Riley12

01

Origins

By 1939 Riley's 12-horsepower cars were being built under new ownership, the marque having spent itself into Lord Nuffield's arms the year before. The cars themselves remained thoroughly Riley: the celebrated high-camshaft 1.5-litre four, hemispherical chambers, close-ratio gearboxes, and coachwork with a sporting line that the family's engineering-first instincts had always favoured. War stopped production within months, which gives these cars their poignancy — the final expression of independent Riley thinking, built in tiny numbers as the company was absorbed. When peace came, the same engine and much of the same philosophy would reappear in the RM series, the cars most people now think of as the classic Rileys. The 1939 12s are their direct parents: rarer, more austere, and mechanically almost identical.