The Cornishman, the Crash, and the Icy Alps
The old Monte Carlo Rally was a thousand-mile festival of amateur lunacy contested by heroic men and women in tweed. And in 1931, the most heroic and magnificently stubborn of them all was a quiet Cornishman named Donald Healey, who won the thing in a car that was, for the final and most crucial part, completely and utterly broken.
Healey, who would later inflict the Austin-Healey upon an unsuspecting world, turned up with a brand new 4½-litre Invicta S-Type. It weighed 1.5 tons dry and had all the rally credentials of a garden shed. The rally's rules were beautifully simple: pick a starting city from a list, then drive through the frozen hellscape of Europe in January to reach Monaco. Naturally, Healey chose to start from Stavanger, Norway, because apparently driving across a continent in winter wasn't quite challenging enough
A Very, Very Long Way to Go
For days, Healey and his co-driver, Lewis Pearce, wrestled the enormous Invicta south, battling through the frozen darkness of Scandinavia and the icy roads of Germany.
The big British car was performing magnificently, its huge engine thumping away reliably. By the time they reached the relative warmth of southern France, they were, unbelievably, in the lead. The sunshine, champagne, and glory of Monte Carlo were just a short, easy drive away. And that’s when it all went spectacularly wrong.
Having a Monumental Crash
Somewhere near Lyons, the Invicta found a patch of ice. It sent the big car into a spin, and it slammed backwards into a wall. The axle was bent, the chassis was twisted, and, most alarmingly, the rear brake lines had been severed. For any normal human being, this was the end of the rally.
But Donald Healey was not a normal human being. He was a gifted engineer with a Cornishman's ingrained refusal to be beaten. Instead of weeping, he got out his biggest hammer. He and Pearce somehow battered the chassis and axle back into a shape that was, if not straight, at least pointing in the right direction. The bigger problem was the brakes. He had no rear brakes at all. His solution was simple: he hammered the severed pipes flat to stop the hydraulic fluid leaking out. He now had front brakes only. A terrifying prospect in a giant car on an icy mountain.
The Final, Terrifying Push
They pressed on. Ahead of them lay the most difficult part of the entire rally: the treacherous, snow-covered mountain passes of the Alps. What followed was a drive of such immense, buttock-clenching bravery that it is difficult to comprehend. Healey wrestled this bent, overpowered, half-broken monster over the mountains, using the front brakes, gearbox and a prayer to slow down.
When they finally limped down into Monte Carlo, exhausted and in a car that looked like it had been in a train crash, they assumed they had lost. And then came the astonishing news. Despite everything, they had held on to their lead and won. It was a victory of such magnificent, bloody-minded determination that it instantly cemented Donald Healey's reputation as one of the greatest drivers of his generation. He had beaten the Monte Carlo Rally into submission with a broken car and sheer bloody-mindedness.