Another mystery car

[galro]

sun.and.rain said:

When this thread first started I thought the car was a prop for film/tv.

Edited by sun.and.rain on Sunday 21st February 16:14

But is likely that a movie prop would have been constructed that way? To me it looks like someone have actually gone to great effort to get a low frontal area and likely have the engine as far back as possible in the car, which to me point in the direction of someone being affiliated with racing. The same goes for the flipfront. I can't help thinking that the car is too small to be useable in a movie too. What star would want to crawl out of such a car on the screen?

But if it is a car used in tv or film then I guess the people at IMCDB would know about it, but I'm not sure how to contact anyone there when you do not know what movie or what car your are looking for.

Edit: Apparently they have a forum: http://imcdb.opencommunity.be/forum_categories.htm...

Edited by galro on Sunday 21st February 16:40

[sun.and.rain]

galro said:

sun.and.rain said:

When this thread first started I thought the car was a prop for film/tv.

Edited by sun.and.rain on Sunday 21st February 16:14

But is likely that a movie prop would have been constructed that way? To me it looks like someone have actually gone to great effort to get a low frontal area and likely have the engine as far back as possible in the car, which to me point in the direction of someone being affiliated with racing. The same goes for the flipfront. I can't help thinking that the car is too small to be useable in a movie too. What star would want to crawl out of such a car on the screen?

But if it is a car used in tv or film then I guess the people at IMCDB would know about it, but I'm not sure how to contact anyone there when you do not know what movie or what car your are looking for.

Edit: Apparently they have a forum: http://imcdb.opencommunity.be/forum_categories.htm...

Edited by galro on Sunday 21st February 16:40

Just a thought, don't worry about it.

[galro]

sun.and.rain said:

Just a thought, don't worry about it.

Sorry if I come across as dismissive or anything. I personally do not think it is a movie prop car, but I do think it is a something that could be worth looking into (like through that forum) just to be sure. I would really like to have a confirmed identification of the car.

[galro]

I'm pretty convinced that the car is now either a Arnott or have some realation to whoever designed the hardtop of their Climax GT. The reason is simply due to the way the gullwing doors are constructed. All other gullwings I've seen have had their gullwing on the flat/close to flat part of the roof so that the gullwing shutlines are not visisble unless you see it from above. However both the Arnott and the mystery car have the unusal setup where the part of gullwing panels actually starts quite low on the roof and have a rather step incline to them. I do not really know how to explain it, but in short the roof continues to rise until the red dots on both cars.



This makes the gullwing shutlines very visible from the front. This seems to be a feature on both the Arnott and the mystery car, but no other cars I've found.


I'm therefore convinced that these two gullwing coupés are designed by the same person unless some other person can show me another car wih a similar design details. The closest match I've found is the Marcos gullwing but even their it don't appears to be as "extreme" as with these two cars. I've also discovered that Arnott was actually active until either 1961 or 1960 and 1957 was only the year they withdrew from competition. I think they spent the year between 1957 and 1960/61 further developing the Climax GT into a street-able gt prototype but I have found no proof for that part yet.

Edited by galro on Sunday 21st February 23:16

[threespires]

galro :-
There's a lot to your observations that add up.
Good sleuthing --

[Roy C]

Good work. Let's hope we can get a bit closer to the origin of the car with this information.

British Pathe has an old film clip of Daphne Arnott and her F3 car.
Girl Car Manufacturer 1953: https://youtu.be/W9H10GrdUY8

There's also a good video of the Arnott-Climax GT Le Mans car here: https://youtu.be/78BPk8_yvIo
...but no evidence of who built the body.

Edited by Roy C on Monday 22 February 07:37

[uk66fastback]

That all sounds feasible in theory, and you present good visual evidence to support that - BUT (devil's advocate) - how come the rest of the car is SO different?

The doors/side window in particular = and the rear screen, don't you think they might have kept more details (or design characteristics) from the original car?

Your gullwing similarity observations are well founded though but is there really any other evidence? Maybe there is but it is yet to be unearthed ...

