Another mystery car
Discussion
We've been through this 'it's been stripped in to the photo' argument before.
There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
I'm still going with my previous theory that this car did not exist in the past, but will in the future. Someone will build it as result of all the fruitless internet searching, but it will take so long that time travel will be invented in the meantime. It will then be taken back in time to appear in the photo, and thus complete the circle. Remember the Back To The Future car was also a gullwing coupe.
Yertis said:
We've been through this 'it's been stripped in to the photo' argument before.
There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
Apologies if this has been covered before as I may have missed something - it's quite a long thread.There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
It is fairly well established that the photo pre-dates the book. so it was intended for some other purpose.
Indeed the book is just a compilation of library shots, and there would have been no budget for retouching at that stage.
I would suggest that it isn't actually too good - in high-res. there is clear evidence of retouching particularly around the lower edges of the car, so the whole thing must be questionable. If it is an artist's sketch then it isn't a scale drawing, which explains why it is so difficult to scale it accurately. It also explains why some of the shut lines don't quite work.
It could certainly have been retouched in the 1960s, although obviously expensive - I believe the process would have been to paint the "car" onto a large copy of the original image, then photograph and reduce that.
Possibly the car was added to obscure something else in the original, which didn't suit the intended use? I keep an open mind.
Hawkshaw said:
Yertis said:
We've been through this 'it's been stripped in to the photo' argument before.
There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
Apologies if this has been covered before as I may have missed something - it's quite a long thread.There is zero chance that this happened.
1 Why bother?
2 The expense of airbrushing it in would be far more than the production budget for a niche non-fiction book would allow.
3 It's just too good. You'd be able to do it now, with CGI and Photoshop and what have you, but not in the 1960s. That would be a genius-level bit of retouching back then – see my previous two points.
It is fairly well established that the photo pre-dates the book. so it was intended for some other purpose.
Indeed the book is just a compilation of library shots, and there would have been no budget for retouching at that stage.
I would suggest that it isn't actually too good - in high-res. there is clear evidence of retouching particularly around the lower edges of the car, so the whole thing must be questionable. If it is an artist's sketch then it isn't a scale drawing, which explains why it is so difficult to scale it accurately. It also explains why some of the shut lines don't quite work.
It could certainly have been retouched in the 1960s, although obviously expensive - I believe the process would have been to paint the "car" onto a large copy of the original image, then photograph and reduce that.
Possibly the car was added to obscure something else in the original, which didn't suit the intended use? I keep an open mind.
I had the book this photo originates in when I was a kid!
Looking at the photo in the OP I can readily buy into the notion that is a doctored image. The car almost looks like a sticker, grafted onto the image. It looks too flat, but geometrically ambiguous at the same time. It is too small and too big! It just doesn't quite sit on the road. There is a strange highlighting around the lower half of the rear end. At the same time the wheels seem the most crisply defined element of the entire photograph. The blue colour also has a slightly otherworldly quality, almost shining up out the the image as though lit from behind. Everything else in the photo is either red or a generic shade of drab pre-psychedelia '60s Britain.
And while the pedestrians behind it appear to be avoiding it, the woman in the red top is about to blunder straight into it.
It is hard to second guess the motivation for taking such a chaotic photograph; albeit one that captures some odd skunkworks sports car in enough detail that it doesn't make logical sense when you start measuring things up. Getting incredibly hypothetical here, maybe the photograph was commissioned by a specialist garage that modified existing cars into these fantasy roadsters. They didn't have a car ready but they had something incomplete, say a fiberglass shell or quarter-sized model, and they had a chassis donor ready to roll. They got the photographer to take a photo of the donor vehicle in a busy hip 'n' happening London street setting then try and busk in the fibreglass shell to give an impression of a fully complete vehicle, being driven around town by a bright young thing... The next car could be your own!
On the other hand, my grandfather build various sportscars after the war from pre-war Austin parts, parts recovered from scrapped vehicles, sheet metal and DIY-fabricated components. He raced at least one of these cars (in fact it might have just been one car that evolved as he improved it). There is no record of these cars online but he did have photographs of them (or it) in various races. He certainly didn't build OP's mystery car, but there were a lot of guys out there chopping stuff up in garages and barns, and it all probably looked good from twenty feet away. Even when I was a kid my grandfather had something he had built using switches recovered from a scrapped WW2 bomber (I wish I had those switches!) and generally did a lot of repair and rebuilding work on his house, his various cars, tools, equipment etc.
Also look at Brian May's DIY guitar that he built with his father. Neither of them were luthiers by any stretch, but between them they had enough carpentry, electronics, engineering and finishing knowledge to be able to study existing electric guitars and reverse engineer and improve on what they saw. After WW2 there would be an influx of young people with robust engineering skills, happy to build the stuff they wanted if it couldn't be bought.
With all this in mind I think it is possible that there could be any number of one or two-man operations building exotic looking cars on existing chassis. They may only have built a handful of cars, and they have no legacy footprint on the Internet beyond an obscure advert or two from a local newspaper on a scanned microfiche somewhere.
