ERA was founded towards the end of 1933 in Bourne, Lincolnshire by Humphrey Cook, a young man who was irritated that no British car had won a major continental race since Henry Segrave a decade earlier, and who hoped to produce a British car with the ability to win Grands Prix. However, by 1933 Grand Prix racing was becoming much more expensive thanks to the very large sums being spent by wealthy and government-backed works teams such as Auto Union and Alfa Romeo.
Because of this, ERA instead aimed its first efforts at the smaller voiturette class of car. Raymond Mays was both a company director and driver, and the company's works were established in a yard behind his house. Mays had prior experience of racing several kinds of car including Vauxhall, Bugatti and Riley. The ERA was essentially a logical development of his White Riley. They were powered by a six-cylinder Riley-derived engine of varying capacities (1100cc, 1500cc and 2000cc), supercharged and unsupercharged. The marque's first race was at Brooklands on 22 May 1934. By the end of the year ERAs had scored several victories in fields containing many more established marques, and through the mid- and late 1930s ERA came to dominate voiturette racing, with drivers of the calibre of Dick Seaman driving for the team. As soon as 1935, in a major race at the Nuerburgring, ERAs took first, third, fourth and fifth places. The two Siamese princes, Chula and Bira, whose trio of ERAs became famous as Hanuman, "Romulus and Remus" drove for their own team, operating from The White Mouse Garage. They were not works drivers...
The more modern E Type ERA appeared just before the Second World War but was not fully developed.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Racing_Automobiles
ERA links
ERA photos
