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Origins
Sunbeam's 1923 Grand Prix car gave Britain a victory it would not repeat for over three decades: Henry Segrave's win in the French Grand Prix at Tours, the country's first in a grande épreuve, achieved with a twin-cam straight-six designed under Louis Coatalen's aggressively cosmopolitan engineering regime — the design owing much to Fiat's contemporary practice, a debt cheerfully acknowledged in the paddock. Sunbeam followed with supercharged versions and land-speed exploits that made the Wolverhampton marque, briefly, the most internationally successful name in British motorsport. The racing budget that bought the glory also helped sink the STD combine into receivership in 1935, a familiar equation. But 1923 stands: until the 1950s, any British schoolboy asked when Britain last won a Grand Prix answered with this car.
GP de l'ACF 1923, victoire de Seagrave sur Sunbeam en Touraine · Le Miroir des sports · Public domain
