This year’s All-British Field Meet, scheduled for this Saturday at VanDusen Botanical Garden, will feature both the curvaceous Jaguar XK120 and the boxy Land Rover.
The two British icons of style and charm are celebrating their 70th anniversaries, and much has been written about how much each has added to an English motoring heritage of swift grace, rugged sturdiness, and plenty of jogging down to the phone box to call a breakdown truck. I highly recommend you pop on down; it’s the greatest British show on four wheels.
Further, joining the ranks of the feted this year is a much friendlier, if diminutive, face: the Austin-Healey Frogeye Sprite. You may perhaps refer to this little car as the Bugeye Sprite, but either interchangeable term is intended to be used with affection. After all, this is probably the happiest car ever made.
When is a Volkswagen Beetle too big and not cheery enough? When you’re a Bugeye Sprite. At less than 3.5 metres in length and weighing in at 650 kilograms or so, the Sprite burst onto the scene as a low-cost sportscar that offered motoring thrills to the impecunious.
The Healey in Austin Healey came from Donald Healey, a sporting chap who’d won the Monte Carlo rally multiple times in the 1930s. Healey had a reputation as a successful car designer, but most of his machines were rakish, low-slung, and a bit expensive. Not so much meant for the common man, but for the well-heeled lead foot.
With the Sprite, the intention was to cut costs to the bone, using a partnership with The British Motor Corporation to source various oily bits from existing cars. This was real penny-pinching British ingenuity, as you might have expected to come from a country that was still struggling through the hardscrabble times of the postwar period.
As an example, the Bugeye Sprite’s happy face is mostly a result of the original design being made more cheaply. The initial intent was to have headlights that flipped up, in the manner of the more-modern Porsche 928, but that was too expensive to manufacture. The fixed-place headlights were a cost-cutting measure, but one that worked.
Perhaps less practical was the removal of a rear boot lid. The Sprite was one of the first sportscars to be made with a near-unibody structure, and the solid rear skin of the car gave strength without adding weight. If you really needed to carry something, you just flopped down the seats and shoved it into the darkness, the way I occasionally kick my laundry under the bed. Oh hang on, my wife sometimes reads this column: er … the way I used to kick my laundry under the bed. Ahem.
Up front, the easiest way to get at the engine was to hinge the front section to tilt forward the same way a Jaguar E-Type does. Thus exposed, the original 948 cc four-cylinder engine looks relatively puny, and it does only make 40 horsepower.
However, having a simple and well-understood engine design meant that many Sprite owners were able to dig a little more oomph out from under the bonnet. Further, with such a low curb weight, you didn’t really need much horsepower to get the Sprite to scoot down the road with aplomb.
All this zip was available on the cheap, and the Mk I Sprite became a success. Its profile was raised when privateer teams began campaigning it in racing, and it won its class at the Alpine Rally in 1958, and the 12 Hours of Sebring endurance event in 1959. The latter featured a hardtop configuration, and moved the headlights to the mudguards.
Nearly 50,000 Sprites were sold in the first couple of years, making it the most successful of the four generations of cars. The later models all got a little quicker and more comfortable, at the expense of not quite looking like so much fun. By the late 1960s, the Sprite and the MG Midget were virtually the
same car.
But let us come back to the original to recognize that it deserves perhaps even greater accolades than the two more famous marques it shares a podium with at the 2018 ABFM. To strive for the best is admirable, but to build the most amount of excitement you can into a car on an absolute shoestring budget is becoming something of a lost art.
My prediction for the next few years is this. Fuel prices in North America will continue to stay relatively low (though perhaps not so much for Lower Mainland folks, sadly). The continuing availability of cheap credit will make average sale prices of new cars artificially high. More manufacturers will join Ford in eliminating or reducing the number of small cars they produce.
In short, the manufacturers will go where the profits are. They generally do – at least until the ground shifts and profits suddenly disappear.
Which is too bad, because a car like the Sprite is representative of the pared-down joy of motoring. Sure, in today’s traffic it doesn’t look all that safe, but imagine how much happier you would be as a pedestrian if every single hulking Range Rover and inattentively driven Highlander was suddenly replaced by a tiny frog-faced machine that looks like it should come with a wind-up key. It’d be like living in a Richard Scarry picture book.
The genius of the Sprite is that it was engineered and built at a time when it was important to provide people with the bare minimum of what they needed to get around, and then add just the tiniest dash of sweetness to it. A little power went a long way. There was no need for threatening-looking over-styling.
On the Sprite’s 60th birthday, you have to wonder how we could get back to this ideal. Obviously we can’t all have ant-sized two-seaters; if my wife doesn’t appreciate laundry lodged under the bed, she won’t like having our kids crammed into an airless space.
But we could all do more with a little less. Less speed. Less weight. Less aggression. More joy. It would be nice to see a modern Sprite embodying these ideals. For now, let’s just celebrate that this little car existed in the first place.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. If you have a suggestion for a column, or would be interested in having your car club featured, please contact him at mcaleeronwheels@gmail.com.
