Deep Sanderson is a brand of racing and sports car that was manufactured in Britain. The cars included a series of single-seater racing cars and small sports coupés that were built and raced mainly in the early 1960s, although the name was also associated with other projects. The last Deep Sanderson was built in 1986.
Background The Deep Sandersons were designed by Chris Lawrence, who also often drove his creations in competition. Prior to building the first Deep Sanderson Lawrence had already begun to make a name for himself as a tuner of the Standard engine used in the Triumph TR sports cars and in Lawrence's own Morgan race car. Some of the Deep Sandersons were built by Lawrence and his staff, first at Westerham Motors and later at LawrenceTune Engines, while production of others was contracted out.
The name of the series is an amalgam of the name of Lawrence's father's favorite piece of music, the jazz standard "Deep Henderson", and Lawrence's mother's maiden name.
The Deep Sanderson cars were born out of Lawrence's interest in pursuing his racing career and in particular as a way to get into driving single-seaters.
DS101 Lawrence developed an interest in the relatively new Formula Junior class. The rules for this class had been laid down by Count Giovanni Lurani and were intended to create an inexpensive racing series. The rules specified that the car's suspension, engine gearbox and final drive should all come from a car produced in volume. Engines could displace either 1000 cc or 1100 cc, although there was a weight penalty for cars with the larger engines.
In 1960 Lawrence drew up a new tubular steel chassis based on a tetrahedron design that he had used for an earlier project. The front suspension was from a VW beetle, as was the transaxle. The engine was a 1000 cc 105E Ford Kent engine. Lawrence took two DS101s to the first race at Goodwood in 1960 but found that his new cars were already outmatched. Both cars retired because, according to Lawrence, while trying to follow a left-handed corner the cars' drivers would drop their car's left wheels over the edge of the tarmac, which caused the sump bung to contact the ground and unscrew itself from the sump. Lawrence rebuilt the cars, one getting an engine from Giannini of Rome, who were supplying engines for the Stanguellinis that were then dominating Formula Junior.
DS104 Lawrence then began work on a new Formula Junior car in which he would apply lessons learned from Keith Duckworth, whom he had met when picking up the engines for the DS101s. This led to his developing a unique suspension system for the car. To get more power out of the engine Lawrence drilled a hole directly down into the cylinder head and pressed a sleeve into the hole, creating a new intake port and blocking off the old at the same time. On the now high-mounted intake manifold he added a set of second-hand 45DC3 carburetors that drew cold air in over the driver's head. The VW transaxle was retained, but was mounted upside-down to drop the crankshaft below the height of the driveline. This car, christened the DS104, was taken to Silverstone for testing, where it was discovered that the crown-wheel was fitted to the wrong side of the pinion, resulting in the car having one forward gear and four reverse. The crown-wheel was subsequently moved. The DS104 debuted at Oulton Park, where it won on its first outing.
The fully restored DS104 appeared at the Goodwood track at the special "Tribute to Chris Lawrence" day on 16 June 2005.
Lawrence Link The suspension system that Lawrence developed and used first in the DS104 came to be called the "Lawrence Link" system. Lawrence recalled some late-night discussions with Keith Duckworth as being the foundations of his knowledge of suspension design and it was the principles he learned during these discussions that led him to design the suspension. The Lawrence Link was a trailing-arm suspension where the axes of the trailing links converged towards the car's centre-line. Lawrence was granted a patent for it. When his LawrenceTune Engines business ran into financial troubles in 1963, Lawrence sold the patent to Rover.
DS301
The Deep Sanderson 301s were a series of a small mid-engined cars with a central tube chassis. The cars were powered by the BMC A-Series engine in various displacements and states of tune. The transmission was the transverse transaxle from the Mini.
In autumn 1960 Len Bridge urged Lawrence to develop a road-going sports car, reasoning that this market was much larger than the one for racing cars. He also strongly favoured using the Mini drivetrain as the basis for a new car. Lawrence reviewed the idea with Andrew Wallace, whom he had known while in the Navy. Wallace studied the Lawrence Link suspension and drew a chassis with a large-diameter backbone having a circular cross-section, box sections front and rear made from sheet metal and an aluminium floor reinforced by smaller square-section tubing. Suspension front and rear was by Lawrence Link. The Mini engine and transaxle were mounted amidships. Guided by Wallace's drawing, Lawrence's Westerham Motors built the prototype chassis from 20 gauge steel, which was then clothed in aluminium bodywork by Williams and Pritchard. Power was from an 850 cc Mini engine. The finished prototype had a rear engine cover as tall as the windshield in an open-topped body. The sides of the rear bodywork were made concave to narrow the back and provide some rearward visibility. Lawrence described the car, nicknamed "the perfume delivery wagon", as "ugly but functional".
