Gear Lever Grommet - Neck UP or DOWN

All Sprites and Midgets built before the arrival of the “face lifted” cars (HAN10 and GAN5 respectively) were given a flexible circular rubber grommet (part number ACA_5208) to seal their gear lever and gear lever turret. No-one disputes this fact. What is very often hotly disputed is how this grommet was installed at the factory: was it “neck-up” or “neckdown”? And why on earth is the strong opinion on this matter so polarised between the Northern and Southern hemispheres? In my experience, there is no more emotive subject associated with our cars: no other topic is able to generate so much animated discussion and produce so many raised hackles. In what follows, I hope to restore calm, logic, law and order to this matter and I begin by reminding everybody that everything is upside down in the Southern Hemisphere. Unless you are a member of the Flat Earth Society, you will know already that Australia is ‘down under’; its water goes the wrong way down plugholes; its sun travels scarily from right to left, pointing north at midday; its stars at night twirl the wrong way; the man in the moon is upside down; runner beans grow in a clockwise direction. The Australian gear lever grommets are upside down too, but I am leaping ahead of my story: we must first look at some facts. While we take this look, the misguided members of that strange Flat Society should instead fly from Heathrow to Melbourne, watch the moon flip 180º in 24 hours (one of life’s great experiences), then try to explain that flip with their flat theory.

Photographic evidence can help us - but which photographs precisely? In the Northern Hemisphere (Abingdon in particular), the trouble is that very early pre-release and press photographs of Mk1 Sprites show gear lever grommets randomly distributed, sometimes “neck-up”, sometimes “neck-down”. So, if one chooses carefully and very selectively from this vast collection of early material (the launch of the Mk1 Sprite was explosive in the extreme), it is very easy indeed to make a very strong case for either a ‘neck-up’ or a ‘neckdown’ gear lever grommet. For example, those who believe it should be ‘neck-up’ often point to the terrific BMC movie1 of Roy Salvadori driving PBL_75 “neck-up” at Silverstone in the wet with commentary by John Bolster (“You’ll never tire of driving a Sprite”). Others, studiously ignoring Roy, instead point to photographs of brand new ‘neckdown’ Mk1 Sprites taken about the same time Roy’s movie was shot in 1958 by British Pathé.

Two early photographs of brand new Mk1 Sprites (note the utterly pristine mats): one “neck-up” (top, provenance unknown); the other “neck-down” (Photo C081280, courtesy BMHIT archive). In the Northern Hemisphere, order emerges from this blushing mess of gear lever grommet confusion if one ignores completely the early photographs and examines later ones taken after the Abingdon production line had settled down, after it had solved the worst of its prodigious initial teething troubles (the most serious requiring extra gussets to strengthen the body shell and cars travelling backwards up the production line). With very few exceptions, later photographs show the gear lever grommet ‘neck-down’, in complete agreement with the orientation illustrated in all variants of the original production factory Parts Lists and Owner’s Handbook.

Perfect in every detail: a brand new Mk2 Sprite at Abingdon, with gear lever grommet ‘neck-down’. For the later Northern Hemisphere cars (beginning with the Mk2 Sprites and Mk1 Midgets) the evidence is quite simply overwhelming: the Abingdon factory installed the gear lever grommet with its neck down as surely as the Healeys in Warwick watched the sun rise on the left while their runner beans grew anticlockwise. To right - a pre-production version of the Mk1 Sprite’s Owner’s Handbook (top, note the strange steering wheel) shows the gear lever grommet ‘neck up’. All production versions (bottom) show the same grommet ‘neck-down’ Why then do all Australian Sprites and Midgets wear their gear lever grommets ‘neck-up’? Well, rather than looking up into the inverted bowl of the Southern Sky for help, the answer is almost

certainly to be found at ground level, within the Pressed Metal Corporation factory at Enfield (New South Wales) where, to avoid excessive import taxes, the CKD2 kits for Mk1 Sprites were assembled for the Australian market. Precisely why this factory decided to go ‘neck-up’ with its grommets is a mystery, the whole affair is shrouded in doubt. We do know that at least one of the first Mk1 Sprites to reach Australia (a very early car, an import, not a CKD kit) had a ‘neck-up’ grommet so perhaps this influenced matters, we don’t know. Alternatively, perhaps the captains of the Enfield factory simply thought the grommet looked better ‘neck-up’, even though the rubber surface looks rougher and the rubber tends to tear more that way. We don’t know that either. What we do know is that it would be an extremely brave concours judge who deducted points for an ‘upside down’ gear lever grommet in one of our cars, no matter the hemisphere and no matter which way the thing is pointing. Of course, in the final analysis, it is the owner’s own choice: the grommet does work both ways and many people do prefer the ‘neck-up’ look. Summing up, no owner can do very wrong if they go ‘neck-down’ when they are ‘up’ in the Northern hemisphere, and ‘neck-up’ when they are downunder. John E. Davies (Member 3443)