said this was "in part because Coatalen was so good at selling ideas to the Admiralty and War Office." He was appointed a director of STD Motors when in 1920 Sunbeam joined with Clément-Talbot and Darracq to form STD Motors Limited, but he remained chief engineer of Sunbeam. He was later put in charge of the technical and designing staffs of all STD subsidiaries. Race cars With the success of 1.5-litre Talbot-Darracq cars, his main interest became racing cars. Their wins catapulted Sunbeam to the highest echelons of international competition from the legendary success at the 1912 Coupe de l’Auto to winning the 1914 and 1922 Tourist Trophy and 1923 and 1924 Grand Prix. Coatelen collaborated with the industry foremost designer Ernest Henry on the 1922 Grand Prix Sunbeams and had some of the most respected drivers of the period – Henry Segrave, Jean Chassagne and Kenelm Lee Guinness driving his Sunbeam cars. In 1926, Sunbeam's racing activities were taken into the STD company and moved to Suresnes near Paris in France and although Coatalen continued working part-time in Wolverhampton, he spent most of his time in Paris. On his direction, Sunbeam was among the first British manufacturers to provide front wheel brakes. Coatalen's innovations included balancing the wheels (a technique also claimed by Sig Haugdahl) and putting the oil pump in the sump, and he was an early advocate of shock absorbers. Record breaking Sunbeam became heavily involved in land speed record attempts including the successful 1000HP car of 1927 and the failed 'Silver Bullet' of 1930. Louis Coatalen designed the engines for the first car to exceed 150 miles per hour and the first car to exceed 200 miles an hour, the 1000 horsepower Sunbeam driven by Henry Segrave. France From the proceeds of his S T D share sale, Coatalen bought control of the French branch of Lockheed hydraulics and with the income from this bought a yacht and a villa on the Isle of Capri. During the Second World War he lived in France and he continued living there until his sudden death in Paris in 1962 aged 82. Marriages Louis Coatalen married four times: in 1902 to Annie Ellen Davis (divorced 1906), in 1910 to Olive Bath (daughter of a Sunbeam director, Henry J Bath), in 1923 to Iris van Raalte, née Graham, and in 1934 to Ellen Bridson known to family as Dickie. There