Mythron Cars Healey: Reborn classic sports car is small and mighty
With its cartoonish ‘Frogeye’ face, Lilliputian dimensions and 43hp engine, the Austin-Healey Sprite wasn’t the obvious starting point for a giant-killing race car. Yet this plucky roadster punched well above its sub-600kg weight, achieving a 1-2-3 finish at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1959, then a class win for Stirling Moss a year later.
Works ‘Sebring Sprites’ were raced throughout the early 1960s by the likes of Bruce McLaren, Briggs Cunningham, Innes Ireland and Steve McQueen. Today, the original cars are vanishingly rare, but one British company has created a 21st century tribute.
Meet the Mythron Cars Healey: a ‘reimagined’ Sebring Sprite, made in West Sussex and priced from £65,000 including a donor car. Excitingly, I would be the first journalist in the world to drive it.
A brilliantly simple sports car
Launched in 1958, the Austin-Healey Sprite was marketed as an affordable roadster that ‘a chap could keep in his bike shed’. With a rudimentary fabric roof, clip-on windows, no exterior door handles and a boot only accessible from inside the cabin, it was brilliantly simple and simply brilliant.
The Sprite was the first sports car with a stressed, unitary body, rather than a separate chassis. Its original design had exposed pop-up headlights, like those of a Porsche 928, but parent company BMC – the British Motor Corporation, which also owned Austin, Morris, MG, Riley and Wolseley – deemed they were too expensive. The fixed, upright lamps used instead gave the car its signature frog eyes.
A print advert of the time proclaimed: ‘This sassy little brother to the Austin-Healey 100-Six sets a new high in 948cc performance… and a new low in cost!’. According to a road test in The Motor magazine, those highs were 0-60mph in 20.5 seconds and a 93mph maximum – all for a lowly £669.
Major plans for Minor engine
Being cheap to buy and easy to fix (its BMC A-series engine was borrowed from the Austin A35 and Morris Minor), the Sprite became a popular club racer – and Austin-Healey itself soon jumped on the bandwagon. Geoff Healey, son of company founder Donald, developed a works version with larger SU carburettors, a straight-cut gearbox, Dunlop disc brakes and an aerodynamic hard-top roof. This was the now-mythical Sebring Sprite.
Jez Hayter, the man behind Mythron Cars, came to the Sebring Sprite via his love for cars and admiration for Steve McQueen. “I was a motorcyclist until I learned to drive aged 30, then I’ve owned 26 cars in the two decades since,” he explains. “Among those were a Porsche 911 3.2 Carrera, Lancia Fulvia Rallye, BMW M2 and i8, lots of Land Rovers and an AC Cobra replica with a 5.7-litre Chevy V8.”
After a successful career in advertising – working for Saatchi & Saatchi, then running his own agency – Jex bought a former Austin-Healey Sprite race car and decided to change course. “Their design is simple, making it easy to understand the mechanics of the car and identify opportunities to enhance performance and handling, along with some styling improvements. I saw the potential to refine them – and create a version more suitable to modern driving. Also, I have always idolised Steve McQueen. And if a Sebring Sprite was good enough for him…”
Fast Road Track specification
Fast forward just four months and Mythron Cars #001 (pictured here) made its debut on the Austin Healey Club stand at the NEC Classic Car Show in Birmingham. “It really struck a chord with all generations and those who weren’t traditional Healey owners,” says Jez. “I personally wanted to build a version of the car that the younger generation felt looked cool and would feel they could just get in and drive.”
My drive will take place on country roads near Goodwood, where Jez racked up many of this prototype’s development miles. Finished in a classic shade of Old English White, Mythron #001 is built to Fast Road Track (FRT) specification. This means an FIA-approved roll cage, fixed-back Tillett carbon fibre seats, four-point harness belts and a straight-cut manual transmission.
Alternatively, buyers can also choose the Fast Road (FR) version, which has softer suspension, a leather-lined interior, conventional seatbelts and a synchromesh gearbox. Mythron plans to build 16 examples of each car, with ‘16’ being Steve McQueen’s race number at the 1962 Three Hours of Sebring.
From a frog to a prince
With a one-piece fibreglass front end and coupe-style bonded roof, this restomod Healey bears scant resemblance to the Frogeye it sprang from. Black ceramic-coated trim in place of trad chrome, racing roundels and a ‘Le Mans’ filler cap complete the street fighter look.
There is rather more than 948cc and 43 horses under the bonnet, too. The four-cylinder engine has been rebored to 1,380cc, with a Neil Slark ‘stage two’ cylinder head, Weber DCOE 45 carburettors, high-compression pistons, a Mocal oil cooler and a Maniflow stainless steel exhaust. The result, subject to some final fettling, is between 110hp and 120hp – ample when you weigh half as much as a Ford Fiesta.
Jez rejected the idea of modern coilover suspension as he wanted to retain the Sprite’s classic character. Instead, you’ll find uprated lever arms at the front and adjustable telescopic dampers at the rear, with beefier KAD disc brakes, 13-inch Weller steel wheels and 175-section tyres.
Driving the Mythron Cars Healey
I inelegantly fold my body beneath the low roof, through the narrow door aperture and into the sculpted seat. The FRT-spec Sprite has no carpets, air-con or infotainment: just a tactile Momo Prototipo steering wheel, a stubby shift lever and a row of analogue gauges – including a GPS-based speedo and a custom rev counter with LED shift lights.
With a little bit of choke (remember those?), the cold engine coughs boisterously into life. It sounds eagerly rorty and raspy, but is soon drowned out by the coarse metallic whine of the straight-cut ’box. Swapping cogs quickly, or blipping the throttle as you dip the clutch, is vital if you don’t want to hear the painful graunching of gears.
The tuned A-series thrives on revs, doing its best work near the 7,000rpm redline. Again, shift too slowly and it can drop off the boil, so you need to keep your brain engaged and the engine bubbling merrily. Mythron Cars hasn’t quoted performance figures yet, but on power-to-weight ratio alone the Sprite has the measure of a new Porsche Cayman. In such a small car, that feels fast.
Little car, big fun
And it really is tiny. With a footprint similar to a Japanese kei car, you have so much more road real estate to play with. On narrow, hedge-lined lanes where a supercar might inch cautiously past oncoming traffic, the Sprite scarcely needs to slow down.
Its steering is unassisted, but the car’s light weight makes it easy to manoeuvre and park. You sit low, with the leather-wrapped wheel pulled close to your chest, enjoying its incessant feedback as the mechanical melodrama ebbs and flows.
The Healey FRT’s chassis feels alert and excitable – perhaps too much so on pockmarked surfaces, where I suspect the softer FR version would fare better – yet it doesn’t have the tied-down feel of a modern track-focused car. There’s still plenty of scope for playfulness here, encouraged by a short wheelbase and complete lack of electronic driver aids.
Verdict: Mythron Cars Healey
Most restomods cost deep into six figures, which makes £65,000 for a bespoke, hand-built Sprite seem a bit of a bargain. Granted, the Mythron Cars Healey isn’t the most sophisticated car of this type, but that’s part of its appeal. If you want a car that immerses you in the drama of driving, this is it.
‘If he drives a Sprite, he’s a bachelor’, declared another period advertisement, ‘or else he’s married and wants a second car he can race’. My bachelor days are long gone, but a Sprite as my second car sounds very appealing indeed. Now, I just need to make space in the bike shed…
Tim Pitt writes for Motoring Research