It was freezing cold, and Rex had stopped in a farmyard near Abingdon for a sneaky pee. By accident he spotted the hubcap of an Itala

Our first meeting with Karen and David Ayre doesn’t exactly start promisingly. It’s the end of a long and hot day in Cairo, and their magnificent Itala 40hp is perched on the back of a low-loader, its front end dipped drunkenly due to a twisted axle and broken wheel. The husband-and-wife team look just a little stressed – but they are determined to fix their car and make it to the end of the Nile Trial endurance rally.
 
From here, it looks as though their world tour is over. The Itala’s arrival under the shadow of the Pyramids of Giza coincides with the start of one of the event’s rest days. There’ll be barely enough time to get it fixed, while the rest of us relax in the sun and contemplate the five days of desert rallying ahead.

But David and Karen are made from hardy stuff, and it’s difficult to imagine a couple more perfectly suited to the physical (and mental) demands of endurance rallying in a car that’s more than a century old. After all, you have to be totally committed to the cause to want to attempt what they’ve already achieved in their Itala during the past couple of years. But that, it seems, goes with the territory when you own an Itala – a car that was at the cutting edge of competition technology when new.

When Matteo Ceirano, a member of Italy’s earliest carmaking dynasty, decided to go it alone in 1903, his intention was to create the world’s finest racing cars. Within the year his workforce numbered 150 and his hugely expensive Italas were already proving successful in competition. Itala’s first class victory was in the Susa-Mont Cenisio hillclimb, which was won by a ‘light’ 4.5-litre 24hp. Ceirano left the company in 1905 but the motor sport success continued: a 14-litre 100hp won the Coppa Florio that year, there was victory in the first Targa Florio in 1906, and then in the Peking-Paris in 1907.
 
These were the glory years for Itala, and after World War One the company went into decline. In 1925 the receivers were called in, and government ownership was the outcome. Closure followed in 1931, then a mini-revival in 1932... but it was all over by 1935.

The most famous of all Italas, Count Scipione Borghese’s 7433cc four-cylinder Peking to Paris-winning 35/45hp, probably helped sell more examples than any other. The car easily won the pioneering 12,000-mile event in just 62 days. Briefly, the car named by the press at the time as the ‘Great Grey Monster’ was the world’s most famous car.

Following this endurance rally success, it made a number of competitive appearances before being retired to the Itala factory. And there it lay until the 1930s, when Carlo Biscaretti ‘discovered’ and restored it for the Carlo Biscaretti Di Ruffia museum in Turin, where it remains to this day.

How David and Karen Ayre’s Itala was discovered is far more interesting. Group Captain Rexford-Welch (‘Rex’ to his friends) found it in 1953 while on a night rally. ‘It was freezing cold, and he had stopped in a farmyard near Abingdon for a sneaky pee,’ David smiles. ‘By accident, he spotted the hubcap of an Itala nestling in the bushes, and got very excited. Rex and his team mate then waited overnight and knocked up the farm’s owners. It seemed they had simply inherited it when they bought the farm. Rex bought the car on the spot – paying around £100.

‘At the time the Itala was wearing a body similar to that of Margherita Maria Teresa Giovanna di Savoia’s car – a landaulette – but Rex removed this bodywork due to being in poor condition. He then fitted new tyres and towed the car minus its body back to his place in Baker Street. In six-and-a-half hours. At zero degrees. With no brakes,’ David adds.

Rexford-Welch decided to restore the car as a recreation of the 1908 Paris-Nice-winning Itala. He had few tools to play with and even less in the way of raw materials. But, unusually for the time, he took photos as he went along, recording interesting solutions to difficult problems: house furniture was stripped for the wooden bodywork panels, and the engine was fully rebuilt, often under the dim glow of nothing more powerful than a Tilley lamp.

Once Rexford-Welch had finished the restoration, he put it back on the road. ‘Rex drove it on special occasions,’ David recalls. ‘Italas are not exactly user friendly. It has no electrics, and starts on the handle – so he mainly used it to attend car shows. Rex always wanted to recreate the famous Peking-Paris run, but time went on and he just didn’t get around to it.’

That’s where David and Karen come into the story. ‘Rex was a friend of my father – they both shared a passion for Lagondas – but contact had been broken. However, when I moved into my current house, I knew he was in the area. It didn’t take long for Rex to introduce himself when he saw my vintage cars around. We’ve been firm friends since.’

David was an Itala fan and was captivated by the story of Borghese’s performance in the 1907 Peking to Paris. If Rexford-Welch wasn’t able to take part in a re-run, his beloved Itala could – and so he decided to sell it to David, who now had the perfect car for the run. The restoration began immediately.
 
But as original factory blueprints aren’t available, restoring it accurately took some cunning. A plan involving a camera, tape measure and three Ryanair tickets to Turin was hatched.

‘I went to the Carlo Biscaretti Di Ruffia museum in 2004 to look at the original car – and, to be honest, they weren’t very helpful. In the end we climbed over the rail, measuring and taking pictures while keeping a look out for security. It was the only way to be sure that we could get our car exactly right.
 
‘Up to that point, we still weren’t quite sure about the configuration we wanted, but in Turin it all clicked beautifully. I realised that we had an identical chassis to Borghese’s car. The more I checked the museum’s car, the clearer it became that we were dealing with sister cars.

‘Everything aligned beautifully: the Endurance Rally Association’s 2007 centenary re-enactment of the Peking to Paris was a mere three years away… and we knew what we had to do.’