Robert Horne's Golden Dream
Interview by: Eric Dymock. Extracted from Sunday Times Supplement May 1990

The former chairman of Home’s outfitters has a driving ambition: to restore and run a 61 year old car that was once the fastest and most beautiful thing on earth.

Above, The 'Golden Arrow' reached 231mph in 1929.  Below left, Henry Segrave stepping out of the cockpit of  Golden Arrow at Daytona beach after breaking the record on a  single practice run with an average speed of 231.44mph in  March 1929. Below right, Segrave waits in the cockpit  preparing for a run.
Specifications  Length: 8.43 metres  Engine: 930-horsepower, 24-litre, Napier Lion aeroengine The  massive 24-litre power plants used by Golden Arrow signalled  the latest thinking in land speed record chasing and set the  standard for others to follow. The use of super powerful  aircraft engines put an end to serious attempts by others who  were struggling to gain horsepower out of the oversized large  car engines of the day.  Design: Golden Arrow, conceived by masterful auto designer  J S Irving, is often considered to be the most beautiful of land  speed record cars with its Flash Gordon space age looks. It  even featured a telescopic sight mounted on the long bonnet to  help Segrave 'aim' the car at the finishing post. Featured  massive & robust 18-inch servo-assisted disc brakes.

I went to see the restoration of one of the finest monuments to British technology— Sir Henry Segrave’s 1929 land speed record car, Golden Arrow. Last autumn a sponsor was ready to secure the rehabilitation of this sadly overlooked marvel, But the economic climate changed, interest rates climbed, and the go ahead never came.

Yet even if the start of the restoration has had to be postponed, Golden Arrow must run again. Britain's record cars have been badly neglected. Other vehicles have been brought back to working order, but these historic pieces of engineering have been allowed to decay.

In the Twenties and Thirties, the land speed record represented what the space race was to the Seventies, and drivers such as Segrave, who drove Golden Anow at 231mph in 1929, were reaching out to the limits of knowledge. They were the astronauts of their time, on the outer edges of technology, risking their lives to reach new frontiers. They really believed they were helping the development of ordinary cars. They put their faith in designers like I. S. Irving, who had created Segrave’s Sunbeam racing cars. Irving was a very innovative and technically able engineer, who made use of wind tunnels and learned a lot from the aircraft industry.

Golden Arrow was years ahead of its time in all sorts of ways. The underside was designed like an aircraft wing in reverse, to ‘suck’ itself on to the ground at the 250mph of which it was theoretically capable. When this aerodynamic ‘ground effect’ was reinvented in the Seventies for racing cars, everybody thought they had discovered something new, but it was generating about 450 lbs of down-force in 1929.

In another radical application of aerodynamics, Irving moulded the car round the profile of the engine and the driver so tightly that the frontal area was a mere 11 square feet. It made a hole in the air not much bigger than a full-sized saloon car, but it had the power of a Schneider Trophy aeroplane.

The years have not been kind to Golden Arrow, even though it did no more than about 50 miles under its own power. It went twice from the team’s headquarters to Daytona Beach, Florida, and back again after setting the record on March 1, 1929. The travelling and exhibitions in the years that followed did more damage than the record runs.

Golden Arrow was donated to the National Motor Museum Trust at Beaulieu by Castrol in the Sixties, and it has been one of the star exhibits ever since. The museum did enough restoration to put the car on show, but there were never enough resources to get it running. Now I have worked out plans with Beaulieu to run it again.

I set up the Golden Apple Trust for the restoration, preservation and demonstration of historic sporting and combat machinery. The rehabilitation of Golden Arrow is our first key objective — and it is an extensive and expensive project.

The broad arrow Napier Lion Schneider Trophy engine has not been run since 1929. We don’t know what condition it is in. It was filled with oil to inhibit rust, but over 60 years, deteriorating oils can create as many problems as they solve.

Dummy wheels were fitted at some stage, with lorry tyres buffed down to look like Segraves's tread-less ones. New wheels will have to be made, and the bodywork needs refurbishing, including finding the exact gold finish applied when the car was completed in the old KLG works, which is still there, in Putney Vale, London.

The rear axle will have to be reconstructed. The transmission is missing. Golden Arrow had a very complex multi-plate servo-assisted clutch which will have to be remade from drawings. The propeller shafts have also disappeared; there was one each side of the driver, and they will have to be made again, using data from a paper that Irving presented to the Royal Institute of Automobile Engineers in 1929.

This is an absolutely key document. It was turned up by the Beaulieu archives and it is superbly detailed. Besides the technical calculations, it shows that Golden Arrow cost £11,559 15s 4d to build in 1929. Now, 61 years later, the Golden Apple Trust is seeking to raise half a million pounds to rebuild it.