Mike Hewland ran a small engineering business in Maidenhead with a speciality in gear cutting. In 1959, Bob Gibson-Jarvie, Chief Mechanic of the UDT Laystall racing team running Cooper F2 cars, sought help from Hewland after experiencing gearbox trouble. Hewland designed and built six gearboxes in response, entering the racing gearbox business.
The first Hewland transaxle, the Mk.I of 1960, was a modified Volkswagen Beetle 4-speed transaxle used inverted, with custom differential housing side plates, for the mid-engine Lola Mk.III. That car used a John Young-tuned Ford 105E 997cc pushrod engine and was built for the Formula Junior regulations. The Mk.II was a similarly modified 4-speed transaxle for the Coventry Climax-engined Elva Mk.VI 1.1-litre sports racer, also in 1961.
The Mk.III of 1962 was Hewland's first product offered to the public. It housed five pairs of bespoke straight-cut constant mesh spur gears with dog rings in a Volkswagen magnesium alloy case, operated by custom brass shift forks. The elimination of synchromesh parts freed space for a fifth speed. The Mk.III became popular for small-displacement formula cars and sports cars and formed the basis for all subsequent products.
The Mk.IV featured a Hewland-manufactured tail casing with the selector rod repositioned to the right side lower position facing forward, simplifying shifter linkage design for chassis manufacturers. Its high-torque variant, the Mk.V, made both units strong sellers. The Mk.VI of 1965 was an improved version of the Mk.IV and established Hewland as the dominant volume-production transaxle manufacturer for small-displacement mid-engine racing cars, aided by widespread adoption in the newly established Formula Ford series.
Hewland gearboxes offered several advantages: dog-ring gear selection for extremely fast shifting; the ability to change gear ratios on second through fifth speeds without removing the transaxle from the car or detaching it from the engine; an inverted layout that allowed dry-sump racing engines to be mounted low in the chassis; and interchangeable third, fourth, and fifth gears sharing the same thickness and drive/driven axis distance. The use of the Volkswagen magnesium alloy case provided strength at low weight.
The corpus notes that a transaxle in an aluminium alloy case for mid-engine racing had been designed by Ferdinand Porsche and built by Horch in 1933 as part of the Auto Union Type A, and that Valerio Colotti had been producing racing gearboxes before 1959 — his transaxle debuted at the 1959 Monaco Grand Prix on a Behra-Porsche. Lotus Engineering also produced a transaxle for the front-engine Lotus 12 in 1957.
Hewland dominated racing scenes through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The company has since shifted focus toward custom engineering work for vehicle manufacturers while continuing to cover almost all racing and rallying classes. Hewland now also offers complete semi-automatic transmission system components including shift actuators, throttle actuators, compressors, shift position sensors, and steering wheel paddle-shift systems.
Beyond single-seater racing, Hewland supplied gearboxes for the track day cars Caparo T1 and BAC Mono. Following an approach from Richard Noble, Hewland designed and built the AE75, a 75 bhp inverted three-cylinder water-cooled two-stroke aero-engine with dual ignition and a 2.7:1 reduction gearbox for the Noble ARV Super2 two-seat light aircraft. The AE75 weighed 49 kg, contributing to an overall aircraft weight 40 per cent lighter than the competing Cessna 152. Hewland also provided a custom high-torque transmission for the Buckeye Bullet 3, which holds the electric land speed record at 549.4 km/h (341.4 mph).
Hewland has supplied transmissions to the entire Formula E grid since the series' inaugural season and remains a key supplier to the championship.
In a July 1974 interview in Car & Driver magazine, Mike Hewland described work he and head engineer John Logan had undertaken on a 500 cc single-cylinder sleeve-valve engine, drawing on Hewland's wartime experience at Bristol. Hewland reported achieving 70–73 hp and 47.5 lb-ft of torque, with a fuel economy of 0.45 lb/hp/hr in the racing version and 0.39 lb/hp/hr in an economy version, with Formula 1 as the target application.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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