IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
‘THE JR WAS A MORE SHAPELY AND SERIOUS MACHINE THAN THE J2X, WITH A LONGER NOSE AND TAIL’
Alan Allard, aged 84, is a proud father. A proud son, too. He’s standing next to a legacy of both roles, Allard JR chassis number JR3408. ‘Lloyd [Alan’s son] made practically all of it apart from the body,’ he’s saying. ‘He’s worked so hard. It’s an amazing achievement.’ And what would Sydney [Alan’s father] have thought? After all, he led the first lap of 1953’s Le Mans 24 Hours in a near-identical JR, one of the Allard marque’s highest-profile flashes of fame. If there is a heaven, Sydney is probably looking down from it through his signature round-lensed spectacles, delighted that his legacy has had a second coming.
The dark green Allard with us today is new. Brand new, apart from a few parts that can’t be made any more, so had to be found and refurbished. Since the 1950s, the sequence of JR chassis numbers has stopped at JR3407, the seventh of the model. The two works cars raced at Le Mans in 1953 were JR3402 (Sydney’s machine, registered NLN 652) and JR3403 (registered NLN 650, one of whose drivers was ‘father of the Corvette’ Zora Arkus-Duntov). So JR3408 is the latest historic racing design to be
