The first customer could hardly have provided a better endorsement for the newly formed Moto-Lita: it was Moss’s dad, Alfred

Imagine it’s 1951. You’re just 14, you’ve just left school, and your next step is to get a job and be a man. War-ravaged Britain is still pockmarked with bomb-sites and food is still rationed, but you’re dead keen on motor racing and things seem to be stirring in your part of suburban Surbiton, just south-west of London. There’s a garage down the road where they are building funny little racing cars with motorbike engines positioned behind the driver. Taking a deep breath, you push open the door and ask for a job.

That’s what the young Simon Green did, and to his amazement he was taken on by the Cooper Car Company. After about three years spent learning the ropes and refining his skills, Simon was entrusted with making steering wheels for the Cooper racers – and his destiny was decided.

Simon moved from Cooper to work for a brief spell with Connaught Engineering and then for another British garagista, Hersham & Walton Motors, better known as HWM. HWM was building sports and formula cars and running them with some success in international events, with drivers like Stirling Moss and Peter Collins at the helm. Then one of the partners in the company, John Heath, crashed fatally on the 1956 Mille Miglia. Dispirited, the company abandoned its racing programme and soon afterwards stopped producing cars altogether.

By now Simon had become pretty good at making steering wheels and, sensing a business opportunity, he rented an old chicken shed in Esher. With a burning ambition to build better steering wheels for sporting cars he placed an ad in Autosport and waited for the orders to flood in. The first customer could hardly have provided a better endorsement for the newly formed Moto-Lita: it was Stirling Moss’s dad, Alfred. He and Ken Gregory had started the British Racing Partnership to run, initially at least, a brace of Cooper F2 cars.
 
Moto-Lita’s business took off rapidly and the one-man band turned into a trio within a year when a couple of Simon’s chums were hired to help out. Ever-increasing demand dictated larger premises and the company soon had to literally fly the coop. Larger and more respectable premises were leased back in Surbiton, at 69 Brighton Road. The new location even boasted a shop front to display the merchandise.
 
The affluent ’60s were starting to swing, the all-conquering Mini had arrived and leather was the fashion of the day. As formula cars had shrunk in size to lightweight, streamlined cigar tubes, so the large-diameter steering wheels of old had given way to dinner-plate-sized circles of aluminium and leather, thick of rim and slim of spoke. Soon every young blade around town, from Bailey to the Beatles, wanted a leather-rimmed Moto-Lita wheel to go with their Paddy Hopkirk steering column lowering kit.

By the mid-’60s Moto-Lita had been contracted to supply its wheels as original equipment to prestigious sporting marques such as AC and Aston Martin and, as time moved on, the list got longer and longer. Today, whether you steer a thoroughbred from Allard or from Zagato, you will be able to find a Moto-Lita to fit.
 
Moto-Lita moved production to Thruxton circuit in 1979; here, despite the fact that it now produces so many wheels, its products remain, as always, exquisitely hand-crafted pieces of automotive art.