JustBritish

Two icons of British car lore, a 1928 Rolls-Royce and a 1950 Aston Martin, will be on display at a concours event July 21-24 in London.

The cars are being shown at Salon Prive, a supercar and concours gathering next week in advance of RM auctions’ sale in October.

While the auction could get pricey with competitive bidding, Salon Prive will offer fans of British cars an opportunity to simply soak in these storied rides.

The 1928 Rolls-Royce Phantom I “Jarvis Torpedo” wears chassis No. 17EX and is one of just three experimental chassis made by the company at the time.

The 1950 Aston Martin DB2 Team Car “VMF 64,” with Mille Miglia and Le Mans credentials, is considered one of the most successful early DB2 sports saloons. The auction will be the first time this car has been on the market in 53 years.

The Aston Martin also will be entered in the concours in the Le Mans class.

Read more: http://www.autoweek.com

Whilst the Phoenix Four – via their media spokesperson – engage in an a somewhat unseemly public spat over who was responsible for the collapse of MG Rover four years ago with the loss of 6,300 jobs at Longbridge and several thousand more in the wider economy, we need to remember who really lost out here. I doubt if it was the Phoenix Four, who did rather well out of the whole affair – after all their remuneration, pensions and other benefits ran into the millions.

Rather, it is the workers and their families, who deserve some answers as to what went so wrong at MG Rover under Phoenix’s stewardship.

Lord Mandelson’s statement earlier this week that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to investigate the circumstances surrounding the collapse MG Rover back in 2005 did genuinely come as a surprise in that if there were grounds for calling in the SFO, one wonders why it wasn’t done much earlier.

However, Mandelson was acting on the advice of government lawyers, and I don’t buy the argument that is an attempt to kick the report into ‘the long grass’ as some on the Tory benches have claimed. In fact, the government has attracted a lot of political flack for doing this.
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Executives at Jaguar Land Rover, the Midlands carmaker, are drawing up plans for an extended shutdown of its UK plants and a new round of staff layoffs as it struggles to cope with the slump in the world car market.

Preparation for the closures comes just days after the company released its new flagship, the latest version of the Jaguar XJ beloved by prime ministers and top British executives.
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This story from the San Francisco Chronicle….

Richard Haas is a marketing consultant based in the Peninsula. A Bay Area native, he was brought up in the United States, South America and Europe.

I grew up with British motorcycles and cars – BSAs, Triumphs and MGs. My first motorcycle was a 650 side valve BSA with sidecar I bought with an older friend. I remember my Mom’s black MGA fondly, and my first college car was a Sunbeam Alpine.

One day in 1996, my future wife and I were driving past a gas station on Camden Avenue in San Jose when we spotted a green MG Midget with a “for sale” sign. We called the guy who had left it there – it was a repo (thanks to too many traffic tickets), and he wanted $1,600 for it. It looked pretty ratty, but it was all there, down to the tonneau cover and ripped ragtop. He took $1,500 and we drove away in it.

The MG Midget is a classic British sports car that developed a cult following due to its unique styling, small size and association with the “mod” fashions of England in the 1960s. The model was first introduced in 1961 and managed to stay alive until the last few cars trickled off the assembly line in 1980. Despite the cool look of these two-seaters, the Midget was plagued with the mechanical problems that affected so many British cars of the era. In fact, devotees of British cars and motorcycles refer to Joseph Lucas as the “Prince of Darkness,” because of the shoddy electronic components made for the U.K. car industry by the company he founded.

The first thing I noticed was that none of the gauges worked. I popped the hood and started looking around and could see that it had been repainted cheaply in a sort of imitation British Racing Green, with a worn metallic accent to it. I saw a partially painted-over original sticker that read “Negative Earth.” I also looked at the battery, which had been hooked up backwards by some backyard mechanic. I hooked it up properly, and, voila, the gauges all worked again. Other than that, the Midget ran pretty well, despite smoky and noisy exhaust, drippy SU carbs, suspect electrics, hard tires and no brakes.

We took our first extended trip down Highway 1 to Carmel with it and had no problems at all, except for an obvious lack of speed. On the day of our wedding we drove around with a cardboard “just married” sign taped to the luggage rack. A Mexican couple outside of City Hall gave us a rosary for good luck. We hung it from the rearview mirror, and it brings us good mojo to this day.

The Midget has let us down a few times, of course. Several times with my wife driving, it couldn’t make it past Volvo corner in Palo Alto. There was a curse there: We had to have it exorcised by a Swedish priest. Another time Prince of Darkness Joseph Lucas tried to end my days on 237 by igniting the wiring harness. I nearly suffocated with the top up! Luckily, I made it to the side of the road and called AAA after yanking out what was left of the wiring.

My brother and I replaced the motor with a fresher one in an afternoon – gotta love the simplicity of these old vehicles. Another time my brother helped me troubleshoot a cracked distributor cap by phone from San Diego. And I recently stopped by Kragen for some oil, got back in the car, started it, heard a “snap.” I knew right away the original 40-year-old throttle cable had just given up.

The Midget is an ideal vehicle for local trips, because it’s small, economical and I can park it anywhere. It’s not so good for those yard sales, or those long boring trips up and down Interstate 5. It’s best to belong to AAA, and know good nearby car mechanics who specialize in British cars. I don’t think we’ll ever sell it – the car is way too much fun, and we probably wouldn’t get much for it anyway!

An interesting article from The Yuma Sun ….

Stan Gourley is a man who obviously loves cars, particularly his 1970 Triumph TR6. The car sits in his garage, partially restored.

“You know,” Gourley said, looking at his jasmine yellow car, “it’s really sad to think that in 20 or 30 years this TR-6 would probably be a Chevrolet Camaro or a Pontiac GTO or an Oldsmobile 442.”

Gourley, a man who knows British sports cars, explains that he thinks what happened to the British Leyland Co. back in the ’70s and what is occurring to General Motors now is too similar to be ignored.

“They were a giant company that dominated the market for British cars in the ’60s and ’70s, but then they had real labor problems, the government nationalized the companies, then guaranteed billions of dollars in bailout money but formed committees to run the companies.
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Jaguar has emerged from its stuffy, country-club period, the one that saw it essentially remake over and over and over again the original XJ for 41 years. Jaguar now wants to be sexy and modern. Founder Sir William Lyons would most certainly approve.

He was never a man to look backwards, to live in yesterday, endlessly reliving the great triumphs of the past. He was a forward-looking, innovative fellow. His cars of the 1950s and into the 1960s were cutting-edge and daring for their time.

That’s what Jaguar is trying to recapture.

“It’s about making Jaguars that are quintessentially Jaguars,” O’Driscoll said.

But this is a nervous business. Jaguar, now part of Tata’s integrated Jaguar Land Rover Group (JLR), is not swimming in dough. Far from it.

Tata Motors’ Indian business, which relies mostly on truck sales, made a profit for its last fiscal year, but the group as a whole was dragged into the red with a consolidated net loss of 25.1 billion rupees ($576-million). The problem was a 32-per-cent fall in sales volumes at Jaguar and Land Rover combined.

Land Rover has been the hardest hit by the global recession. Its sales fell 39 per cent to 120,000 units during the June, 2008, to March, 2009, period under Tata ownership. Jaguar sales fell only 4 per cent to 47,000 car.

But in the bad news there was something encouraging to be found. Jag’s XF mid-size sedan, launched last year, rescued the brand’s overall results. The car is a hit. And the design cues first shown in the XF are advanced much, much further in the new XJ. That has the Jag types feeling pretty hopeful.
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