Page 23 - Sample pages "Kim: A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber" by Jon Pressnell

‘OFF-THE-PEG’ RACING AND THE
START OF RECORD-BREAKING
It was in 1931 that Kimber made the first step in a defining expansion of the company’s activities: the construction of specialist racing models in small numbers, for sale to the general public. It was an innovation to be able to buy at a relatively modest price an ‘off-the-peg’ competition car, and this would make a major contribution to establishing the marque’s reputation. An experimental department would be set up at Abingdon to develop and prepare the cars, but Kimber showed proof of his astuteness in that these special M.G.s and the services of the racing department, as it soon became, would be financed by those who bought and raced the cars.
The first of these special models, the C-type or Montlhéry Midget, was announced in March 1931, at a starting price of £490, all nuts and bolts split-pinned and wired and with the car ready to hit the track. Available in both supercharged and unsupercharged form, the C-type had a more highly tuned engine, reduced in capacity to 746cc to fit into the under-750cc racing class, and an all-new chassis. When tested by The Autocar a supercharged example (price £575) recorded 87.8mph over the half-mile, an impressive figure for a road-equipped sports car of such small capacity.
The first 14 customer cars were hurriedly built for the 1931 Double-Twelve race, and in a masterful publicity coup were handed over en masse to their owners at the Brooklands track in time for practice, having been driven down in convoy from Abingdon. Kimber personally delivered one of the cars, and when one of the batch had to be fitted with a new engine he himself did the running-in by driving the car for 400 miles during the night3.
3 As recounted by Mike Allison in The Works MGs.
The C-types all aligned for the May 1931 Double-Twelve race at Brooklands. ‘These little cars formed one of the most remarkable teams ever put into a race of this sort,’ commented The Autocar. The cars ran unsupercharged. (Goldie Gardner courtesy Mike Jones)
177 Chapter Eight: Sailing, Racing and a New Six-cylinder Car
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