With a little more luck, and perhaps a little less hype, Napier might have beaten Rolls-Royce in the British prestige car stakes. Although the two marques fought, head-to-head, until the end of the 1900s, Napier then fell away.
It all began when the cycling and motorcycling pioneer Selwyn F. Edge joined the company in 1900, and became Napier’s sole distributor, racing personality and arch-publicist. The first true Napier began as an engine conversion in Montague Napier’s own Panhard, producing the car in which Edge competed so successfully in the Thousand Miles trial of 1900.
Early production Napiers were twin-cylinder-engined machines, a four-cylinder type followed almost at once, and the first monstrous racing types followed in 1901. By the time Edge himself had won the Gordon Bennett Cup in 1902, and a new factory had been built in Acton, west London, Napier was on the world map. Edge persuaded Montague Napier that it should build a straight-six-cylinder model, and the Type L49 of 1904 was the world’s first successful example of that type. Convinced, Napier developed a whole series of magnificent ‘sixes’, culminating in the rare circuit racing types with engines of up to 12 litres.
The 60 hp model of 1905–10 was typical, and had a 7.7-litre side-valve engine. (Each cylinder displaced 1,279 cc, which was larger than the entire engine of the first Bullnose Morris, which would shortly arrive.) This was the third variety of Napier’s ‘sixes’, and there would be several more in the following decade.
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By later standards, of course, we would not call such a car smooth and silent, though by comparison with its contemporaries, it seemed to be so. Fitted with a distinctive new ‘water-tower’ radiator cap extension, a pressed-steel chassis frame, and a choice of magnificent formal coachwork, they were among the fastest, most costly, and most prestigious British cars on the market.
By 1908, Napier were offering a plethora of ‘sixes’ – the 4.9-litre ‘30’ and ‘40’, the 6.1-litre ‘45’, the 7.7-litre ‘60’, and the 9.7-litre ‘65’. They all used variants of the same Edge-inspired side-valve engine, most of them with shaft drive, and only with rear brakes; there was also a vast 15-litre ‘90’ for which a colossal £2,500 was asked for the chassis alone. After balancing power against grace, style against practicality, the ‘60’ was usually seen as the most desirable of all.
By the early 1910s Napier was offering far too many models from a factory which never built more than 800 cars in a year, and was overtaken in the prestige stakes by the Rolls-Royce 40/50 hp Silver Ghost. S.F. Edge moved on in 1912, and Napier’s reputation was never as high again.
The Napier ‘Six’ cars were fitted with a new ‘water-tower’ radiator cap extension. They had pressed-steel chassis frames and were among the fastest and most prestigious cars on the market. |
