The 1925 HRD That Won at Brooklands – and the Remarkable Story of Its Romanian Rider

One of the famous HRD machines – sold under the banner ‘Produced by a Rider’ – is posed at Brooklands, with a Romanian nobleman on board. SIMON ROBINSON reports…

Within this one photograph we can see at least two icons of motorcycling. The very obvious one in the background is shouting at us: Brooklands. First opened in 1907, Brooklands can lay claim to being the world’s first purpose-built motor racing facility. The second icon is the motorcycle, which is one of the first HRD motorcycles produced. Specifically, this is a 350cc (well, 344cc to be correct) ohv JAP-powered Model 80.

Born in Birmingham in 1895, Howard Raymond Davies grew up seeing cycle makers become motorcycle makers as the trend to power two-wheelers mechanically swept through the nation. After his schooling was complete, Davies began an apprenticeship with AJS in Wolverhampton, but he didn’t stay long, as the young Davies was eager to go racing. In those early days AJS wasn’t so keen, instead preferring to concentrate on the steady stream of the handful of road machines it was turning out each week. Davies joined Sunbeam (via a stint at Clyno to work around the ‘no poaching’ rules that stood between AJS and Sunbeam, preventing him from joining directly) and it was with Sunbeam that he entered his first competition – the Scottish Six Days Trial on a 6hp V-twin Sunbeam. The frame broke on the machine, which ended his foray, but Davies decided to stay on in Scotland to see the end of the trial. Upon his return to Wolverhampton, his bosses took a dim view of his extra leave and promptly sacked him. After some bargaining, he made a return to Sunbeam and was entered into the 1914 Senior TT. Following team orders to take it easy to give Sunbeam the best chance of taking the coveted team award, Davies did as instructed this time. However, once his machine had freed up after running in a newly installed piston, he felt comfortable pushing on and rose from 12th at half-race distance to finish second, much to his surprise!

Racing took an obvious hiatus later in 1914 as war clouds gathered over the world. As with so many others, Davies answered his country’s call to arms and joined the Army as a despatch rider, where he saw active service in France before being shipped home and commissioned, which led to a ‘boring’ desk job. Keen to feel the adrenaline pumping again, Davies joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, where he quickly earned his pilot’s certificate in 1916. He was shot down twice; the first time he managed to keep his freedom, but on the second occasion he was captured and taken prisoner of war in April 1917. Listed as missing in action, his obituary prematurely appeared in Motor Cycling in May 1917 before being retracted.

Post-First World War, Davies joined AMAC carburettors, which gave him the opportunity to return to his love of racing motorcycles. The year 1921 was to be a good one for Davies, as he managed second place in the Junior TT and a win in the Senior, still on board a 350cc machine, which was one of the newly released ohv AJS ‘Big Ports’. Davies’ cross-pollination between AMAC and AJS seemed to suit all parties, with Davies gaining access to the latest machines and mutual development between the two companies leading to a successful collaboration.

In 1924, Davies decided that he would begin work on his own machine. For a while he’d been thinking that what the world needed was not only a good-quality and attainable machine, but one that had been designed and engineered from the outset by a rider, for the rider. While he’d had some great machines under him, he always thought that the only way to really build a racer’s machine was to ask a racer to design it. Launched at the Olympia Show in 1924, his ‘HRD’-badged machines received a warm welcome and enough orders to make the operation viable.

With proprietary engines, gearboxes, forks and magnetos, Davies eventually offered a range of machines of varying specifications, all with JAP single-cylinder engines. Davies produced motorcycles until 1928, when the firm was placed into liquidation and acquired (for £400) by Philip Vincent, who carried on the good work – and the good name – of HRD motorcycles under the Vincent-HRD banner.

Less than a year before Brooklands hosted the first British GP in 1926, our picture is from a slightly more understated event: the 1925 Brooklands Sutton Coldfield and North Birmingham Auto Club event, to give it its full and wordy title. They must have had some sizeable trophies to have the space to engrave that lot on!

The man on the machine is labelled only as ‘M G Cantacuzino’, who was victorious in the 350cc handicap event. Little is known of this rider, although a little scratching does reveal that the Cantacuzinos were a Romanian family of some nobility. In 1928, two brothers by that surname became the first Romanians to compete at Le Mans in the famous 24-hour car race, but neither seems to be the fellow in this picture; our man seems to be one Matei Ghica Cantacuzino. Born in 1906 – which would make him 19 at the time of the photograph – he was educated in England and, as a keen motorsport enthusiast, he’d have also had access to the considerable funds needed to buy such a new and expensive machine.

Matei Ghica Cantacuzino went on to have a pretty colourful life. As well as numerous wives, he also stole two aeroplanes in the space of a few years during the Second World War, escaping his chiefs to flee as he firmly believed ‘his’ Romania didn’t sit kindly with the Nazis. Eventually emigrating to America, he died in November 1988 at the age of 82.