WMC181 at the RAC 9th - 15th June
8th Jun 2026
Le Mans Rep WMC181 will be displayed at the RAC club in Pall Mall from the 9th to the 15th of June.
WMC 181 was one of seven similar Le Mans Replicas built by the Frazer Nash works for the 1951 racing season. It had been ordered by Squadron Leader Sidney Greene. As Greene had lost an arm in a road accident as a schoolboy he was not allowed to race, but he could compete in speed trials. He won over 20 awards in 1951 starting with Boreham in April. John Bolster road-tested the car for Autosport magazine and his report was published on 18 May 1951: “weight as tested 15¼ cwt, 0-60 mph 8.8 sec”.
A 21-year old Stirling Moss was invited to race the car in the British Empire Trophy in the Isle of Man on 14 June 1951. He outdrove the other Nash drivers and won on both scratch and handicap, but the latter only after Pat Griffith’s Lester-MG seized its engine on the very last lap. This was fortunate for Moss because, like at pre-war Brooklands, the trophy was given for the handicap result, not the overall scratch result. Stirling Moss was entered again in the 1952 British Empire Trophy but this time retired with a misfiring engine.
The car was also sprinted and raced by Dick Jacobs and by Roy Salvadori. The car was fitted with a more powerful BS1-spec engine in August 1952, before the Goodwood Nine Hours where Dick Jacobs and Tony Crook were lying sixth before retirement with rear axle problems. At the Brighton Speed Trails on 6 September 1952, Jacobs set a new 2-litre class record and was timed at 104.6mph.
Greene then sold the car to Performance Cars, Brentford in 1953. It was featured in The Autocar ‘Used Cars on the Road’ series on 26 March 1954. Reggie Wright of Wolverhampton bought the car in April 1954 as a direct result of the article and used it in sprints and hill-climbs for the next few years.
John Aldington, Managing Director of AFN and son of ‘Aldy’ Aldington, bought the car from Reggie Wright in 1982. Five years later, when John retired from AFN, he retained ownership of the Le Mans Replica and established the Frazer Nash Archives Trust in Henley-on-Thames.
