Many of the Alvis works competition cars of the 1920’s were dismantled for parts or broken up, and why Racing Car No.1 wasn’t became more of a mystery than the name. Indeed, Arthur Cummings, the machine shop foreman who was responsible for much of the lightening and special engine and chassis work on all three of the 1923 Racers was insistent that all of the cars had eventually been dismantled or destroyed, right up until the point at which Robert Wicksteed parked No.1 outside his house in Ascot in the mid ‘70s to prove him wrong. For whatever reason, however, a little over a month after the Brooklands victory, Racing Car No.1 was transferred to Tommy Simister, sometime racing driver and Alvis agent for Macclesfield who, alongside Harvey, campaigned the car during the spring and summer of 1924 at sprints and hill climbs around the country. This is perhaps the clue as to why the car survived – it was still very competitive: Indeed during that second summer it beat a 3 litre Sunbeam at a Southport event to win FTD.
Under private ownership (nominally at least) and at the hands of a now famous works
driver, yet bearing a much closer resemblance to the production 12/50s that were
now coming out of Holyhead road, this was a powerful advertisement for the model
on which Alvis had pinned their hopes of future survival. In the end the model prospered,
and the Marque survived. Having done it’s job, Racing Car No.1 was finally sold
on to Jack Linnell at the end of the season for £250, clearing the way for the 1924
200 miles race cars. In the interest of balance, it is also worth noting that the
No.3 car (Brayshaw’s) was stripped of the racing fairings underneath the engine and
behind the driver, exposing a lower slung but otherwise identical bolster tank, registered
as HP6145 and also raced by Harvey with some success during the same period. So
Jack Linnell, a prospering clothing manufacturer, became the second owner of No.1,
using it for everyday motoring as well as occasional racing, much in the manner one
would a race-