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History

Downton Engineering Works was started around the turn of the 20th century, in the small Wiltshire town of Downton, as an agricultural machine business.
Bought in 1947 by Daniel Richmond, a skilled engineer, it was transformed into a business selling and servicing the exotic cars of the time, like Bugattis and Lagondas.

With the release of the Mini in 1959 Richmond obtained one of these unusual little cars and set about improving it. He was soon extracting impressive performance figures from the little engine and became one of the driving forces of the early competition success of the mini; meeting regularly with Alex Issigonis, John Cooper, Alex Moulton and the BMC competitions manager Stuart Turner.

UHR 850, the most famous of the Downton tuned cars, competed at Spa and set the scene for the giant-killing works Coopers of the early to mid-sixties. It now resides in the British Motor Heritage Centre in Gaydon.

The business was carefully nurtured and grown by Daniel’s wife Veronica (nicknamed Bunty), who gradually wound the operation down during the five years following Daniel’s premature death at the age of forty-six.

Bunty went into decline and committed suicide in the mid 1970’s, leaving instructions that UHR should be given to a museum or destroyed by fire. Fortunately, Leyland Historic Vehicles found it a home in the new Donington Park museum.