Peter Westbury (26 May 1938 – 7 December 2015) was a British racing driver from England.
He participated in two World Championship Formula One Grands Prix, scoring no championship points. In 1969 he raced a Formula 2 Brabham-Cosworth, driving in his first Grand Prix in the 1969 German Grand Prix. He finished ninth on the road, fifth in the F2 class. The following year he failed to qualify for the 1970 United States Grand Prix driving a works BRM, after an engine failure.
Early in his racing career he campaigned a homebuilt special called the M.G.W., graduating to a Cooper-Climax in 1960 which was later fitted with a Daimler V8 engine. Westbury won the British Hill Climb Championship twice, in 1963 and 1964. In 1963 he drove the self-built Felday, with supercharged Daimler V8 2.6-litre motor. The following year he won in the 2.5-litre Climax-engined Ferguson P99 with four-wheel-drive, on loan from Ferguson Research Ltd. Westbury also drove the Ferguson P99 in the 1964 Brighton Speed Trials and at the First International Drag Festival, a series of six events held in England that year, where the car covered the standing-start quarter mile in 11.01 seconds. He also drove a Lotus 23-BRM sports car at the Drag Festival.
During 1965 Westbury developed the Felday-BRM 4 sports car with four-wheel-drive. The car won on its debut at Brands Hatch on Boxing Day, 26 December 1965, driven by Mac Daghorn. At Mallory Park on 13 March 1966, Peter Westbury and Mac Daghorn shared the car, each winning a race. Jim Clark raced the Felday 4 in the Guards Trophy at Brands Hatch on 29 August 1966. The Felday 5 sports car was fitted with a 7-litre Ford Galaxie engine and four wheel drive, but only raced briefly. The Felday 6 was a 4.7-litre Ford-powered hillclimb single-seater, with rear wheel drive, built for Tony Griffiths.
In 1967 Westbury raced a Brabham-Ford Formula Three car in England and in Continental Europe. He won the F3 race at the Silverstone circuit on 29 April, the Grand Prix des Frontières at Chimay on 14 May, and also at the Auvergne Trophy meeting on 18 June 1967, on the daunting Clermont-Ferrand circuit in France. The same year he resuscitated the old BRM P67 four-wheel-drive F1 car, designed by Mike Pilbeam in 1964, for David Good to campaign in the British Hill Climb Championship. The car led the series at the half-way mark, but then passed into the hands of Peter Lawson, who revamped it for 1968. The car was a dominant winner of the series in 1968. Info from Wiki
Peter Westbury – Champion of the hills
The resurgence of interest in hill-climbing can be attributed, in part at least, to the interesting diversity of machinery taking part. For many years, the ‘A level’ of hill-storming centered on one type of car, first the supercharged ERA, and later the blown Cooper 1100. One-marque domination is never a good thing if it is maintained for long, and happily we are now going through a period of interesting experimentation, involving large and smalf-engined ex-circuit single-seaters, special sprint cars, and even hot developments of go-karts.
From all these entries, the one which has made the most impact on the hills has been Peter Westbury’s Felday-Daimler, a car which has taken 25-year-old Westbury to an exciting victory in this year’s RAC Hill Climb Championship, after a dose-fought strugglewith the ‘old master’, Tony Marsh.
Westbury’s leap into the limelight has been a spectacular one. His hill-climbing started modestly enough with an MG special, three seasons ago, then he took time off for a few months racing on the Continent with an Elite. Then, last year, he was back on the hills, and making quite a name for himself with a Daimler-engined Cooper, and it was because of the promise shown by this car that he decided to build a lighter chassis to carry the Daimler V8, for a serious onslaught in 1963.
The Felday-Daimler took less than 11 weeks to build-work started on January 19 this year, and the car was a runner on April 4. The name Felday, incidentally, was chosen because it was the old name for the Surrey village of Holmbury St Mary, where Peter Westbury lives, and where he runs Felday Engineering, a small company specializing in tuning Daimler engines for competition use. Those were busy weeks for Westbury, and for Rupert Kosmala, who joined him part-way through the construction, and is now a full-time employee of Felday Engineering.
The Felday is a compact, yet quite roomy car, based on a spaceframe of mainly 1 inch and 3/4-inch mild steel tube, shot-blasted andstove enameled, and weighing some 81 pounds. From the front as far back as the cockpit diaphragm it is Lotus 20? but from the diaphragm to the rear it is completely original. The engine is mounted at seven points, and the Lotus gearbox at a further two points.
