Austin A40 Sports

To develop and build lower quantity niche models Austin cooperated with various coachbuilding companies around England. One of these long lasting cooperations was established between Jensen Motors and Austin as well.

In the late 1940s the Jensen Brothers needed mechanical components to further develop their car projects especially an engine and orders to keep their company running.

The idea of their first post-war model "PW" was to offer a luxury saloon to compete with the more expensive offerings of Daimler, Bentley and Rolls Royce, so one can imagine the shock when Austin came up with the same idea with their A125 Sheerline, beating their price by another 1000 pound. 

 

So one story that has just recently been repeated claims that a furious Richard Jensen went to meet Austin chairman Lenard Lord to complain. So far I have not been able to find the source for this story. Anyway Lenard Lord liked the new Jensen touring car  that Jensen's chief designer Eric Neal had just designed and asked to come up with an similar product based on the A40 chassis and components. Neale was put on the job and in a very short time, he scaled the initial design down and further developed it to come up with the first British mass produced car that followed the new continental lines first envisioned in Italy by Farina for Cisitalia and Ferrari, by Bertone for Siata and in France by Simca.

 

Jensen got the contract and a production line for A40 Sports bodies was set up along the Jen-Tug line at a new interim plant Jensen had just rented at Pensnett Industrial Estate. Jensen historian Felix Kistler has just now been able to find out more about the site and wrote an interesting story about it. For Jensen this contract proved invaluable to test their skills on mass production.