It was a great disappointment to me not to have seen his first attempt at motor-racing, but Mary, who was born on the anniversary of Harry’s start to fly the Atlantic, and named after the boat which subsequently saved him, being a few days old, I was reluctantly compelled to stay at home and be contented with watching them set out in the car in the morning, receiving my reward when just after tea they all returned home bubbling with pride.
This new form of speed had got well hold of Harry, and he filled in the time before the next meeting, at which he was to drive the new 450 h.p. Sunbeam racer, the largest car in the world, by tuning up his own 12-cylinder Sunbeam. Stripping the car of all unnecessary equipment—lamps, mudguards, wind-screens, etc.—he attained, after much “changing of jets” and general tuning, a speed of 107 miles per hour with a four-seater touring body. Shedding about half the rubber off a front tyre, high on the banking at nearly 100 miles per hour, causing a series of tremendous skids out of which it did not seem possible to straighten successfully, did not deter him, for he seriously contemplated having the car properly streamlined. Luckily the 450 h.p. Sunbeam got down to Brooklands, and after a run on her Harry brought our Sunbeam home, spent an evening tightening up the body everywhere and replacing all the impedimenta. He also ordered new tyres, saying that, after all, a car only capable of under 110 miles per hour was only fit for a touring car, and so ended its racing career.
On June 26th, the B.A.R.C. held their Midsummer Meeting, at which the 450 h.p. Sunbeam was to make its début.
The car not having arrived down from Wolverhampton until late in the week, Harry decided to give it a lap or two on the morning of the meeting. Accordingly he set out early on his Ford, and I was to follow later with the Sunbeam. We arrived at the gate and, the congestion being so great, we were held up for some time in the “queue.” During the wait someone coming on foot from the paddock shouted across to some people in a car near us, “Hawker’s crashed on the Sunbeam in practise!” What one does on these occasions is generally hard to remember, but I know I got out of the stationary car and walked on to the paddock, almost dazed, to find out what had happened. Arriving at the gate, the sight of Harry standing there was such a relief that instead of hurrying to tell him of the great anxiety of the last few moments I could say nothing. He was surprised to see me walking in, and asked where the car was. “You don’t generally walk to Brooklands.”
“And you don’t generally wait patiently just at the gate for me to come.”
“No,” he replied, “but I have just blown a tyre off the Sunbeam and shan’t be able to race to-day, so I’ve nothing on earth to do.”
So much for coming off the banking at the fastest part of the track with a flat tyre at something over 110 miles per hour, crashing through a fence and jumping a ditch the other side. A Press account of the accident taken from Harry’s own description of the incident shows how a terrible disaster was only just averted.
“Hawker had the car out on just an ordinary race-meeting practise run. On the banking under the Members’ Bridge the car was doing 125 miles per hour beautifully, with plenty of power and speed in hand, a black-snouted, white-bodied speed monster, hurtling round in the fresh morning air, well up the banking, when—the Fates being liverish—the front offside tyre burst. A swerve, a struggle with the wheel, utter disaster averted, and with the front axle chattering uncushioned on the concrete the car plunged on under its momentum down the railway straight. Try as he will, Hawker cannot get the car to answer to the wheel and bear left. The drag of the erring tyre holds it to the right of the track. Careering almost parallel with the fence which runs alongside the straight for a quarter of a mile, the car at last digs its forepart into the corrugated iron sheets, still doing over 80 miles per hour, rips them apart for eleven or twelve yards, gambols obliquely down a four-feet drop, and finishes up on all fours, right side uppermost a paling immovably jammed in one of the front wheels, but otherwise unhurt. Mr. Hawker, too, seemed but little shaken by his experience and far more interested in the glorious running of his mount before taking the toss than in the accident itself.”
On the same day during a race the 6-cylinder Sunbeam, the car which Harry had handled at the previous meeting, came to grief. What actually happened was not definitely known, but the car was seen to swerve at almost the same part of the track that Harry had his trouble, and, after coming down the railway straight, left the track for the Sewage Farm, where it turned two complete somersaults, the driver, Captain Geach, miraculously escaping any serious injury. Perhaps it was the penalty of fame or a proof of popularity that in the next morning’s papers there were lurid accounts of Hawker’s escape from death, one heading reading, “Hawker, the man who won’t be killed!” while little comment was made on Captain Geach’s more serious accident.
A few days later, July 3rd, saw him in the air again, at the Royal Air Force Tournament at Hendon, where a huge crowd had assembled to witness what proved to be the finest exhibition of all kinds of flying ever seen in one afternoon. Here Harry, on his Swallow monoplane, went through a series of stunts which he loved so well, and according to a current flying paper, “executed many extraordinary evolutions which seemed quite different to those just witnessed.”