Richard Woolmer and his crew at The Washroom are helping breathe new life into the classic British car scene. We caught up with them at the soft opening of C&M’s new site, The Bowl.
What scene comes to mind when you think about old British cars? Probably a sports car of some sort, an MG or a Triumph, finished in signal red or old English white. It might be parked outside a quaint country pub, or possibly on a manicured village green during a fête. There’s a chance you mentally file their owners under ‘CAMRA member’, ‘keen birdwatcher’ and ‘beard enthusiast’.
And that’s all lovely. It’s a subsector of car culture that’s pretty unique to these shores, and it means there’s a proud, dedicated audience helping keep Britain’s automotive heritage alive. Richard Woolmer, though, takes a slightly different approach.
When he and a gaggle of friends and family roll into the Yard at The Bowl, Caffeine&Machine’s new Bedfordshire venue, it’s in a delightfully mismatched, eye-catching convoy. With the exception of an interloping (but still wonderful) Mercury Comet, it’s all British-built and spanning a 30-odd year period from the 1930s to the 1960s. That’s where the similarities end, though. Richard and his crew, a collective going by the name of The Washroom, look after an incredibly eclectic fleet, running the gamut from pristine competition cars with impressive racing heritage to bonkers Frankenstein creations.
“For a living, I build classic racing cars,” explains Richard. “But in my spare time, I like to build crazy, ridiculous cars.
“It’s a family business. Me and my dad started about 10 or 12 years ago now, I think. He used to work in a big corporate firm, and had had enough of that life, I was just coming out of college, so it kind of all tied in really well.” That business, Woolmer Classic Engineering, has built up a nice little operation specialising in restoring and prepping historic racers, primarily sports cars from the 1950s and 1960s of the sort that run at things like Goodwood’s Revival and Members’ Meeting, and the Silverstone Festival.
That explains a couple of the cars Richard and his friends have arrived in, one of which is the very Lotus Cortina, replete in the iconic red and gold colours of Alan Mann Racing, that won the 1965 European Touring Car Championship, piloted by Sir John Whitmore and a gaggle of other legendary drivers including Sir Jackie Stewart. There’s also an ex-works Austin-Healey 3000 rally car, it too hailing from 1965.
Other ultra-pristine machines they’ve brought along include a totally unique prototype roadster built by the Healey Motor Company, which never saw production, and one of a tiny handful of V8-powered Ford Pilot vans left on the road.
It’s the rest of the collection where originality and concours-worthiness take a bit of a back seat. There’s the aforementioned Mercury Comet, a 1962 model belonging to Richard’s partner. The mechanicals are original but it’s lowered and proudly wears 60-plus years’ worth of weathering on its gorgeous, chrome-and-tailfin-adorned bodywork.
One of his friends has brought his thumping Chevrolet LS-powered Ford Popular drag car, which regularly runs at Santa Pod, but one of the most interesting things here comes from a manufacturer that last produced a car in 1960. This is Richard’s Armstrong Siddeley Lancaster, a car built in Coventry in the immediate post-war years.
“It started off life in the Air Force as an officer’s car, and it was bought by the chauffeur who used to drive it. He kept it his entire life, and it was then sold out of his family estate. A mate of mine bought it and went through a lot of the work recommissioning it. I bought it off him, widened the wheels, got it sitting a bit lower, put the exhaust system on it… the plan is [to lower it with] either air or hydros, but there’s five of these left in the world, so I’m trying not to do anything that’s not reversible,” laughs Richard.
Perhaps most personal to Richard, though, is the Austin A30 that sits proudly out the front of The Bowl. These almost unbearably cute little saloons were once common sights on British roads, but it seems that these days, most have been turned into historic racers, along with the slightly newer A35.
Richard’s has that look to it, but it’s really more of a show car stroke fast road build, and its creation helped him through a tough time personally. “I ended up with it after a very lairy relationship breakup. It was basically standard when we got it, and with a bit of time, we got it sitting nicely and built it up.”
The A30 originally came with the smallest, earliest 803cc version of BMC’s venerable A-Series four-cylinder, a motor that basically mobilised Britain’s masses in the 1950s and ’60s. Richard’s has been swapped out for the later 1098cc version, then head ported and fitted with twin carbs. It breaths through a custom exhaust system.
Other modifications to make it more amenable to spirited driving include a hydraulic clutch, biased pedal box, a dinky little twin-spoke Sparco steering wheel and a pair of tartan-trimmed Recaro buckets.
Then, of course, is that meticulously hand-painted black and gold John Player Special livery. “I’ve always liked that look. A lot of people point out that it’s not period correct, because the John Player Special cars were ’70s and this was a ’50s car, but I don’t think it matters.”
That last statement neatly sums up Richard’s approach to modification. His love for Britain’s motoring heritage is plain to see, but he comes at it with a fresh, interesting twist. It puts us in mind of the kind of ultra-slick, minimalist vibe that populates shows like Rollhard and Players (indeed, his cars are mainstays of both), but it’s applied to a completely different genre of cars to the ’80s and ’90s German and Japanese norm. That said, his interests aren’t exclusively rooted in midcentury British metal – he tells us of an ongoing project involving transplanting a W12 engine from a Bentley Continental GT into an FD Mazda RX-7. Because why not? “For me, it’s [about] doing something that’s never been done before. You can LS swap anything, but nobody does W12 swaps.”
This is something to be applauded. Cars like this should be an extension and reflection of their owners’ personality and interests, and if that comes at the expense of originality or period-correctness, who is anyone else to judge? Without people like Richard and the rest of the Washroom team, the automotive scene would be a much duller place.
