Tommy Sopwith (racing driver) to powerboat racing. He is the owner of Endeavour Holdings Limited, a car dealership in Portslade, Brighton, with a turnover of £17 million. He was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire. Tommy Sopwith (racing driver) Thomas Edward Brodie Sopwith (born 15 November 1932) is a British businessman and former car racing driver. He is the son of English aviation pioneer and yachtsman Sir Thomas Sopwith, builder of the Sopwith Camel, and Phyllis Brodie. His success as a racing driver saw him win the first ever round of the British Saloon Car Championship in 1958. That year he narrowly lost out on
Sopwith Pup takeoff experiments. In 1915, Sopwith produced a personal aircraft for the company's test pilot Harry Hawker, a single-seat, tractor biplane powered by a 50 hp Gnome rotary engine. This became known as Hawker's Runabout; another four similar aircraft have been tentatively identified as Sopwith Sparrows. Sopwith next developed a larger fighter that was heavily influenced by this design, though more powerful and controlled laterally with ailerons rather than by wing warping. The resulting aircraft was a single-bay, single-seat biplane with a fabric-covered wooden framework and staggered equal-span wings. The cross-axle type main landing gear was supported by V-struts attached to