Georgia Peck, founder of The Aubrey Halls in Rye, has a passion for motoring, instilled in her by her racing driver grandfather, Henry “Harry” Aubrey Peck. Here she tells us about the important link between Rye’s engineering history and Formula One racing.
Rye is better known for cobbled streets, medieval gates and rich smuggling history than for Grand Prix engineering. Yet for a few remarkable decades, it was also one of the most influential addresses in high-performance engine development thanks to Harry Weslake’s quiet research shop and, later, Dan Gurney’s audacious decision to build a world-class Formula One programme around it.
Weslake’s Rye: a small-town lab with big-world reach
Harry Weslake – Britain’s greatest expert on cylinder head design and founder of Weslake and Co, famous for its work with Bentley, Austin, Jaguar and the Gulf-Wyer Ford GT40 Mk – had already built a reputation as a “gas-flow” obsessive, someone who treated ports, combustion chambers and valve angles as art forms measured in cubic feet per minute. After the Second World War, he established Weslake’s research and development work in Rye, turning the town into an unlikely node in Britain’s performance-engine network. From this base, Weslake consulted widely, applying flow-bench thinking to road and racing engines alike, work that ranged from motorcycle development to production-car cylinder head design.
Rye mattered as a location. Weslake wasn’t a mass manufacturer; it was a high-speed problem-solving outfit. The Rye workshops became a place where manufacturers and teams could send a tricky head, a stubborn combustion problem, or a clean-sheet concept and expect hard-won answers, often through meticulous experimentation rather than corporate committee. The setting also encouraged a certain independence: not in the centre of the big Midlands industry belt, but close enough to the UK’s racing corridor to remain connected.
Dan Gurney finds Rye – and a partner who thinks as he does
By the mid-1960s, Dan Gurney was more than a top-line driver. Through All American Racers (AAR), he wanted to build American cars that could beat the best, on both sides of the Atlantic. Formula One, with its new 3-litre engine formula, offered a chance to make an unmistakable statement. But to do it, Gurney needed an engine that could challenge Ferrari, BRM and the emerging Cosworth threat. Weslake, via engineer Aubrey Woods and earlier development work, had the nucleus of what Gurney wanted: a compact 3.0-litre V12 design direction that had been explored in test form and could be evolved into a full Grand Prix engine. Gurney commissioned Weslake Engineering to build that V12 for his Eagle Mk1.
The collaboration produced the famous Gurney-Weslake V12 (often referred to as the Type 58): a 60-degree V12 with four valves per cylinder – an architecture that pointed toward the future of breathing efficiency.
Anglo American Racers: Rye becomes an F1 address
There’s a wonderfully Rye-specific twist to the Eagle story: although the Eagles were built by AAR in Santa Ana, California, the F1 effort required a UK foothold, and Anglo American Racers operated from Rye, East Sussex, explicitly tying the programme to its British engine partner. The Eagle Mk1 is remembered as a US-built car, but its competitive heart was being developed in and around Rye’s workshops.
That meant that, for a time, Rye sat in the same mental map as places like Surbiton, Slough and Bourne – towns that, in different ways, fed Formula One’s engineering bloodstream. In Rye, the glamour of the paddock never displaced the reality of the work: dyno hours, machining, casting, tolerance headaches, oiling puzzles. The engine was potent, but reliability would haunt it, made harder by the very nature of a small specialist shop pushing into the most demanding category in motorsport.
The high point: proof that Rye could win a Grand Prix
If you want the single moment that crystallises “Rye matters,” it is Spa-Francorchamps, 18 June 1967: Dan Gurney won the Belgian Grand Prix in an Eagle-Weslake, with Sir Jackie Stewart hot on his tail, finishing in second place. It remains one of motorsport’s most romantic achievements – Gurney winning in a car built by his own organisation, powered by an engine developed through this Anglo-American partnership rooted in Rye.
A few months earlier, the combination had already shown its speed by winning the 1967 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch (non-championship, but prestigious), reinforcing that this wasn’t a fluke of weather or attrition – it was a fast, sophisticated package.
What Rye represents in the Gurney–Weslake story
The Gurney-Weslake partnership is often told as a tale of American ambition meeting British engineering craft. But placing Rye at the centre reframes it: this was also about place – about a small coastal town hosting a workshop culture capable of world-level invention. Rye offered Weslake the space to be experimental and independent, and it gave Gurney a UK base that was more intimate than the sprawling industrial complexes of larger cities.
Today, when people talk about the “valley” of motorsport engineering in Britain, Rye is rarely the first dot on the map. Yet for a brief, brilliant period, it was exactly that: a dot that connected road and race, theory and practice, Britain and America – and helped produce one of the most beautiful cars and most intriguing engines of Formula One’s 1960s.
Georgia Peck opened The Aubrey Halls at Rock Channel in December 2025 and her monthly classic car meets are proving very popular. The next one is on Sunday 22 February from 9am to 12pm and, in collaboration with Rye Bay Scallop Week, The Mermaid Street Cafe will be serving hot breakfasts with scallops, with Ground Up Cafe serving coffee and pastries. Alongside there will be various stalls focusing on vintage fashion.
Image Credits: Courtesy of All American Racers .