through rebuilding the engine for him because he was struggling to find someone to do it. Because it’s so sort of wacky, no one wanted to touch it. But I was younger and brave enough to do it.”
Edwards started the work in 2019 and it took the best part of a year to rebuild. There were a lot of things wrong with it and he just used his common sense and innate engineering nous to improve it. One of the problems was the oil wasn’t getting to the crank properly so everything was getting hot. Edwards completed the work, and Leigh ran it again, before Edwards ended up buying Spider in 2020.
“Since then I’ve been inside the engine again, just to check a few things and improve things a little bit more,” he continues. “It’s now just maintenance really. You do get quite involved in it. It’s so nice to work on something like this; apart from materials, there aren’t any modern bits to it at all. It still uses the homemade carburettors that Basil made. It hasn’t changed really.”
In period, Davenport flattened the springs and lowered and then lightened the chassis.
“The car is just full of holes but there’s not a great deal of modification to the chassis,” says Edwards. “The front axle’s a bit wider. It’s very original, which is remarkable, and it handles fantastically. He didn’t do a lot to the chassis, which is a good advert for the GN chassis.
“It’s not meant to be a museum piece and it’s a scruffy old thing. If you machine something for it, you don’t make it look too good. You machine it properly and then rough it up a bit so that it blends in with the rest of the car!”
Spider also retains a lot of its original parts: “You can just tell that many of the parts came out of the factory, like the hoop that carries the steering box to convert it into a central steering, and the steering arms and stuff, I’m sure it all came out of the GN factory. It’s got an aluminium steering box, which is rare.
“A big change that I made was the tyres. David ran it on very grippy motorcycle tyres, which I didn’t like it as it felt like there was too much grip. But he posted some good times on those.
“You didn’t know when it was going to break away so I put it on tyres with less grip, and it’s a lot more fluid and controllable. I’m a couple of seconds away from David’s best time, which I think I can probably achieve even with less grip, probably a bit more sideways.
“It’s just going to take me a bit of practice but Shelsley is a great hill because it’s simple in a way and really suits the car. It’s just about keeping your foot in.”
"You just keep maintaining and you fix what breaks, but fix it in a sympathetic way that no one can tell you’ve replaced something"
Jim Edwards
However, the handbrake arrangements do present a problem as the driver can’t change down and brake at the same time. That makes somewhere like Prescott quite a busy hill, but Shelsley is easier and Edwards says the car feels much more at home there.
“The real pleasure is when you take it to a race meeting and lots of people can watch it and you get comments like, ‘I saw this in the 1960s’, or similar,” Edwards concludes. “There’s a lot of that with this car, it’s so distinctive.
“You just keep maintaining and you fix what breaks, but fix it in a sympathetic way that no one can tell you’ve replaced something. I think when David was selling it, he had to make sure it was going to the right person: somebody who understood it and understood what it’s all about.”
