Britain's first F1 Champion cut his racing teeth in a 16-year-old Riley Imp, and you might say it's been in the family ever since.

Tim Ely (left) and Tribute Site Manager, Tony Bailey, on the Members Banking at Brooklands with Mike Hawthorn's Riley Ulster Imp... In Challenge me the Race, Mike recounts how he was thrilled "to watch the cars thundering round those towering cliffs of concrete where the banking curved under the Members Bridge".

Tim Ely is one of the most generous, kind, and perceptive individuals you will ever meet. "I have always found" Tim says as the lunch crockery is being cleared away, "that the best thing for anyone faced with driving an unknown car is to be given some basic instruction, and then left alone to sort things out for themselves". Five minutes later, I am seated in Tim's irreplaceable Riley Ulster Imp, the very car in which his friend Mike Hawthorn, legendary World Champion of 1958 and Britain's very First, started his automobile racing career, and Tim is saying "remember, this switch is fuel and this is magneto and this is the starter, and we'll see you back at the Barley Mow." Big smile, cheery wave, walking away. "You'll be fine. 'Bye now!" It is just beginning the rain, and the only thing I can remember at this particular moment is that Hawthorn himself once said the car would swap ends in the wet in a heartbeat...

The Barley Mow at Tilford, one of Mike Hawthorn's regular watering holes

But I digress. The day has started out with a rendezvous of all concerned at the Barley Mow public house in Tilford, and for two reasons. Reason One: it's easy to find Tilford, and easier still the Barley Mow; it is the archetypical Olde English pub on the village green, cricket pitch and all, and essentially unchanged since the 50's. Reason Two: no story about the cars, people or places from the early life of John Michael Hawthorn would be complete without it. JMH and the likewise motoring-mad friends of his youth were regulars there, along with most of the other pubs in and around the town of Farnham, Surrey.

More importantly perhaps, they were also regulars on the roads between them, and it's probably no coincidence that none of the favourite spots was more than a reasonable "lap" away from another. In fact, when Tim and the Riley arrived in Tilford, photographer Paul Harmer was off on a tour of the road to the Frensham Pond Hotel, a rolling, narrow, hump-backed country lane, with another one of those motoring-mad friends, Tom Mayhew. "Lots of evenings would start at the Pond" Tom said, "before we moved on to the Barley Mow." He paused, a bit sheepishly, "Now, there wasn't much other traffic on the road then, so we used to have a bit of a time trial on the section that leads back to the main road — and Mike was always the quickest."

Mike wasn't always driving something so appropriate to the task, either; there was a long-suffering Fiat Topolino early on, followed by a Riley 9 Monaco saloon with front doors that had to be tied shut with rope. Tom remembers it also had another special JMH modification. "We were all keen on flying as well, and Mike's Monaco had a toilet chain hanging from the rear view mirror. He called it his turn and bank indicator."

In October 1949, however, six months before Mike's twenty-first birthday, his father Leslie bought this 1934 Ulster Imp, KV 9475. Ulster Imps were pretty potent 1100cc club racers in their day — Tim calls them "the Lotus Seven of the 30's"--and KV was a former works car. It finished 12th overall and 3rd in class at the '34 Le Mans in the hands of French drivers Jean Trévoux and René Carriére. Initially, JMH used it on these very roads, but when the engine started hammering, Leslie decreed that KV be rebuilt as a dedicated competition mount for Mike's anticipated debut.


The original Ulster Imp lubrication chart, sent to Mike Hawthorn at the Tourist Trophy Garage in 1950

Leslie Hawthorn was no mean hand with a spanner, his Tourist Trophy Garage in Farnham was well known at pre-war Brooklands, and he did some club racing himself. He therefore knew his business, and when he finished the engine, KV was also converted from cable brakes to hydraulics.

The Imp was completed in time for the Brighton Speed Trails of September 1950, and Mike won his class, first time out. Two weeks later, in his only other 1950 outing, Mike placed second in class at the Gosport Speed Trials. And when he took it to the Gamston aerodrome for his first crack at circuit racing on Easter weekend of 1951, he won his class there as well. All in all, Mike Hawthorn had raced KV 9475 eleven times by early '52, winning seven times, and finishing on the podium the other four. During the same period, he also won seven 1500cc events with Leslie's Riley TT Sprite.

Then he moved up quickly, becoming a Formula Two sensation in only his second full season, signing with Ferrari for his third, and in 1958, won that glorious World Championship. He retired at the end of the year, settled into Farnham to run the family garage, and in January 1959, died in a highway accident. It happened, as Mike likely would have preferred if needs must, on a road near Farnham, and he is buried in the town cemetery.

