Leyland Motors was one of Britain’s leading makers of lorries and buses when, after the First World War, its chief engineer J. G. Parry-Thomas and his assistant Reid Railton designed a car intended to be the finest in the world. The Leyland Eight was unveiled at the 1920 Olympia show, where it was dubbed the “Lion of Olympia”, and managing director Henry Spurrier told his board it was better than a Rolls-Royce in every respect.
It was the first British car with a straight-eight engine, a 7-litre unit with a single overhead camshaft and hemispherical combustion chambers that produced up to 146 bhp. The chassis had torsion-bar anti-roll systems at both ends and vacuum-servo brakes. Bodies were available from the factory as open tourers, or from coachbuilders such as Vanden Plas.
It was also the most expensive British car of its day, with a bare chassis costing £2,500 in 1920. Leyland was short of cash, orders were discouraged, and only about 18 were built before the car was dropped in 1923. Parry-Thomas left for Brooklands with spare chassis and parts to build the Leyland-Thomas racing specials. The only known survivor, a Leyland-Thomas assembled from spares in 1929, is in the British Motor Museum. Leyland went on to build the Trojan under contract at Kingston upon Thames between 1922 and 1928.
