Recently we reported on the new Invicta but what was the original all about? Captain Noel Macklin and Oliver Lyle were wealthy men who set out in 1924 to make their ideal high performance car and sell it in small numbers to discerning customers. Macklin's home, the Fairmile in Cobham, Surrey, was the base for the operation and his friend Lyle, of the Tate & Lyle sugar company, was a major investor, along with coal millionaire Earl Fitzwilliam. Their Invicta car was to be fast but flexible, able to cruise at high speed and also to pull away in top gear from low revs, and the chassis was to incorporate well-developed British ideas of those times. Parry Thomas, a hero of Brooklands, was retained as consulting engineer.
The original plan was to use 2.5-litre Coventry Climax straight sixes but Macklin soon switched to Meadows engines, also built in the Midlands. After the 2.5-litre, which went on sale in 1925, engines were enlarged to three litres and then the 4.5-litre of 1928. The low-chassis S-Type version was launched at the close of the 1920s as an extreme sporting model.
Seventy-seven S-Type Invictas are said to have been built before production ceased in October 1933, and 48 of these are known to have survived. They were undoubtedly built to the highest standards of craftsmanship but the high price of Invictas inevitably brought the enterprise to a halt. A more modest 1.5-litre model, introduced in 1932, failed to keep the company afloat. Invicta was revived briefly after the Second World War, building a large, complex car beside the A30 at Virginia Water, but it closed in 1950 shortly after Macklin, by then knighted for his wartime motor gunboats, died. The defunct company, plus useful engineering equipment, was then acquired by AFN in Isleworth, makers of Frazer Nash cars and later the UK Porsche importers. The completely new Invicta appeared in 2002.
