Jay, back in 1989 I looked at a Tiger for sale in Atlanta Ga and part of the
deal was a Harrington top off an Alpine....The car was a mess...but the top
looked good. Don't know what ever happened to it. When I was service manager
at the Navy Exchange Gas station at Miramar there was a traveling salesman
from LA that was driving a Harrington Lemans w/fins that looked like it had
been around the world 80 times in 1 day! It had about 268,000 miles on it I
think and the guy said when it quit running he would restore it...Never saw
that one again either...that was 1994 . I have been studying the 70's
Datsun B210 fastback and it is very similar to the Harrington top...even the
windshield looks like the Lemans Car....now that would be a great conversion
to save a poor little fintale that would otherwise be butchered into a tiger
! Maybe you ought to save that 62, put a 210 top on it and a 3.2 litre
chrysler 225 hp aluminum v6 from the 99 Chrysler~!
-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Laifman <Jay_Laifman(at)countrywide.com>
To: alpines(at)autox.team.net <alpines(at)autox.team.net>
Date: Monday, March 29, 1999 11:06 AM
Subject: "Harrington" and Fin design
>
>
>
>If you folks will recall, I commented about how terrific I thought a
>particular Harrington look alike was in the SAOC Horn from the Manx
>Classic. I just had a call from Steve Smith, the guy who organized the
>Manx Classic. He told me that the top was off of another production car,
>but he was sworn to secrecy about what car it was from. The guy who did it
>runs a body shop so did a lot of the work, which included metal work and
>fabrication. That was about it for the call, he had someone at the door.
>We weren't able to talk about his engine set up or how to get copies of the
>picture of him driving his Alpine on two wheels. I'll have to write him a
>letter.
>
>As to fin design, in reading the Hobson Sunbeam Alpine and Tiger book, I
>noticed something I had not noticed before. In the pictures of the early
>designs, the pointy fins actually did not slope up but down. That is, if
>you take a straight edge along the top of the door, you will note on the
>SIV,V and Tiger that the rear fins slope down, basically as much as the
>front fenders. I think the tip of the flat fin is about 1" lower than the
>top of the door. On the SI-III production cars, the fin pips up about 1"
>(on cars with lower springs in front, the fins appear to go up even more
>because the car is sloping more). But, if you take that same straight edge
>along the door of these early design models, the pointy fin model actually
>goes down too.
>
>Of course we will never know how or why. The book describes the design
>process. Three designers seem to have done most of the work, one being
>Howes. I hate to say it but I don't have the book here and I unfairly
>don't remember the other two guys' names. I'll be sure to post their names
>tomorrow. After the designers got to the end of each stage, the Rootes
>family would come and take a look. Each person in the family would have to
>suggest/require a change, even if it was hardly anything, they always had
>to have their say, and the designers had to agree. So, I don't know if the
>fins up or the fins down were Rootes family inspired or designer inspired.
>It seems that much of their motivations were centered on what they thought
>the American public wanted. The idea of the new sports car started in '57
>when fins were in full force. So, I would suspect the family wanted the
>fins up. They did say that the non-peaked rims were dropped in favor of
>the peaked fins specifically because Billy Rootes opined that Americans
>wanted them.
>
>I'm also not sure that the pointy fins sloping down slightly would have
>looked as good. It might have been a little droopy.
>
>Cheerio.
>
>Jay
>
>
>
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