Noel Macklin founded Invicta in 1925, with financial backing from Oliver Lyle of the Tate & Lyle sugar family, and the first cars were assembled in the garage of his home, Fairmile Cottage, at Cobham in Surrey. Invictas combined big, flexible engines with good handling and quality, and they became favourites with sporting drivers.
The low-chassis 4½ Litre S-type was the marque’s most famous model, and in 1931 Donald Healey won the Monte Carlo Rally outright in one. But the cars were expensive to build, the Depression hit sales, and car production ended around 1935; Macklin moved on to found Railton, and Invicta Cars Limited was finally wound up by the court in 1938.
The name returned after the Second World War on the Black Prince, built at Virginia Water in Surrey from 1946, a technically ambitious car with an automatic transmission, until Frazer Nash acquired the business in 1950. A third Invicta company built the S1 sports car at Chippenham in Wiltshire in the 2000s before being dissolved in 2012.
