Ron & Rob Gordon

AN5 - 14849 or TFR 1 or 7080AC

[The above identification numbers were, after Sebring, also put on to another Sprite which took part in the Alpine Rally, then on to yet another which was sold in September 1960 to Jack Wheeler]

Believed to be the car Stirling Moss drove at Sebring in 1960 when he achieved a class win & 2nd overall in the 4 Hours race.

Donald Healey Motor Company prepared just a single Sprite for the Sebring 4 hours in 1960. The car was entered in the 1000cc GT class for Stirling Moss and John Sprinzel to drive (though it appears John did not start and Stirling drove the whole race). Twenty-nine cars practiced and 17 of them were in the 1000GT class, the race beginning with a Le Mans start. The winning car was a Fiat-Abarth 750, driven by American, Paul Richards, which covered 57 laps of the 8.4 km circuit and Moss was just one lap behind at the end. The winner's average speed was just over 121 k.p.h.

Geoff Healey wrote in his book, "More Healeys":-

"For 1960, the organisers of Sebring introduced a four hour race for the smaller cars. This was one we could win. As the race was for GT cars, we could make only minimal alterations, using homologated equipment. We decided to enter TFR 1, our first Targa Florio Sprite*. The engine was sent to Harry Weslake at Rye for him to try to get just a little bit more power, which of course he did. To make our chances of a win more certain it was decided that we would try to get Stirling Moss to drive it..............The main opposition .... would be the twin-cam Abarth cars, whose advanced engines were capable of giving considerably more power.......We knew that our hope for a win lay in Stirling being seconds quicker than almost any other driver". "However, when the car was being driven around prior to the race, it lost water and overheated. On stripping we found that a flaw in the head casting had developed into a hole. Our alternatives were to weld the port at a point about 2 inches in from the manifold, or to fit a production head and lose power. We decided on the former and found a repair shop in Avon Park where the owner, expressing misgivings, welded the head. One inlet port now had a large bump of weld and we did not risk filing much of it off. When rebuilt the car seemed to run as well as ever, but it must have lost something at the top end"....."Stirling made one of his normal good starts but the two fastest Abarths got ahead of him. He took the lead when the Abarths pitted for fuel, but after two and three-quarter hours he had to come in for both tyres and fuel. This lost him a good two minutes to the Abarths, who did not need a tyre change. He had to make a second stop for fuel and finished a very close second".

* In "Spritely Years" Tom Coulthard states that the car used at Sebring was actually a new car modified by the Canadian distributors from parts sent out from Warwick! ?

After Sebring, Moss's then red and white race car was delivered to local BMC dealer Ship & Shore Motors of West Palm Beach (still bearing its UK registration plate 7080AC which was later applied to another car in England and raced and rallied by Jack Wheeler and Martin Davidson). The dealer subsequently sold it to Tom Bratten who entered it at Sebring the following year wearing No.9 (see photo right - note forward-hinging bonnet and go-faster stripe!). Tom Bratten retired after completing 39 laps of the 1961 4 Hour FIA GT race, the front runners achieving 59 laps of the course - Sebring Sprites finished 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th behind the two Fiat-Abarths. It is believed the car was damaged during another race at Sebring, after which it was repaired and repainted in metallic blue. Next owner Jerry Miller describes Bratten: - "Tom owned a small sports car/ race car shop in West Palm Beach called AutoTechnia. He was from Dayton, Ohio I believe. Tom was a great guy and a very knowledgeable sports car enthusiast. Unfortunately, he was a terrible businessman. He did all the work on the car while AutoTechnia was operating. The shop went broke and I believed he moved back to Ohio. I think his father had funded the entire cost of the operation and lost a lot of money. He also owned the Nassau Sprite, which I also had for a while."