Lawrence took the prototype DS301 to the Nürburgring in 1961, where the car turned in some respectable lap times before ending up in a tree. The car was retrieved but scrapped as not worth repairing, but work immediately started on a new shape for subsequent DS301s, constructing a plywood form that Williams and Pritchard would use to make a new body for the second DS301 in aluminium, like the prototype.
The plan was to display a revised DS301 at the 1962 Racing Car show in Olympia and then take the car to Le Mans the same year. The car was complete with body and paint in January 1962 when it was displayed at the Racing Car show. The new body was much more attractive than the prototype, being a compact fastback having a drag coefficient () of 0.29 and a total frontal area of . The entire body behind the driver, almost half the length of the vehicle, tilted back for access to the engine. Returning to the Deep Sanderson display unexpectedly after the press day Lawrence found Colin Chapman and Mike Costin giving the DS301 a close inspection from inside.
After taking the car to Spa and then to the Nürburgring, the second prototype returned to England, where it was sent to the Microplas company to have a body mold taken from it so that subsequent bodies could be made in fibreglass. After the molds were made the aluminium-bodied car was prepared for the 1963 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Publicity from the car's appearance at Le Mans caused orders to start coming in to the factory for the standard 850 cc DS301. This caused a space problem for LawrenceTune, as they did not have enough room to store the parts and build the cars. A solution was presented by John Pearce, who had started working for LawrenceTune in 1962. He offered to build the DS301s as a subcontractor, even building a workshop to do the work in.
After Lawrence was in a devastating road accident in France LawrenceTune was reduced to Lawrence himself, all of the other staff having moved on and most of the assets sold. Throughout Lawrence's recuperation Pearce had continued to build and sell DS301s and paid Lawrence all of the royalties owed for 23 cars by January 1965. In 1965 Pearce purchased a commercial garage and demolished the facility where the DS301s were built, bringing an end to their production.
DS105
In 1963, Lawrence inherited a project that was originally meant for Downton Engineering Works but which they were unable to undertake. Downton had convinced the client to have a car built with two engines, similar to a Mini that John Cooper had built earlier, but this one was to be a single-seat hill-climb car. Lawrence took on the job but built the car as simply as possible, installing two 1071 cc Downton-tuned Mini engines and their transaxles in a minimal chassis with a Mini subframe in the front and a Deep-Sanderson cross-member and suspension in the back. Designated the DS105, and nicknamed the "Twinny", the car debuted at Brands Hatch on Boxing Day 1963. The car raced again on Easter Monday at Mallory Park 1964. By this time a new linkage had been added that allowed the driver to vary the throttle opening between the engines, giving controlled oversteer or understeer or neutral handling as needed. The only problem was that the brakes were not up to the stresses imposed by the two engines. The car was entered in Sidney Allard's "Festival of Speed", where it performed well. It was then sold to John Pearce with the understanding that it was being resold to the United States, but this sale was never completed. The next owner was Duncan Rabagliatti.
DS302 Late in 1967 Lawrence decided to go to Le Mans again and compete in the Index of Thermal Efficiency. The engine that he would use for this was a Ford Kent 116E equipped with fuel injection from Tecalemit-Jackson, for whom LawrenceTune had become London Agents. The engine would be installed in a car that started life as a DS301, but which had its chassis lengthened and bodywork modified so that the 1600 cc Ford engine could be mounted longitudinally and drive through a Hewland FT200 five-speed transaxle. The modified car received the new designation of DS302. Lawrence contacted Rover, who had bought his patent for the Lawrence Link suspension, to let them know that he was building a new car for Le Mans and was planning on using the Lawrence Link in it. Rover refused to permit it, so the DS302 was fitted with a standard A-arm suspension in the front and a de Dion suspension at the rear. The DS302 was taken to Spa to be sorted out before going to Le Mans.
The DS302 had its Ford 116E motor replaced by an all-alloy SOHC V8 originally developed by Ted Martin for Formula 1 in anticipation of another run at Le Mans in 1969, but the car was unable to obtain an entry.
Chris Martin would personally restore the DS302 for a return to Le Mans in 2004. For this race he returned the car to its 1600 cc Kent configuration.
At Le Mans Lawrence described himself as being absolutely hooked on the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Even after winning the 2-litre class with his Morgan in 1962 he was determined to return in a car of his own design.