Meet the dealer: Tom Hardman

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Tom Hardman's name must be familiar to anyone whose passion is for vintage and post-vintage sports cars. A quick look at his current stock makes it perfectly clear why: with such machinery on offer as an Aston Martin 15/98, ex-works Lea-Francis Hyper, Talbot-Lago T120, Delahaye 135 CS and Bentley Three-Litre tourer, his showroom contains some of the very finest specimens on the market at any one time. Located high up in the north of England, at the southern edge of the Forest of Bowland, a remote but very beautiful region, the Hardman showroom is surely worth a visit for anyone who happens to be looking for a high-quality sporting machine of the pre- or early post-war period.

Tom's infatuation with historic vehicles can be traced back to his childhood, as the son of enthusiast parents. "We didn't have a modern car growing up," he says. "We had a 1926 Humber 12/25 tourer. My mum was the only driver because my dad had bad eyesight, so he was the mechanic. My first race meeting was at Oulton Park in 1978. I was a few weeks old, and travelled in a basket on the floor of the Humber. I thought the country was really big because it took us two days to go to St. Albans for our holidays... My dad died when I was 20 and left me an Austin Seven Chummy for my 21st birthday present. At that age, I thought a Chummy was a bit uncool so I sold it and built a racing car, which was known as the B&Q Special because I made the body from hardwood at Prescott. I keep looking for the Chummy now—I shouldn't have sold my birthday present."

Despite having to be rebuilt after a bad accident at Cadwell Park in 2007, Tom's do-it-yourself Seven served him well as a racing car until 2009, when he got married and sold it. While his weekends were packed with speed and excitement on track, his day-to-day job at the time was rather more mundane. Originally, he had trained as a patternmaker and toolmaker, and worked for eleven years in engineering before deciding to move into modern car sales in 2004. After six years of that, he realised he was in a position to combine work and play, and in 2010 he did what any of us would have done had we been in his shoes.

Thus did Tom Hardman Ltd. come into being: "I used to test the B&Q Special on the farm where we are. I was looking for premises and the farmer said, 'There's a barn round the back.' It was the archetypal barn-find setting—it had no roof and it still had cattle stalls in it."

It needed work, clearly, but it had potential. Tom renovated it and, after starting with 1,100 sq. ft. of space, expanded first to 3,500 sq. ft., then to 4,000, and is now preparing to add another 2,000. He's justifiably proud of the site he's got: "It's idyllic. You drive to it down a hundred-year-old tree-lined drive, and it's on the Tolkien Trail, because nearby Stonyhurst College is where Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings."

Being so well-connected within the V.S.C.C., he has never had any trouble in finding new stock. "We started with a lot of Riley specials, but we do much more now. I like to sell what I like to drive, which might not be the right way to do things, but it's easy to sell the cars you like. We've sold some amazing cars, like a Maserati 6CM, a Frazer Nash Nürburg and a very original Three-Litre Bentley. I like the stories behind the cars. I had a Cooper which won the Luxembourg Grand Prix, and that was bought by Luxembourg's car museum [the Conservatoire National de Véhicules Historiques] for display. I sold a Vauxhall 14/40 to some people in Scotland who wanted it just because it had a Scottish number plate. It could have been the roughest one or the best."

Since getting started, Tom has been very fortunate in being able to combine business with pleasure. "In 2016, I went to Montlhéry with four cars plus the MG Bellevue Special. I drove the MG round the track and eventually found a way of buying it. I'm now driving an ERA, AJM1. It was a boyhood dream. At the V.S.C.C. Silverstone meeting, which was always the weekend before my birthday, I bought myself a pencil drawing of an ERA and promised myself I'd be driving one one day. Now I am, twenty-five years later."

In the fourteen years he's been in business, Tom has amassed numerous loyal customers from around the world. He is happy to take care of all the shipping and paperwork arrangements to make the sale as easy as possible. "At one point, two thirds of my cars went abroad, but now it's about ten per cent. It's really changed since leaving the E.U. A lot of European clients are selling through us, through recommendations more than anything else."

While sales are Tom's main focus, and he typically has between ten and sixteen cars for sale at any one time, his premises are well-equipped to offer other, complementary services. Although he no longer runs a workshop, he retains the facilities and knows a number of specialists he can contact to work on cars if required. The most recent development, as of October, 2022, is the creation of a storage facility for up to thirty cars, and it's proving popular—"I need another building to increase capacity," he mentions.

With all that going on, Tom's got enough to keep him busy, but he still manages to find time for racing and family life. As his children are now at primary school, that involves dropping them off at the gates in something interesting, and often quite racy. "The kids love it. If a car comes into stock as it's school-run time, it gets used. These cars need running and the next generation needs to see them. My children go to the same school that I went to, so dropping them off and picking them up in the Humber is like going full circle."

Indeed, though Tom has vintage Bentleys, Aston Martins, Rileys and Sunbeams at his disposal, the faithful Humber is still serving him well after fifty-eight years in the family. It just goes to show that historic cars are more than a matter of business to Tom; he's an enthusiast at heart, and can be as sentimental about a car as any of us.

Tom Hardman Ltd. is located at Foxfields Farm, Whalley Road, Stonyhurst, Lancashire. For more information, visit www.tomhardman.com

The full current stock can be viewed here.

Photographs supplied by Tom Hardman Ltd., except for the action shot of the Bellevue Special (copyright Colin Murrell)

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