Stephen:
Excellent job on the rebuttal! Thank you for taking the initiative in
informing SCM of their inadequacies concerning the Tiger article.
Hopefully, they will print your letter in response.
Andy Walker
B382001600LRXFE
----- Original Message -----
From: "stephen jones" <joness@wsu.edu>
To: <tigers@autox.team.net>
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2002 12:19 PM
Subject: Sports Car Market Tiger article
> The November issue of Sports Car Market is out and it has a one pager on
> Tigers under their Affordable Classic heading. Gary Anderson, editor of
> British Car Magazine wrote it and basically it is a rehash of the
> usual. However, he states that real Tigers are only worth 1/3 more than a
> fake. That paragraph starts with the sentence: "Surprisingly, there isn't
> a huge difference between a real Tiger and a nicely executed
> fake." Funny that they would allow this to get in the magazine, Norm
> wrote a nice piece on fakes in the same magazine just a year or so
> ago. And Anderson does state earlier in the piece that "...your worst
> danger in buying one of these cars is buying a converted Alpine...."
The
> article in general sends some pretty serious mixed messages and there was
> no mention of the TAC program at all.
>
> Below is my letter to the editor of the magazine:
>
> Dear Editor:
>
> I was happy to see Sunbeam Tigers covered as your November "Affordable
> Classic". As the owner of a 1964 Tiger I can live with the assigned SCM
> investment Grade of "B" for Tigers. But what I can't live with is the
> statement that: "Surprisingly, there isn't a huge difference between a
> real Tiger and a nicely executed fake." To be fair, the context of the
> statement was dealing with costs of Tigers but it may be taken by some in
> the more literal way that it was written, specifically that indeed there
is
> little difference between real and fake Tigers. It's unfortunate that the
> addition of the words "in price" added after the word "difference" would
> have changed the whole meaning of the sentence and left it in the economic
> context. Although one could easily argue that price differences are in
> fact huge, the main point is that the difference between a real Tiger and
a
> fake one is that a fake is a fake is a fake. That is true with a GTO, a
> GT350, a big block Vette or any other factory specialty car. Fake Tigers
> that are passed off as real (many eventually are) can have devastating
> effects for the new owner and for the collector community as a
> whole. Usually your magazine is much more careful in pointing out the
> value in originality but you seemed to be a bit lax in this case. That
> surprised me because Norm Miller, a marque expert, wrote a piece for your
> magazine several issues back on the danger of fake Tigers. For many years
> the Sunbeam Tiger Owner Association has organized the Tiger
Authentication
> Committee (TAC) which inspects, verifies and registers real Tigers. A
> buyer can be sure that if the car has been TACed that it did indeed start
> it's life as a real Tiger. And speaking of originality, the original ID
> tags were held on by rivets, not by screws as stated in your
> article.---Stephen Jones, Pullman, WA
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