The front suspension and steering are also made up from Lotus 20 parts, but the rear end is based on inverted Cooper Formula 1 uprights, with low-mounted bottom wishbones, single top links and radius arms. Toe-in is controlled by Heim joints on the lower wishbones.
Last year, when the Daimler V8 was installed in the Cooper, it was in a comparatively mild state of tune-little more than larger inlet valves, and polished ports and manifolds. Its output then, of around 160 horsepower, was useful enough, but obviously capable of considerable improvement.
For this season Westbury has blown the 2,5 liter unit with a Roots supercharger, running at about 8 pounds. Some time ago it was put on Heenan and Froude’s rolling road dynamometer, when it showed 173 horsepower at 5,100 rpm at the rear wheels-and the engine revs willingly to 6,500 rpm. The ignition timing was quite a long way out when the reading was taken, and when this was subsequently fixed, a dyno check was made at 3,500 rpm, when there was a 6-horsepower improvement compared with the earlier reading.
Recently, the drive from the blower has been changed from belt to chain, and this has not only improved the gearing (from 3/4 to I down to 4/5 to 1 down), but has also eliminated a certain amount of slip. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the 2 1/2-liter Daimler is now turning out around 200 horsepower at the rear wheels. It is a remarkably tractable unit, and gives its maximum torque somewhere around 3,500 to 3,800 rpm. The power build-up is smooth all the way up the scale, which makes it admirably suitable for hill-climbing, where too much wheelspin can mean the loss of those priceless hundredths of a second.
The Lotus box is one of those five-speed positive-stop units used in some of the 2 ½ liter GP cars and in the early Monte Carlos. Naturally, five gears are a needless extravagance on the hills, and in fact first is blanked off, and of the remaining four ratios, only two are used, one giving a maximum of 75 mph, and the other peaking at around 95 mph. Westbury has been surprised to find, this season, that hills of widely differing characteristics enable him to reach almost the same maximum speed, so that he has been very little bothered by gearing.
One of the reasons for Felday’s spectacular success has been its ability to really get the power through to the road. The rear engine location is virtually a ‘must’ for this sort of work, and in this case the complete package, including flywheel, clutch and supercharger, scales about 420 pounds (compared with the 456 pounds of the production Daimler V8 with all ancillaries, but without blower, of course), and this puts two-thirds of the car’s all-up weight on to the rear wheels. These, incidentally, are Coopers, whereas the front wheels are Lotus. Dunlop R6 tires are used all round-6.00 x 15s at the front and 7.00 x 15s at the rear.
Peter Westbury contrived to score a first, first time with both his MG and his Cooper, and he made it a hat-trick by scoring an overall first with the Felday on its debut at Wiscombe Park, on April 7. Its first championship appearance was at Loton Park, on April 27, when Westbury was third, and after that he scored a fifth at Prescott (his ‘bogy’ hill-he loathes it!) a second at both Wiscombe and Barbon, a ‘duck’ in the championship runs at Shelsley after the gearbox casing split, and a sixth at Bo’ness after breaking a rear upright in practice, and taking over the Cooper-Felday Daimler generously loaned by David Good. Then came the day of glory-followed and a new record at Rest and Be Thankful-followed by a similar performance at Bouley Bay, and a second place at Great Auclum (although he earlier set a new record during the class climbs). This gave him 71 championship points, to tie with Marsh (who admittedly had notched his score from fewer appearances), with Peter Boshier-Jones third with 56 points.
It was by this time clear that Peter Westbury had a fighting chance of wresting the title from Tony Marsh, who had been using two cars for his championship efforts, the 2 1/2-liter BRM and the Marsh-Climax, initially fitted with a 1 1/2-liter engine. From the August Shelsley meeting onwards, however, Marsh relied solely on the Special, which was now fitted with a 2-liter Climax engine, having sold the BRM. Westbury was absent from Shelsley, but Marsh could only manage second place for a four-point lead.
Then at Prescott, Westbury took second place, and a one-point lead, while Marsh’s car let him down, and in the final round at Dyrham Park the Felday-Daimler’s ftd and new record clinched the title for Westbury by a margin of four points over Marsh. Typical of the spirit of hill-climbing, when Westbury’s crown wheel failed at Dyrham Park his championship rivals rallied round to help him, and agreed to postpone the decisive championship climbs until the end of the meeting. An exciting end to quite a season.
from Motor Racing 1963 V10 N11 November – P390 Peter Westbury Hillclimb Champion
Software processed scan – thanks to Steve Wilkinson for the scan – sorry for some mistakes
Gallery F1 and other F2 F3
