Thanks to one man — Jack Henry Turner — Seisdon in Staffordshire became the unlikely centre for a successful, if somewhat short-lived, motor sport industry.

Born in Wales, Turner moved to the Old Smithy in Seisdon in the late 1940s where he looked after and tuned racing cars for a variety of wealthy owners. One of the most enthusiastic of these was John Webb, chairman of Stourbridge glassmaker Webb Corbett, who raced a ‘Turner’ (in fact a converted MG Magnette) for a number of years.

In 1953 Webb became a director of Turner Sports Cars Ltd. and the factory moved into Wolverhampton where larger premises had been found in which a new single-seater Formula 2 car could be designed and built. The car, which used a Lea Francis 1767cc engine, unfortunately suffered from poor reliability and it failed to finish in most of the races in which it took part.

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