In 1962 the car was sold by AutoTechnia, to J. Jerome (Jerry) Miller who tells me that he raced it for two seasons in the G-Production (Series) at SCCA events in Florida and Georgia. He won the 1963 SCCA Florida Region Championship with this Sprite. He always raced it open and with a racing screen. He later moved to Jacksonville and sold the car to an Air Force jet pilot by the name of Charlie Fritz. He learned a year later that while being towed to a race meeting the car had dropped off its trailer and had been destroyed. However this information proved to be inaccurate as the car has since re-appeared albeit in need of extensive restoration. [As mentioned above Jerry Miller also once owned the Falcon-bodied Sprite known in the States as the Nassau Sprite, which raced in the 12 Hour race that same weekend at Sebring in 1960, driven by Sprinzel and Lumkin (Moss only practiced it as he was racing a 'birdcage Maserati'). Despite suffering a blown head gasket the car soldiered on to win its class. It later raced at Le Mans.]

When Jerry owned the Moss Sprite it had a number of special features, including: "Front disc brakes, wire wheels, (?aluminium) forward-hinging hood (bonnet), close ratio transmission, Stage five engine, competition gas (fuel) filler, roll-over bar, competition seats, - it was right-hand drive with Nardi steering wheel, and had competition gauges".

Through until the early '70's Charlie Fritz and his son Tim raced 7080AC first in Florida and then East Coast SCCA events (HP). The HP logo, which is still on the side of the car, stands for the "H" Production Class which at the time was the SCCA racing class for production sports cars less than 1000cc, and London Auto Services, also still on the car, was a Northern Virginia auto service firm specializing in English cars that sponsored the Fritz' racing. Their racing with the car came to a close after another race accident following which it was put into storage. It has apparently remained with Charlie Fritz for all the intervening years and we assume he intended to re-build it some day.

Sadly Charlie Fritz died in recent years in a motor-cycle accident after which his son, Tim, decided to sell his Sprite. He offered it to a colleague Ron Gordon who had shown a lot of interest in it over the years. Ron, with his son Rob, has acquired the car, many components of which are in boxes needing restoration and re-assembly. From the recent photos one can see that the rear bodywork was extensively damaged when the car fell off its trailer.

Ron Gordon wrote on 24th Jan 2009: "We are in the depth of winter here on the East Coast (of USA) so I am able to make progress on the Sprite. There are several vintage meets this year that the Sprite competed in, in SCCA trim, so I have decided to do an interim restoration to the SCCA HP configuration before returning to the Sebring configuration. I have the engine at the machine shop. The lower end is being built to Sebring specs...flat top pistons etc. After disassembling the head I found a lump of weld in the No.3 intake (see picture, right). Could this be the repair Geoff Healey referred to making at Sebring? This head has (2) cracks in very thin areas which will be difficult to repair. In the interim I am installing a 1098 head that was used in SCCA. The bonnet was soda blasted which revealed considerable amount of damage and repeated repairs on the right fender (wing) (again see picture right). When I removed the paint it revealed layers of red (original?) white (Tom Bratten?) in addition to two shades of metallic blue paint (Jerry and the Fritz's). I imagine the restoration shop will separate the fenders from the center section to properly straighten and install new welting. The gas tank has been removed and is in excellent condition...no internal rust, residue or damage (again pictured right).

I received the following little anecdote from Verne Wheelwright who supplied the accompanying picture (towards the top right):

"Moss was a wonderful guy and a fantastic driver. I (in No.24 Fiat-Abarth 750) got lucky on the start of this race and got into the first turn ahead of Moss, who had a great reputation for Le Mans starts. He passed me on turn two and waved...with a bottle of Coke in his right hand! I just checked your site and learned something new! I watched Moss drive the Birdcage most of the day until it broke. Gearbox, I think. Didn't know he'd gotten into a Sprite for the rest of the race! [Sorry, my error, Moss only practiced the Falcon car - MEI].
We didn't get a lot of photos of the 4 hour because we had a problem with a blown head gasket. Got it fixed and finished the race. The owner of the car, Donivan McCune ran from the pits to the Esses a few times with parts, then got to drive the last five laps".

The photo mentioned above comes courtesy of: www.racingsportscars.com and my thanks also go to photographer Verne Wheelwright of www.personalfutures.net