Randall Young wrote:
The practice then was to register the car in the year it was
sold (IOW they were perpetually 'new' cars as long as they sat on the
dealer's lot), and some cars sat on the dealer's lot for a long time. For
example, my Sports 6 was clearly made in 1963, but the paperwork indicates
it was first sold in 1965. (By then, there was a separate tag applied to
cars sold late, and I have the "STC-65" tag. But the tags were not required
in 1961.)
Let the record also state that 'sitting around in England' was by no means
an unknown phenomenon. I have a memory of spending a day at Honeybourne
(very close to where I now live) and thirty odd miles from Coventry on
anti-freeze duty. This was to add anti-freeze to the cooling systems of
summer built cars that although ordered and awaiting shipment, were still
'in stock' because of delays in receiving the various letters of credit to
pay for the vehicles they covered. This was an annual ritual that took place
on a freezing, windswept WW2 airfield that was often half flooded with cars
sitting in a morass of mud and often close to their axles in water. I also
remember selling one or two cars that had been in stock for so long that in
the summer of the following year, they eventually found their first owner
and we then had to explain the additional charge for anti-freeze on a car
delivered in June of the following year. Note: the explanation was not
because the car had been built up to a year earlier! Then there's the story
of the TR4A that missed its anti-freeze dosage, froze solid, blew the core
plugs, drained itself in the Spring and was then driven under its own power
to London with no coolant at all. I still have the letter from its owner who
said what a reliable car it had been, despite a cruelly hard driven life.
Says quite a lot for the old wet liner four, I think.
Jonmac
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.547 / Virus Database: 340 - Release Date: 02/12/03
|