Parked up by Tilford Green with Tim and Tom, though, the Mike Hawthorn who raced D-Types and F1 Ferrari Dino's hardly gets a mention. The Mike Hawthorn they like to talk about is the mate from Farnham who loved a laugh, and was lucky enough to get paid for driving racing cars. The same Mike who once swapped an evening in his brand new Jaguar for a ride on Tom's old Aeriel: "It's been ages since I've ridden a motor bike. How about you take the Jag, and I'll ride your bike." The Mike who tagged along as the fifth wheel on a double date they had with two sisters, and once almost drove Tim's road Imp into the hedge because he forgot that all Imps didn't stop like his racing Ulster.

It might even be that Tim's road Imp caused JMH to reacquire KV 9475. After Mike graduated to greater things, Leslie sold KV, but when it appeared in the Motor Sport classifieds in 1957, Mike bought it back. At the time of his death, KV was completely stripped for restoration; Mike intended to put it on display in the showroom.

Three months after the accident, in April 1959, word went around that Mike's mother wanted to sell it again; indeed, there was already an offer on the table. The offer was from another of the circle of friends, and it was £75 — Tim immediately doubled it. When Mrs. H. accepted, he nipped around quick to the TT before she could change her mind (Mrs. H. having then had about enough of anyone remotely connected to motorcars); with the help of some friends, he reassembled what he could, scooped up the rest, and dragged the whole lot home in one day.

Mike Hawthorn's Riley Ulster Imp just after Tim got it home in 1959...

"I had been looking for something to race with the VSCC, and being a Riley man, this seemed a good opportunity. I suppose I didn't attach a huge importance to the fact it was Mike's car; I didn't really realize I was buying something that had any historical significance. I just wanted to go racing."

Which is exactly what he did. The Riley went back together as a racing car, not a display piece, and during Tim's initial reassembly and at every turn in the almost 50 years since, he has stuck to the original TT Garage philosophy of gradual but constant development. It would have pleased Mike: he never owned a car he didn't tinker with, and some of the upgrades now on the Imp were his idea in the first place.

"Mike and I were talking one day and we got onto the pre-selector gearbox lever on the steering column, and how he had over-revved the engine a couple of times when he went over a gate too far. And he said what he really would like is a gear change in the traditional manual box position, just to left of one's knee. I thought about it and concluded, well, if that's what Mike would like, I'd like it as well. So I came up with a sketch and made a fairly simple arrangement to mount it straight on the gearbox."


Through the 60's and into the 70's, the Imp was raced and hill climbed hard and often, and there's an impressive stack of tinware in Tim's house to prove it. The schedule is a little less hectic now; KV went through a complete restoration a few years ago and spends a good part of its winters in the Brooklands Museum. But there are still hill climbs and speed events in the summer, and seeing as KV's fastest times recently are at the hands of Tim's son David, rumours of the old Riley's retirement would seem to be premature.

Unless, of course, I whack it into little bitty pieces against a lorry in the rain. Right, everything else is done; we've seen the old TT Garage (now a carpet store), the Duke of Cambridge around the corner (now a Thai restaurant), and snapped photos outside the bar of the Bush Hotel in the town centre (still there, thank God, and doing quite well). We've had lunch at the Bull, where JMH once had lodgings, and we've even paid our respects to Hawthorn's Garage, last trustee of the family name, and benefactor of the JMH gravesite. Nothing left but the driving impressions, the cautious, circumspect, wet driving impressions, on the way back to the Barley Mow...

From tickover, then: move the pre-selector lever to first, release the fly-off handbrake, push the clutch pedal, and as you let the pedal return, it starts to bite...and away we go. Immediately move the gear lever to second, watch the huge, jiggly, mechanical rev counter, and somewhere around 4K or so, push in the clutch pedal again. When the pedal catches on its way back up, presto, you're in second: repeat as needed. The engagement is far smoother and more progressive than I thought it would be, and best of all, the rain has blown through with only a few drops on the windscreen. This is going to be fun.

Mike Hawthorn's Riley Ulster Imp on the Members Banking at Brooklands

Slowly around the edge of Farnham and onto the Tilford Road, gaining confidence (and speed...) all the way. The brakes feel great, almost modern, but the inside front wheel will cry if they're trailed into even the slightest corner. The steering is almost insanely quick, and the beam axles bounce alternating ends of the car off the ground when so much as a pebble stands proud of the tarmac. There's an impertinent bark from the exhaust, the straight cut gears howl like a werewolf, and the Brooklands screen blocks just enough wind to keep your eyeballs in their sockets. It is direct, elemental, sensitive and absolutely marvellous, and quite frankly, I think a race or two in Mike Hawthorn's basic trainer would do most of today's racing drivers a world of good.

A pint and a laugh at the Barley Mow wouldn't hurt a few of them, either.



Thanks to... Dale Drinnnon and Octane Magazine, Charles Barton of the Barley Mow, Diane Vasey of The Bush Hotel, and Carl Obert of the Farnham Herald.