A Rocket In a Garden Shed
In the gloriously amateur and often slightly unhinged world of the British specialist car industry, there has always been a fine line between bravery and madness. It’s a line that the Fairthorpe company spent its entire life happily dancing on. Having established itself with tiny, featherlight sports cars that could embarrass much grander machinery, its founder, the wonderfully named Donald "Bunty" Scott-Moncrieff, decided to have a crack at the big time. He wanted to build a car that wasn’t just a giant-killer in the corners, but one that could punch a hole in the horizon on the straights. The results were the Fairthorpe Zeta and Rockette, two machines of such magnificent, shed-built ambition that it’s a wonder they existed at all.
For years, Fairthorpe had been building its reputation on the little Electron, a car that weighed less than a wet towel and was powered by a small but feisty Coventry Climax engine. It was a scalpel, a car for slicing through corners. But Bunty, a man who clearly believed that too much power was almost enough, wanted a sledgehammer. He wanted to build a car that could take on the likes of a Jaguar or an Aston Martin, but for a fraction of the price.
The Zeta: A Racing Engine in a Road Car
His first attempt was the Zeta, and it was a masterpiece of pure, unadulterated lunacy. The plan was to take the big, lazy, six-cylinder engine from a Ford Zephyr saloon and turn it into a fire-breathing monster. To do this, he went to one of the most respected names in British motorsport: British Racing Motors, or BRM. BRM developed a hugely complex and expensive new cylinder head for the Ford engine, and Fairthorpe bolted it on, along with, in some cases, an absurd collection of up to six carburettors.
The result was a fantastically powerful and highly-strung racing engine, which was then dropped into Fairthorpe’s signature lightweight fibreglass body and tubular chassis. The Zeta was a rocket ship. It was a car that offered the sort of performance that would normally require a second mortgage, all in a package that was hand-built in a small workshop in Buckinghamshire. It was, of course, a deeply temperamental and highly-strung machine, a proper racing car for the road. And because it was so complex and expensive to produce, almost none were ever made.
The Rockette: A Simpler, Saner Solution
Having experimented with the magnificent but complicated Zeta, Fairthorpe then came up with a much simpler, and much more sensible, solution. They launched the Rockette. The recipe was the same: a lightweight fibreglass body on a simple, effective chassis. But this time, the engine was the brilliant 1.6-litre, and later 2.0-litre, straight-six from the Triumph Vitesse.
This was a genius move. The Triumph engine was smooth, powerful, and, most importantly, it was reliable and cheap. The Rockette was a proper, 100-mph-plus sports car that an ordinary enthusiast could actually afford to buy and run. It was a beautiful, raw, and wonderfully effective machine, a car that delivered on the promise of affordable high performance without the headaches of a temperamental, multi-carb racing engine.
The Unfulfilled Dream
Sadly, neither the Zeta nor the Rockette was the sales success that Fairthorpe had hoped for. The company was simply too small, too underfunded, and too eccentric to ever become a mainstream manufacturer. They were brilliant at having ideas, but not so good at the boring business of building and selling cars in large numbers. Production of these magnificent six-cylinder cars was tiny, and the company soon returned to its more familiar territory of building smaller, cheaper machines.
The story of the Zeta and the Rockette is the story of Fairthorpe in a nutshell. It’s a tale of glorious, infectious ambition from a small group of enthusiasts in a shed who dared to take on the giants. The cars were magnificent, flawed, and fantastically exciting glimpses of what was possible when you threw common sense out of the window and simply built the fastest, most exciting car you could imagine.