Sydney Allard, a London garage owner and trials enthusiast, built his first specials before the Second World War and founded the Allard Motor Company in Clapham, south-west London, in 1945. His cars combined light British chassis with large American V8 engines, and early models such as the K1 two-seater of 1946 to 1949 found a ready market.
The J2 sports car was a formidable competitor in the late 1940s and 1950s, especially in the United States, where Carroll Shelby and Zora Arkus-Duntov, later the father of the Corvette, both raced them. A J2 finished third overall at Le Mans in 1950, and in 1952 Sydney Allard won the Monte Carlo Rally in one of his own P1 saloons, the only person to win the event in a car of his own make.
Sales fell away in the 1950s, and car manufacture ended in 1957 after about 1,900 cars had been built; the company became insolvent in 1958. A new Allard Sports Cars company was set up in 2012 and began building continuation cars in 2018.
