I was reading the book "Tiger: An Exceptional Motorcar". It tells the
story of the two prototype Tigers, the one by Shelby's company and the
one by Ken Miles. The book seems to leave out details of why they
bothered with two. They just gave $10,000 to Shelby to do it. Maybe
other books address this - or maybe this is otherwise common knowledge I
have not learned yet. My uneducated guess is that Shelby's attitude was
his way was right, period. But, Ian Garrard might have felt that the less
modifications the better (to convince the home office of the idea) and
wanted to prove it with a conversion setting the engine farther forward.
It seems Shelby won out. Is this true?
The book also seems to leave out why they gave Shelby a royalty on every
Tiger (anyone know how much?). The story says that Shelby was paid
$10,000 to develop a prototype, but nothing else. Seems Shelby wanted to
make all of them, but Rootes was worried about quality control and wanted
them built in England. My guess (uneducated again) was that someone was
overeager and promised Shelby more than the book suggests, but management
wanted all the glory - so they had to pay him for the promise. You would
think that Shelby would also want his name on the car somewhere. So,
either the royalty was to pay Shelby to use his name in advertisements, or
to pay Shelby for not putting his name on the car. Maybe it is extremely
ironic that some Tiger owners out there have had Shelby sign their cars.
Any thoughts?
Jay
Jay S. Laifman
Pircher, Nichols & Meeks
1999 Avenue of the Stars
Los Angeles, California 90067
(310) 201-8915
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