This car, Lot 126, sold for $272,535 (£201,250), including buyer’s premium, at Bonhams Cars’ Chichester, U.K., sale on September 13, 2025.
In the later years of World War II, it became apparent that the Allied side was going to win. This set various English automobile engineers to ruminating about what would come next. William Lyons of Jaguar spent his evenings thinking about what a new sporting engine would look like, while Donald Healey and his friends sat in various pubs dreaming of what they would build when wartime ended. For Healey it was more speculative, since he wasn’t a manufacturer, just an engineer who used to work for Triumph. He had a great background in rallying but spent the war working at Humber, building light military vehicles.
Gearing up
Healey’s dream was to create a light, sporting car with a stiff and modern frame, independent front suspension and relatively soft springs to allow the tires to hang onto the road. The inspiration was the BMW 328 roadsters that arrived before the war. The drivetrain would have to come from an existing source -— building the car itself would be enough of a challenge. An early project was to work out a suitable independent front suspension. Ferdinand Porsche had created an innovative twin-trailing-arm arrangement for Volkswagen that had promise, though Healey wanted to use coil springs instead of torsion bars. As 1944 wore on, a design was finalized and prototype constructed.
British industry in the 1930s had been preparing for war, not advancing road cars. Finding a suitable engine off the shelf posed issues, but Riley had 2.4-liter inline-4 that would do. It was a late-1920s design, unusual in that it used twin cams, but not mounted overhead. They were set high in the block with short pushrods and rockers that allowed hemispherical combustion chambers. It had excellent torque and was efficient for the time, as well as being dependable. Riley also had a 4-speed transmission and torque-tube rear axle that would work well.
The frame design makes an interesting story. Achille “Sammy” Sampietro, an expatriate Italian designing for Humber, oversaw the concept. Given the likely availability of materials, a structure of folded sheet steel was the best approach. Another early member of the group was director of Westlands, the Humber distributor in the area. He offered a workshop for Healey to use, and in the corner was a “folding machine” (we would call it a metal brake) that could handle eight-foot-wide material. Because that was what they had, the frame was eight feet long and the resulting wheelbase was eight feet and six inches long.
Though everyone was expecting it, the end of the war came quite suddenly, with a resulting scramble to put dreams into something tangible. By late 1945, Healey’s team had a running chassis to test, nicknamed “The Horror,” and got access to the perimeter road around an RAF base for testing. The testing was useful, resulting in substantial stiffening of the frame and other fixes. Ben Bowden, another volunteer member of the group, had spent his wartime evenings in Coventry sketching body designs (an open car and a light saloon) and drawing the full-scale versions on his living-room wallpaper. Tracings were then transferred to templates. There were never any “original” body drawings of these first cars.
From sketch to street
Rumored sightings had been circulating, but Healey officially let the cat out of the bag in a January 1946 letter to Motor Sport magazine. Interest was intense and immediate, but the group still had nothing more than a running chassis to work from. It was time to scramble. Construction of a second chassis started at Westlands, where the roadster body was also taking shape. Steel was all but unavailable, but there was lots of sheet aluminum left from aircraft production, so bodywork was made from that. Healey approached Samuel Elliott & Sons, who had worked with Vanden Plas before the war, to build the ash frames and panels for the more luxurious and civilized saloon.
The first car shown to the press was the roadster in early 1946, and it was well received. The Times enthused: “The old-style sports cars with their highly tuned and therefore unreliable engines, harsh springing and complete lack of driver comforts bear no comparison with the Healey. Here we have a softly sprung model that holds the road like a leech, a very fast car that can still trickle through traffic smoothly and quietly.”
Getting production organized took a while, with the first Westland roadsters in October 1946 and the Elliott saloons a few months after that.
These early Healeys did not take the world by storm. With 101 Elliott saloons and 64 Westland roadsters produced between 1946 and 1950, they were effectively hand-built, and suitably expensive. The Elliott cost £1,750 before the punitive U.K. purchase tax and £2,723 including it. In today’s dollars, that translates to $94,000 outside the U.K. or $150,000 for U.K. purchase. The body design was very swoopy for 1946, but somewhere between weird, cute and “only a mother could love” by modern standards. It was, however, the first “modern” sporting saloon of the post-war era, and for a while at least, the fastest production saloon in the world. The only real option to buy in those early days was the Bristol 400, an English-built BMW 327 clone. Jaguar didn’t restart production until later.
A historic Healey
Within the particularly quirky market subcategory that likes this sort of car, the Elliotts are particularly collectible. It is a strictly European, mostly British market that reveres the early post-war development of the sporting cars and Healey’s importance to it. There is not a lot of vintage racing to be done with them because they are so rare, but vintage rallies and prestige events are great fun. This car in particular, having entered and won its class in the 1948 Mille Miglia, is a guaranteed entry in today’s 1000 Miglia, and probably a fun ride there as well.
Trying to establish a market valuation for these early cars is a challenge. The Bristol 400 was the only real British alternative until 1948, when Jaguar started production, Frazer Nash and Aston Martin didn’t get going until 1950. Alfa Romeo’s 6C 2500 and Maserati’s A6 1500 are beautiful, more sophisticated and more expensive, but not as fast and not British. In this situation I think we have to trust the market. This unique and historic example of the earliest post-war British sporting saloon was auctioned at the Goodwood Revival, where it was most likely to receive attention from interested parties. Fairly bought and sold.
