Alta Car and Engineering Co. Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey 1931 - 1954

The company was founded by Geoffrey Taylor who was one of those inventive and dedicated Englishmen who was following the tradition of the gifted amateur when he started building cars in his father's stables in 1928.

His first car was based around his own ambitious 1074cc engine design which used an aluminium cylinder block and hemispherical cylinder head with the valves operated by twin shaft driven camshafts. The chassis was from the little ABC light car with leaf springs. It was capable of about 85mph or less reliably 110 when supercharged. Replicas competed in races, sprints and rallies and one took the class record for the Brooklands Mountain Circuit in 1934.

The company also made tuning equipment to help finance the car production and one of the more popular accessories was an aluminium cylinder head for the Austin Seven.

In 1935 two further models were available with the engine capacity enlarged to 1496cc and 1961cc. The camshaft drive was also modified for chain drive.

For 1937 new chassis were constructed using sliding pillar independent suspension and coil springs all round which gave a useful reduction in weight. When supercharged the power output was in the region of 180bhp and many competition successes resulted in the hands of private entrants. These included George Abecassis, Beadle, R. Cowell, R. Eccles, Sammy Davis, George Hartwell, H. Hunter, Robin Jackson, Charles Mortimer Miss D. Stanley-Turner, J. Wakefield and E. Winterbottom. A number of friends bought roadgoing versions and one was Geoffrey Last who was a well known pilot and won the King's Cup Air Race in 1935 at 176mph, made a record flight from Lympne to Cape Town in 3 days 17 hours 37 minutes in 1936.

During the Second World War the company survived on prototype work and the manufacture of aeroplane parts.

In 1945 another ambitious "G P" car project was announced. The chassis was designed to use rubber suspension because of it's light weight and self damping capacity. The 1500cc engine was a completely new design with aluminium crankcase and cylinder head above a cast iron "meehanite" cylinder block to take the strain of the two-stage supercharging. There were various delays before the car finally appeared in 1948 largely due to a lack of finance. The cost of development was too much for a small firm and even though George Abecassis tried very hard to maintain the momentum the car was plagued with minor problems.

More successful was the 2 litre version of the engine running unsupercharged in John Heath's Formula 2 HWM team with complete reliability.

In 1951 the "GP" chassis was fitted with the Formula 2 engine and in 1952 a lighted and improved version was available, but it was never successful. With the engine enlarged to 2.5 litres unsupercharged for the new Formula 1 in 1955 another car was constructed but never left the works.

However the engine had attracted the attention of other British Formula 1 contenders as there was a shortage of suitable units available at this time and Connaught, from just along the Portsmouth Road at Send, used it to great effect when Tony Brooks won at Syracuse in 1955 to give the first all British Grand Prix win since Henry Seagrave in the 1920's.