If you’ve followed this story you’ll
know just how important it was for ASC131, my father’s old car to be re-allocated its original number. Since locating and then buying and importing the Frazer Nash/BMW this is the thing that really worried me most about the process - dealing with the DVLA.
I don’t need to tell you how important this was. The iconic picture of ASC131 ascending the Bo’ness hillclimb at speed, the grainy pictures of that car - my father’s car, pictures of which I carried in my wallet for so many years, they’re all tied together by that registration number. If I couldn’t get that number I’d feel mighty angry, and frustrated - because surely this car, and that number belong together.
Our submission to the DVLA not only had the assessment from the BMW Historic Owners Club technical officer, Mark Garfitt, confirming the car’s originality, but it also had the Frazer Nash Archives authenticated copy of page 790 of the AFN service records, (AFN were the sole distributors of the Frazer Nash/BMW in the UK).
For me, this document is absolutely fascinating, and here’s why.
I bought Denis Jenkinson’s ‘From Chain Drive to Turbocharger’ some time ago - interested primarily in the Porsche element of this story about AFN, the first Porsche UK distributors. As I got more into the business of finding my father’s old Frazer Nash/BMW, the early days of the company became increasingly relevant.
I learnt the story, from Jenkinson’s book, that Frazer Nash’s had always done well in the great European rally - The Alpine Trial, when for several days, individual drivers, and teams of cars from several countries fought it out around the great Alpine passes, to win the team Alpine Cup.
They’d done well that is until 1934, when everything changed, and the team of new BMW 315’s (in line V6) won the 1500cc team prize for Germany. This was of course a triumph for Germany and as Jenkinson notes in his book, Munich - and the emergent National Socialist Party, welcomed the victorious drivers back into the city.
The story goes that Managing Director H J Aldington was so impressed by this that he went back to Germany and negotiated with BMW to be able to import (and badge) these new cars and sell them in the UK as Frazer Nash BMW’s. The 319 Type 55 sports roadster that my father would later buy was the more powerful 1911cc version.
Denis Jenkinson had long been one of my heroes since my early 356 days. It was his book ‘A Passion for Porsches’ that really started my emotional journey with old Porsches.
When researching the Frazer Nash Archives for ‘The AFN Story’ Denis Jenkinson (a Frazer Nash TT replica owner himself) appears to have sorted the individual car’s build details matching them where possible with their registration numbers.
And sure enough, there on the build sheet/service record for my father’s car, Chassis 56131, is the added annotation ‘ASC131’ signed by DSJ himself! (It was also lovely that the reg number allocated in Edinburgh before the existence of the DVLA tied in with the chassis number -131).
We completed our submission with all this authenticated material, and set off to post it at a Post office in Bristol. This was the part of the process that we have absolutely no control over. We’ve done everything we could, but now we were in the hands of the DVLA. We were told that we should not expect to hear anything for up to six weeks.