Turner Sports Cars

Unknown & Missing Turner 306 BOM

Photo and information courtesy of
Russell Filby

A revently discovered period racing photo of a MK1 Turner with a registration number which was unknown to me (306 BOM). The car appears to be a white Left hand Drive Alexander Turner (shield emblem replacing Turner emblem on the nose) and is tucked in close behind a works Falcon Competition at Silverstone during a 1960 BARC race meeting. I suspect this car to be the MK1 supplied from new by Alexanders to American racing driver Peter Sachs and the car in which he participated in his first races in the UK. Peter starting out on his racing career in an Alexander modified Turner having driven in his first race at Silverstone in 1960, in 1963 he was the SCCA national champion in F Modified, driving a Lotus 23. He won an SCCA divisional title in 1964 with a Brabham BT5, setting a lap record at Lime Rock Park and also raced in IMSA Firehawk, Grand-Am Cup and various vintage racing series while his day job prior to his retirement was as an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs & Co. In recent correspondence with Peter he recalled '' I bought my Alexander-Turner 950 in 1960 from Michael Christie, mainly because my old friend Skip Barber had run an earlier one for several years here in the US. I ran the car in a few races in the UK in 1960, while driving it on the road, and then brought it back to the USA and sold it, as I was then going into the Army. Unfortunately, I have no photos of the car (it was white), nor do I have any records of it at this remove in time' From that first outing in a Turner, Peters racing career spanned more than four decades and today he manages the Klemantaski Collection, one of the world's largest archives of motorsports photography, an article written by Peter regarding his UK 'Turner' adventure featured in the BARC Gazette in May/June 1961.