Australia's Elfin sports and racing cars

de John Blanden and Barry Catford, Brooklands Books réedition 2012, 208 pages 21 x 30 cm, couverture souple, 220 photos et illustrations NB, texte anglais.

It is a little known fact that the tiny Australian company, Elfin, was the world's second largest producer/manufacturer of racing cars ever. In the late 1950s, an imaginative, modest and dedicated South Australian, Garrie Cooper, realised his dream and began building a series of sports/racing cars in his small Adelaide factory. He called them Elfin, and the subsequent history of the marque is long and illustrious. From the first Streamliners, Cooper's designs progressed through some of the most highly com­petitive sports and open-wheeler racing cars of their day, ranging from Formula Vees through to 'big banger' sports cars and the MR9 formula 5000 of the 1980s. Champion racer, John Bowe, in his foreword to this book, expresses his belief that had Cooper been based in the United Kingdom he would have been a world class designer/constructor. Certainly his cars ran with the best, both at home and overseas, and a measure of their appeal is evident in the large number that are still competing in open competition and in Historic racing here and internationally. The history of every known Elfin is covered in this book and register sheets give details of the current status of each car. The frank recollections of many who were intimately involved with the Elfin marque are fully recounted in this exhaustive history of one of Australia's great racing names. In 1982, Garrie Cooper died, tragically young at 46. After his death Tasmanian, Tony Edmondson and mechanic John Porter assumed the Elfin mantle, designing a new Formula Vee, the Crusader, and a Formula Brabham car. In 1993, the Elfin name passed to Victorian, Murray Richards, who set out to build a 'new generation' Elfin Clubman. In failing health, he in turn sold Elfin in 1998 to the enthusiastic and capable pair, Bill Hemming and Nick Kovatch, subsequently being taken over by the late Tom Walkinshaw.