SingerEleven

01

Origins

In the mid-1930s Singer stood third among Britain's carmakers, behind only Austin and Morris, and its overhead-camshaft engines gave it a technical edge over both. The Eleven carried that sophistication into the family market: a 1.5-litre ohc four in a well-appointed saloon, offered with the fluid drive of the day's fashion and trimmed a notch above its price class. Singer's Le Mans sports cars, built on the same engineering, gave the range a competition glamour few family marques could borrow. The company's weakness was commercial, not technical — too many models, too little capital — and the late thirties squeezed it hard. But the Eleven era shows why enthusiasts mourned Singer's slide: an ordinary family car with a genuinely clever engine was a rare and admirable thing.