You’ll be able to buy a new Healey 3000 sports car again soon. In January, Anglo-American outfit HFI Automotive bought the rights to use the famous name from Donald Healey’s daughter-in-law Margot and her daughters Cecilia and Kate, keepers of the Healey Automobile Consultants (HAC) flame. They will be shareholders in the new company.

HFI is headed by managing director Tim Fenna, best known for his Frontline Spridget company that builds and markets improved parts for MGs and Sprites. Former head of British Motor Heritage Brian Cameron is in the picture too, and funding is from the UK and the Middle East.

HFI says it has a prototype 3000 running and will reveal the car later this year. Early speculation suggested that it could be based on 1Automotive’s Project Tempest, a brawny sports concept with obvious Big Healey styling cues, or even the MG SV, both using Mustang V8 power, but Fenna says the car is all new – though this early rendering shows an uncanny resemblance to the Marcos TSO. It will use a steel spaceframe chassis and all-independent suspension, with a composite body. Power is from a 3-litre straight six – though not German or Japanese, Fenna was at pains to point out. A roadster is planned for later. Fenna says it’s too early to announce prices yet, but that the new car will be ‘attainable’ with ‘more special alternatives’ coming later, including a smaller, cheaper car.

Rumours of a new Healey have never completely died away since BMW showed its project Warwick concept in 2001. That had more than a touch of Z4 about it, and conspiracy theorists said this was because the Z4 was planned to be branded a Healey when BMW owned Rover Group – though the Bavarian company later admitted it had no right to use the name.

Momentum picked up again in September 2005 when the GB Sports Car Company announced it was searching for a factory in Wales or Warwick in which to build its new Austin-Healey. But it seems to have overlooked the fact that Nanjing Auto, which bought MG Rover and with which GB did a licensing deal to build MGs and Austin-Healeys, doesn’t own the rights to the Healey part of the name. This was licensed to BMC/BL by the Healey family, an agreement that expired in 1970, which is why the last Sprites were badged as Austins, not Austin-Healeys.

Comments from sports car enthusiasts on web forums show positive reactions to any new Healey project: a fervent wish that it will be built tempered by a gentle air of cynicism about what happened last time – many proposed new Brit sports cars have come and gone without troubling a showroom. The typical attitude is ‘Fantastic, but we’ve seen it all before, and they always go bust’ and ‘They’ll never make it for the money.’ One contributor said ‘I thought the new Jensen – now defunct once again – was supposed to have been the new Austin-Healey?’

Indeed, the small-volume British sports car market is littered with failures, one of the more memorable being the Jensen S-V8. Launched in 1998, it attracted 300 orders but cars only appeared in 2000 after numerous delays due to development glitches, which irritated potential buyers and ate up the budget. Jensen went under in 2002 after just 20 cars had been sold. SV Automotive took over the job of finishing the last 12 cars; there are still three left to be sold, by Oselli of Witney.

Richard Gorley, who owns one of the original 20 cars and who runs S-V8.com, says: ‘I think some of the delays were caused by the 13 partners arguing over the specifications. It was originally going to be a V6. There were a lot of spec changes and all the cars are slightly different. The original price was £42,000, but with all the options it was nearer £48,000. And they weren’t that well put together.’ Interestingly, research showed punters perceived it as a £50-60k car. Gorley commented on the new Healey project: ‘If there’s one director in charge, and he’s left to get on with it, they should be all right.’

Buyers vote with their wallets, as AC Cars found out. Maker of the iconic but basic Ford V8-powered Cobra, it stuck with the low-tech approach but tried to broaden the Cobra’s appeal by offering the CRS version with a plastic body at a bargain-basement £36,000. This obviously wasn’t what buyers wanted – especially when you could find a reasonable aluminium-bodied MkIV for similar money secondhand – and AC Cars has trailed from Malta to Alabama after packing up its Weybridge base.

Morgan has always cleverly updated its cars – under the skin at least – to keep up with the times, and adopting a mix of high-tech motor and retro styling hasn’t done it any harm with the Aero 8, launched in 2000, with help from BMW to integrate its 4.4 V8 and electronics. Though it has a bonded

extruded-aluminium chassis, it is hand built and charmingly retains wood in certain areas as this is claimed to give the best crash protection. But it’s an expensive way to build cars, and an Aero 8 starts at £62,500.
Two great British names have been revived in the recent past – Connaught and Vanwall – though the former’s car is still in development. Caterham continues to sell 500 cars a year worldwide, lightweight track stars that are in a different market to luxury roadsters.

Aside from Morgan and Caterham, there’s one major success story among independent British sports car makers: Noble, which builds a reliable 200 cars a year that start at near £50,000. A Noble manages without wind-in-the-hair motoring, retro looks or even very much heritage but seduces its buyers with a stunningly capable chassis that outperforms its Porsche and Ferrari rivals while undercutting them on price. Boss Lee Noble modestly says it has ‘conquered the specialist sports car market in five years’. He’s even just tackled the M12’s slightly kit-car looks with the Ferrari 360-esque M14, though this will cost £75k.

Anyone proposing to enter the sports car market must have one eye on the Mazda MX-5. It’s a great handler, recently revamped into Mk3 form, and it costs under £20,000. Lack of grunt is its most obvious shortcoming in this company, but if it were supercharged or turbocharged and priced at only £25k or so, it would give more expensive roadsters a very hard time. Project Tempest was going to have to do battle with the Z4, which starts at £23k – but it’s hard to see how anyone can put a low-volume, big-engined new sports car on the road for less than £35-40k – even the V6 ‘traditional’ Morgan costs £39,190. As a comparison, the last and best of the original Big Healeys, produced from 1954 to ’67, commands around £35,000 in top condition.

So the new Healey faces tough competition – not least from that Marcos – and the obvious question is, what do a couple of guys whose background is making and selling parts to fit traditional British sports cars know about building and marketing a high-tech new one? Fenna says he is basically the catalyst for making the project happen: ‘We are the driving force behind the company but we’ll be bringing in other expertise and partners whom we’ll announce through March.’ Which companies these are will dictate where the car is built. Speculation says that Banbury and its environs would be the most logical choice – either at Prodrive or the nearby former TWR site at Leafield, now run by Menard Engineering.

HFI must be certain it can succeed, and Fenna says it’s not going to run out of money. It paid ‘a seven-figure sum’ – something like £1 million, according to the rumours – for the rights to the name, which is a strong statement of intent. The project has the full support of the Healey females, who have guarded the name through the decades, and there is a great deal of goodwill towards Fenna, whom they describe as: ‘Our kind of engineer.’

Fenna and Cameron are serious about building their new car. HFI says it has already had numerous enquiries from potential buyers, and is taking £1000 deposits against the first 203 cars built. This number coincides with the speed record set by company founder Donald Healey at Bonneville
60 years ago, driving a modified Austin-Healey 100 to 203mph on the famous salt flats. The £1000 will be held in escrow and deducted from the final purchase price.

With this level of commitment and finance plus British sports car know-how and enthusiasm, and the willingness to embrace outside technology, the new Healey sports car deserves to succeed. Let’s hope the team behind it doesn’t, in finest British tradition, drop the ball like so many others who have gone before.

These are the websites to check out, though they weren’t up and running as Octane went to press: www.hfiautomotive.com and www.healeysportscars.com