Having looked at the videos of the race car (what a resto!) I suppose how far back towards the middle of the car the engine is mounted gives further support to your claim - the mystery car's low bonnet line would suggest similar.

Great work!

Edited by uk66fastback on Monday 22 February 08:05

[Roy C]

uk66fastback said:

That all sounds feasible in theory, and you present good visual evidence to support that - BUT (devil's advocate) - how come the rest of the car is SO different?

The doors/side window in particular = and the rear screen, don't you think they might have kept more details (or design characteristics) from the original car?

Your gullwing similarity observations are well founded though but is there really any other evidence? Maybe there is but it is yet to be unearthed ...

It's most probable that the mystery car isn't an Arnott (Arnott's Garages closed in 1961). All their other sports cars had fibreglass bodies. But it is possible that whoever built the Arnott GT body also made the mystery car body. It appears to be a very well constructed vehicle. The Arnott car was built for Le Mans, so some of it's features wouldn't be entirely suitable for a road car.

I was hoping the video would show something like this, as it's not far from Edgware to W&P at Hornsey.

Edited by Roy C on Monday 22 February 08:24

[sun.and.rain]

galro said:

sun.and.rain said:

Just a thought, don't worry about it.

Sorry if I come across as dismissive or anything. I personally do not think it is a movie prop car, but I do think it is a something that could be worth looking into (like through that forum) just to be sure. I would really like to have a confirmed identification of the car.

No offence taken galro. At the moment it does look like we are looking for an Arnott-related road car built around 1959 -62.
Mystery car indeed!

[uk66fastback]

So do we reckon this mystery car is a one-off - I presume the Arnott car built for the '57 Le Mans race was a one-off. They built one for 1955 but it crashed and was repaired. It looked NOTHING like the '57 car. And as Arnott Garages closed in 1961, as you say Roy, this is probably not an Arnott car but COULD have been designed by the same guy who penned the design for the '57 car. But who would it have been?

Surely these things would have cost the earth back then as one-offs ...

Probably alluded to previously in this thread: fantastic source for archive material now sadly not in current use due to legal wranglings.

http://www.williamsandpritchardregister.co.uk

Edited by uk66fastback on Monday 22 February 09:18

[Roy C]

Slightly OT, but I hadn't realised that Charlie Williams of W&P had previously (before WW2) worked for Corsica in Highbury.
They made some lovely car bodies (mostly one-offs).

Edited by Roy C on Monday 22 February 11:34

[galro]

uk66fastback said:

That all sounds feasible in theory, and you present good visual evidence to support that - BUT (devil's advocate) - how come the rest of the car is SO different?

Because it is a very different car. First off every car Arnot produced very likely different from each other as they produced a 2,5 cars a year at average. This means that they likely produced individual designs for each cars. All pictures I've found of Arnott cars seems to show great design variation between the cars.

I think this car further differs from the rest their production is that it was mainly built as more of street-able sports coupé than a proper race car.

uk66fastback said:

T
The doors/side window in particular = and the rear screen, don't you think they might have kept more details (or design characteristics) from the original car?

I don't think the Climax-gt is the "original car" in the sense that I think they took a Climax-gt and fitted it with new bodywork. Our sports car is likely a completely new design, at least body-wise. I think they just used some of the ideas from Climax-gt in it.

The Climax was developed as a racecar to go to Le Mans in while I think this is more of a sports coupé aimed at the likes of Lotus Elite. That's two very different cars that require very different solution, not least in terms of refinement of the styling.


I do not believe it is possible that two people in London built so similar gullwings at the same time. Also take a look at the square shutlines on the roof on both cars, how the gullwings cover almost the whole roof with only a slim pillar in the middle. Imho they must have been designed by the same hand. Given how it appears like Arnott did their design in-house and the Climax GT was a works car, leaves me thinking it must have been designed by Arnott. It could fit with their withdrew from competition in 1957 too to presumable focus on something else.

