Sydney Allard is best known as the father of a British car company that made its name by taking a well engineered British chassis and stuffing it full of whatever American V8 they could shove in it. Allard had the jump on Shelby by a decade.

What many people fail to realize is that Sydney Allard was basically the guy who brought drag racing to England. He championed the sport and built what were recognized as the fastest and best constructed dragsters in Europe for a time in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

We’re going to pick up his story in 1946 with the forming of the Allard Motor Company. Allard’s company would go on to hand build nearly 2,000 cars in the course of its lifespan and spawn imitators and admirers all across the globe. Allard scored his first notable success in 1949 by winning the British Hill Climb Championship in a special model he called the Steyr. It was a formula that would bring Allard great success and acclaim. He built the car and for this particular model sourced and Austrian built Steyr motor that displaced just shy of four liters. The motor made 140hp and combined with Allard’s skills behind the wheel made for a nearly unbeatable setup.

Allard was soon producing several different models of cars but for our purposes we’ll keep our eyes on the performance J model. In 1950, a 331ci Cadillac-powered J2 carried Allard to a third place overall finish at LeMans which was then, as it is now,  the most significant sports car race on Earth. His rumbling V8-powered racer was beaten only by the exotic French Talbots.

Although many of the earlier J2 models shipped with Ford flathead motors, the overhead-valve Cadillac V8 was an instant hit as were early Chrysler Hemi powered cars. These cars developed a strong following here in the states during the ‘50s because wrenching on them did not require you to know a guy names Pierre or Mario. They were the perfect split between high-brow sporty car and knuckle-dragging hot rod. Allard sold far more J2s in the States than in Europe.

Some small details that added to the car’s success were the big aluminum Alfin drum brakes, a rigid tube chassis, and a neat De Dion rear axle that really kept the narrow rubber planted on the track.

Allard’s other major hot rodding contribution came in 1960 as he purchased a blown, Hemi-powered dragster from Moon Equipment in California in order to showcase drag racing in the UK. The one problem is that no one else bothered to build anything for him to run due to the exorbitant cost involved so he was basically relegated to making solo runs.

Undeterred, he formed the British Drag Racing Association. Mickey Thompson and Dante Duce came to England to run Allard in 1963 and the match races around the country drew huge crowds to watch the action. Duce ran a Chevy-powered rail borrowed from Dean Moon and had publicly challenged Allard to the Trans-Atlantic match races. Allard’s car was no slouch as he and Duce traded blows across the country, with Duce coming away with the overall bragging rights as Allard’s car broke the blower at the final meet of the trip.

His biggest accomplishment was teaming up with Wally Parks to put on the 1964 and 1965 British Drag Fests, events that drew the stars of American Drag Racing to the UK and really catapulted the popularity of the sport. Crowds of over 20,000 people showed up to see Don Garlits, Tommy Ivo, Tony Nancy, KS Pittman, Ohio George, and a host of other racers. At the final of the six Drag Fest events, held at Blackbushe, over 30,000 people showed up. Ivo beat Garlits on a hole shot for the win at that event.

Finally, Allard noting that the expense of getting into the sport was the biggest impediment to its growth in England, designed and built a dragster that he was planning on selling to the public as a kit. It was called the Dragon and was based on tube dragster chassis, powered by a common 1500cc Cortina engine with a Shorrock blower. He was planning on selling the kits for 600 British pounds. Test runs reveled the car to run in the low 12s out of the box.

Sadly, Sydney Allard died on April 12, 1966, the day after the opening of  Santa Pod, the first purpose-built dragstrip in England. Fittingly, it was one of the biggest events to date for drag racing in England and several Allard Dragons were in competition that day.

Sydney Allard is a gearhead guy you should know because he was one of the first guys to show that horsepower knows no geographical boundaries. He was a tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking, dignified, British hot rodder. How cool is that?