The Silver Aero

One aspect of the classic car scene I love is the element of surprise from discovering cars I'd never seen before. That's especially true when something very rare and well-known turns up in a low-key location where you really wouldn't expect to see such a thing. Yardley Gobion is one such place that isn't famous for anything at all, a pleasant village in the border country between Milton Keynes and Northampton where nothing of any great significance has ever happened. The annual Festival of Transport is a typical village show, a hundred or so cars in a field with some stalls and kids' activities, attended mainly by locals and hardly one of the season's premier events, which makes the presence of this unique car all the more remarkable...

What's that appearing in the gateway? Surely it can't be...

The 1970s were the golden era of Vauxhall's Luton Design Centre under the leadership of its American-born Design Director, Wayne Cherry. He created a whole new design philosophy he called DRG for 'Down the Road Graphics', emphasising how the car looks when you see it coming down the road towards you, and out of this came such legendary cars as the 'Droop Snoot' Firenza and the rally-bred Chevette HS and HSR.
 

Chevette HSR was the ultimate production expression of Cherry's DRG values

The 1980 Motor Show was looking to be a disappointing one for Vauxhall as their most exciting new product was the rather staid Viceroy, so something to inject some glamour into their stand was needed. The result was the third and final instalment in Wayne Cherry's series of show cars based on production Vauxhalls and embodying his DRG principles to the full, following on from the Firenza Silver Bullet and Chevette Black Magic. Cherry's team took a standard Cavalier 2000 GLS Sportshatch off the production line and subjected it to a series of dramatic upgrades to create Silver Aero.

The starting point - it looked very different when Wayne Cherry finished with it

The bodykit wasn't just intended to look brash but was carefully designed for maximum aerodynamic efficiency and many hours were spent in the wind tunnel. The droop snoot concept has been extended with a fibreglass nosecone and wrap-round bumper that transforms the frontal appearance and makes Silver Aero some eight inches longer than a normal Cavalier. The bumper-mounted lamps and numberplate are covered with a smooth perspex panel but it surprisingly retains the standard headlights, albeit fitted with wipers that were never offered on any production Cavalier.

A totally different face

At the sides, there are ducts to channel the airflow smoothly through the wheelarches, and thick black rubber skirts that draw air underneath the car and create 'ground effects' to glue it to the road. The back is finished off with a tailgate spoiler and a deep sculpted bumper to increase downforce and minimise turbulence. These modifications resulted in an impressively low drag coefficient of 0.32, but unfortunately much of this work was undone by the choice of wheels. The car sits on Compomotive spilt-rim alloys that interrupted the carefully-controlled airflow, so the solution was to cover them with smooth plastic discs. Sadly these disappeared long ago and the current owner is trying to get a set of replicas made, but this is no easy task as they were unique to this car.

Lots of skirts and scoops

The engine went to renowned Vauxhall tuner Bill Blydenstein, who stroked it out to 2.4 litres and fitted a Rajay turbocharger to develop an impressive 150bhp. Unusually, this is controlled by a computerised engine management system, a very advanced feature for the time, and it combined with the aerodynamic improvements to deliver significantly more performance than the original Cavalier. The interior wasn't left untouched either, featuring electrically-adjustable leather Recaro seats and a stereo radio cassette with four speakers, cutting-edge stuff for 1980. One surprising omission is electric windows, the standard winding handles instead being refinished in hard-wearing black perspex.

2.4 Turbo for go to match the show

Building a show car based on a model that was about to go out of production seems odd, but the real reason for Silver Aero's existence wasn't public knowledge at the time. GM had decided to rationalise their European operations and close the Luton Design Centre, transferring all responsibility for styling to Russelsheim and meaning future Vauxhalls would just be rebadged Opels. Silver Aero was thus created as a final fling for the Luton team to go out on a high and prove they were still just as capable of turning out cutting-edge designs as their colleagues in Germany, and it seems to have succeeded in doing just that.

Luton's magnum opus still looks good today

Vauxhall had talked about making Silver Aero's special features available as dealer-fitted option packages for the production Cavalier but nothing ever came of this as the all-new Mark 2 Cavalier appeared shortly afterwards, and it remained a one-off. It wasn't a wasted effort though, as shortly afterwards the Opel Manta received a facelift with new looks that were very clearly inspired by Silver Aero and would see it stay in production until 1987. Wayne Cherry himself went on to even greater things, ultimately returning to the USA and becoming the worldwide Vice-President of Design for General Motors before he retired in 2004.

Manta facelift shows obvious Silver Aero influence

So what happened to Silver Aero after the show? You might expect Vauxhall to have kept it in their heritage collection, but no, it's in private hands. Silver Bullet and Black Magic somehow ended up languishing on the roof of the disused design centre, from where they were rescued and restored in the 1990s, but Silver Aero's whereabouts during this time seem to have remained undocumented. Happily, all three of Wayne Cherry's DRG show cars have survived: both Silver Aero and Silver Bullet are now owned by a chap called Dave Boon, who keeps them roadworthy and regularly drives one or other to shows around the country, and he is friends with the owner of Black Magic.

Alive and well and regularly driven

How come this unique car unexpectedly turned up at such a small and insignificant show then? Geography plays a big part really as Yardley Gobion isn't a great distance from Luton so naturally there are a lot of Vauxhall fans not too far away. Despite the small size of the Festival of Transport, it was designated an official club event by the Cavalier and Chevette Club, who had a stand with about half a dozen mostly local cars. At just after 11am Silver Aero rolled into the show field to join them and become my undoubted star of the event.

Not surprisingly attracting a lot of attention

It was fantastic to take a close look at a one-off car that I'd read about but never seen in the flesh, made all the more surreal by being at a quiet village show rather than one of the big national events where you'd be more likely to find such a thing. I suspect most of the festival visitors didn't even have a clue what it was, but it's definitely one of my highlights of what has already been an amazing show season!