Edited by galro on Monday 22 February 12:46

[galro]

uk66fastback said:

So do we reckon this mystery car is a one-off - I presume the Arnott car built for the '57 Le Mans race was a one-off.

Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say as little information exist, but we have this picture showing a Climax-gt with a slightly different front and slightly different bonnet. Of course it could be the same car that was later modified to provide better cooling, but it could also be a different one.

[Roy C]

galro said:

I do not believe it is possible that two people in London built so similar gullwings at the same time. Also take a look at the square shutlines on the roof on both cars, how the gullwings cover almost the whole roof with only a slim pillar in the middle. Imho they must have been designed by the same hand. Given how it appears like Arnott did their design in-house and the Climax GT was a works car, leaves me thinking it must have been designed by Arnott. It could fit with their withdrew from competition in 1957 too to presumable focus on something else.

I agree that the roof arrangement seems to be by the same hand, but I doubt that a small garage used to building F3 cars and plastic-bodied sports cars could turn their hand to build an alloy body with that level of sophistication. The Arnott GT video suggests that quite a high skill level would be required to make such a purposeful design.

[galro]

Roy C said:

I agree that the roof arrangement seems to be by the same hand, but I doubt that a small garage used to building F3 cars and plastic-bodied sports cars could turn their hand to build an alloy body with that level of sophistication. The Arnott GT video suggests that quite a high skill level would be required to make such a purposeful design.

They also built this stream-lined record car which could perhaps be in aluminium but I'm not sure. It seems to share some of the tail design with the Climax-gt too.


But of course I do not know whether the body of the Climax was built by Arnott or not, but I'm pretty sure that whoever built it also built the roof on the mystery car.

[uk66fastback]

Where do these seemingly one-off cars end up? I know it's 50+ years ago but were they crashec, crushed, cannibalised, hammered flat, burnt in a fire, bought for a private collection, pinched, sold many times etc ... fascinating.

Is the mystery car no more or is it sitting in Zurich somewhere under a dust-sheet? Love the not knowing! It'll be a shame when it's named in the end (maybe)

[galro]

uk66fastback said:

Where do these seemingly one-off cars end up? I know it's 50+ years ago but were they crashec, crushed, cannibalised, hammered flat, burnt in a fire, bought for a private collection, pinched, sold many times etc ... fascinating.

Is the mystery car no more or is it sitting in Zurich somewhere under a dust-sheet? Love the not knowing! It'll be a shame when it's named in the end (maybe)

Depends on the car of course, but a surprisingly amount of one-off have seemingly just disappeared and no one knows what happened to them. And that even goes for one-offs produced by famous coachbuilders. I actually recently started to compile a wiki with the ambition of getting a over-view over all one-offs and such and what happened to them, and there is surprisingly little information about many of them. Example: The Bertone Mustang, a big deal when it was built, but no one have seen it since 1967 and there are just rumours that it is out there somewhere owned by someone who do not want to show it to the public.



But on the bright side more and more one-offs have started "suddenly" appearing in recent years, like the Ford Cougar II that was found in a waarehouse in Detroit or Renault Boano Fregate that was found in a garage in France:

Edited by galro on Monday 22 February 13:47

[uk66fastback]

I wrote an article on that Bertone Mustang once for the club mag when I edited it and it was indeed rumoured to be in a private collection somewhere t maybe one day make an appearance again ...

[galro]

uk66fastback said:

I wrote an article on that Bertone Mustang once for the club mag when I edited it and it was indeed rumoured to be in a private collection somewhere t maybe one day make an appearance again ...

There are a number of such cars that are rumoured to still be around. Apparently the Jaguar Xk120 by Pininfarina I posted in another thread is supposed to be under restoration in Germany now and there are many rumours that at least one Zagato Lancia D20 exist in Italy somewhere, but only period pictures seems to exist of both cars. It's a shame as I love quirky and unique cars.

[838HNK]

The front headlights are driving me mad but I did come across this little beauty ... a Triumph Harry Webster Zebu ..



I realise there are some fundamentals wrong about it but the front and the angular line running front to back could be a clue ?