As a car-mad kid growing up in Melbourne I recall seeing the occasional Jowett Javelin on the roads. But, not once did I see the Javelin's sports car sibling, the Jupiter. There was a good reason for this. History tells us only 28 were ever brought new into Australia.
It is remarkable that exactly half of these are still on our roads, and incredibly that figure is a world-wide phenomena. Jupiter owners simply love their cars and cannot wait to get them on the tar. These days Australia has a few extra Jupiters brought in privately adding to the original 28. Around the country there is more than one garage housing a Jupiter either being restored, or about to be.
Looking at this British icon, it's not hard to see why. The Jupiter is a stunning looking car, typical, but different, from the 1930s `Delage' style that was popularised in the late 1940s and early 1950s by cars such as the Jaguar XK 120 and Morgan. These soft top cars are all mudguards, curves, long bonnets, timber dashboards and grilles laid back at various angles.
Where the Jupiter differs from most others of this distinctive style is the upright three-piece grille and the enormous boot length. This is an early model, built in 1951, and if you look closely there's no boot lid. Access to the boot was behind the seats. A boot lid was included in later models. But there is a small lid just atop the rear bumper that gives access to the spare wheel.
The Jupiter was built by Jowett Cars of Idle, close to Bradford, between 1950 and 1954. The concept was to make use of the Javelin powertrain in a sports car. The engine is a story in itself. It's a flat four design which is the same concept used by Porsche and Volkswagen, and more lately Subaru. It uses overhead valves and is of 1486cc capacity. For the Jupiter compression was upped from 7.2:1 in the Javelin to 8.0:1. It ran two Zenith carbys.
The engine developed 45 kW of power at 4500 rpm and had a top speed of almost 140 km/h. Surprisingly, Jowett supplied the Jupiter with a gearshift mounted on the steering wheel column. But, there were four forward gears. The column shifter may have been because Jowett wanted a car that could take three passengers, as it came with a bench seat. Our featured car, owned by Doug Anderson, had been modified slightly by the inclusion of bucket seats and the column shifter moved to a floor mount.
The move by Jowett to produce a sports car their first and only prompted the company to approach ERA to design an appropriate car for the drivetrain. What emerged was a tubular steel chassis based on a design by Professor Eberan von Eberhorst, best known for his work at Auto Union, now Audi. On this framework Jowett built an aluminium and steel body.
We have already mentioned the non-boot. At the pointy end the bonnet is hinged at the rear and the bonnet and mudguards tilt back in one. Two sprung latches are attached to the front bumper and hold the bonnet and guards down. While the body is aluminium, steel was used to link the aluminium with the tubular chassis. Torsion bar suspension was utilised front and rear.
Despite being a `pretty' car the Jupiter also had bite. In it's first race-track outing the car took out a class win at Le Mans and then a 1-2 in the following year's Monte Carlo Rally. This was followed by an outright win at the 1951 Lisbon Rally and a class win and runner up at Dunrod, Northern Ireland in a tough, four-hour sports car race on public roads. Further class wins followed at Le Mans in 1951 and 52. It's an impressive CV.
The Mark 1A Jupiter came out in the latter part of 1952 which is when the boot lid was added along with a slight improvement in power from the flat four engine. By 1954 the Jowett Jupiter was no longer competitive as rivals had lifted the performance bar. Jowett had plans to retaliate with a lighter-bodied fibreglass variant with lighter chassis, called the R4, but Jowett, like so many British makes, closed before this could happen. Three prototype examples of the R4 were built.
Our featured car was sold new in either Sydney or Melbourne and has had five owners. Doug Anderson has owned the car since 1968, but restoration was not completed until around 2001. In fact, he is still tinkering with the car although most of the hard work is done. He had previously owned a Jupiter in Melbourne and still had that car when he bought this vehicle, which was in better condition.
He undertook a full body-off restoration and replaced a lot of the sub-frame steel which had succumbed to rust, but the tubular frame was still in good repair. He retained the original gearbox, but shifted the gear lever to the floor and installed the buckets seats. The original Jowett gearbox was fine, he said.
Doug said the car handles well, given it still runs on narrow, cross-ply tyres. He is an active member of the Jowett Club of Queensland, which boasts more than 100 members with Javelin and a handful of Jupiter cars. We found this car at the 2010 Macleans Bridge Classic Car Show near Brisbane.
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