Montague Napier inherited his family’s ailing engineering business in Lambeth in 1895. Through cycling he met the Australian racer S. F. Edge, who persuaded him to improve a Panhard and then to build cars of his own. Edge’s Motor Power Company agreed to buy Napier’s entire output, and the first car was delivered in March 1900.
Edge used racing as publicity as no other British maker did. In 1902 he won the Gordon Bennett Cup in a Napier painted green, the colour that became known as British racing green. Output reached 250 cars in 1903, and the works moved to a larger site at Acton in west London. For 1904 Napier launched a six-cylinder car, the first commercially successful six, and within five years dozens of British makers had followed.
In 1907, the year Brooklands opened, Edge drove a Napier for 24 hours at the new track, covering 1,581 miles at almost 66 mph. After the First World War Napier built one expensive model, the six-cylinder T75, priced like a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, but only 187 were made and the last car was sold in 1924, bringing Napier’s total to 4,258. By then the company was concentrating on its Lion aero engine, and in 1931 it tried to buy the bankrupt Bentley company, only to be outbid by Rolls-Royce.
