Harry Weslake was born in Exeter in 1897 and joined his father at the gas engineers Willey and Co. At 16 he modified a Rudge Multi for hill climbs; in the First World War he joined the Royal Flying Corps. He set up a workshop in Exeter to market his Wex carburettor, and at Brooklands developed an air-flow meter to test gas flow in a combustion chamber. That led to consulting for Sunbeam and to work for W. O. Bentley, tuning cylinder heads for his racing engines and the first Le Mans win.
After Wex Carburettors collapsed in 1926 he moved to Automotive Engineering, and in 1935 set up Weslake & Taylor at the Alta factory, consulting for Austin, MG, Citroen and Swallow Sidecars, where he helped convert the Standard engine to overhead valves for the first SS cars. During the war he worked with Bill Heynes, Walter Hassan and Claude Baily on the Jaguar XK engine.
In the 1940s he set up Weslake Research and Development at Rye, East Sussex. He designed the cylinder head of the overhead-valve BMC A-series engine used in the Morris Minor, Mini, ADO16, Allegro and Marina, and received royalties on each. He also developed heads for the Rover 3-litre used in the P4 110 and P5, and worked for Facel Vega, Vanwall, Coventry Climax and Ferrari. In 1966 Dan Gurney commissioned Weslake to build a 3-litre V12 for his Eagle, which won the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix; Gurney-Weslake cylinder heads powered the Gulf-Wyer Ford GT40 to Le Mans wins in 1968 and 1969. Harry Weslake died in 1978; the company was bought by Normalair-Garrett in 1979.