Looking at the photo in the OP I can readily buy into the notion that is a doctored image. The car almost looks like a sticker, grafted onto the image. It looks too flat, but geometrically ambiguous at the same time. It is too small and too big! It just doesn't quite sit on the road. There is a strange highlighting around the lower half of the rear end. At the same time the wheels seem the most crisply defined element of the entire photograph. The blue colour also has a slightly otherworldly quality, almost shining up out the the image as though lit from behind. Everything else in the photo is either red or a generic shade of drab pre-psychedelia '60s Britain.
And while the pedestrians behind it appear to be avoiding it, the woman in the red top is about to blunder straight into it.
It is hard to second guess the motivation for taking such a chaotic photograph; albeit one that captures some odd skunkworks sports car in enough detail that it doesn't make logical sense when you start measuring things up. Getting incredibly hypothetical here, maybe the photograph was commissioned by a specialist garage that modified existing cars into these fantasy roadsters. They didn't have a car ready but they had something incomplete, say a fiberglass shell or quarter-sized model, and they had a chassis donor ready to roll. They got the photographer to take a photo of the donor vehicle in a busy hip 'n' happening London street setting then try and busk in the fibreglass shell to give an impression of a fully complete vehicle, being driven around town by a bright young thing... The next car could be your own!
On the other hand, my grandfather build various sportscars after the war from pre-war Austin parts, parts recovered from scrapped vehicles, sheet metal and DIY-fabricated components. He raced at least one of these cars (in fact it might have just been one car that evolved as he improved it). There is no record of these cars online but he did have photographs of them (or it) in various races. He certainly didn't build OP's mystery car, but there were a lot of guys out there chopping stuff up in garages and barns, and it all probably looked good from twenty feet away. Even when I was a kid my grandfather had something he had built using switches recovered from a scrapped WW2 bomber (I wish I had those switches!) and generally did a lot of repair and rebuilding work on his house, his various cars, tools, equipment etc.
Also look at Brian May's DIY guitar that he built with his father. Neither of them were luthiers by any stretch, but between them they had enough carpentry, electronics, engineering and finishing knowledge to be able to study existing electric guitars and reverse engineer and improve on what they saw. After WW2 there would be an influx of young people with robust engineering skills, happy to build the stuff they wanted if it couldn't be bought.
With all this in mind I think it is possible that there could be any number of one or two-man operations building exotic looking cars on existing chassis. They may only have built a handful of cars, and they have no legacy footprint on the Internet beyond an obscure advert or two from a local newspaper on a scanned microfiche somewhere.
NapierDeltic said:
and they have no legacy footprint on the Internet beyond an obscure advert or two from a local newspaper on a scanned microfiche somewhere.
A project to scan the nation's microfiche resources into digital storage, and then use machine learning-assisted OCR to extract text in a searchable form, would be a tremendously-useful exercise.So useful in fact that I'm surprised Google hasn't done it yet - conceptually far faster than scanning millions of physical books.
ETA: libraries now have digital microfiche / microfilm scanners. If somebody was bright enough to programme them up so that every time somebody accesses a microform resource, a digital copy is stored on a server, regular users would contribute to the build-up of a digital resource without any additional labour...
Edited by skwdenyer on Monday 13th February 14:39
NapierDeltic said:
With all this in mind I think it is possible that there could be any number of one or two-man operations building exotic looking cars on existing chassis. They may only have built a handful of cars, and they have no legacy footprint on the Internet beyond an obscure advert or two from a local newspaper on a scanned microfiche somewhere.
This, I think, is far more likely than someone spending a fortune to create crap picture. You just wouldn't do it for a book of this sort.I think the availability of Photoshop has skewed how people see image manipulation. Before PS came along photo-retouching was usually a last resort, something you did because things had gone wrong (and you couldn't do a reshoot) or you needed to show something in the best possible light. If whatever it was didn't exist you just used an illustrator to create an 'artist's impression'.
If I'm proven wrong I doff my hat to one of the best bits of image manipulation I've ever seen.
As I said before, we don't know the motivation behind the photograph. This is possibly one the reasons the car is so tricky to ID. The book, which I think is the 1967 edition of Buses, Trams and Trolleys by Chas. S. Dunbar, is a loosely curated collection of plundered photographs, line drawings and colour illustrations. The photographs are recycled from various other sources, so I doubt the Mystery Car photograph was commissioned for the book.
Slightly on the contrary, I think it is a common perception that photo doctoring was uncommon or prohibitively difficult prior to the arrival of Photoshop. It was common during WW2 to obscure, or spuriously add, geographic landmarks in photos. It was also used to remove political opponents or disgraced comrades from official photographs. I've seen people get tripped up studying 1950s Gibson guitar catalogs as there is some ambiguity over which images are photographs of guitars, heavily re-touched photographs of prototype guitars and images created by master draftsmen and dressed up to look like photographs. Reproduce these images in sub-optimal conditions (such as a lightweight compendium on public transport) and things get uncertain fairly quickly.
It isn't too difficult to imagine the best photographers in the UK flocked to London during the '60s. The guys who had their own dark rooms and a full trick book of dodging, burning etc (I'm mainly thinking of the guy in Antonioni's 1966 movie 'Blow Up', here). Anything to get sharper and more vibrant images with the subject matter jumping off the page.
If nothing else, the shadow under the front of the mystery car looks incredibly dubious compared to the shadows created by the other vehicles in the shot.
I almost hope the Mystery Car isn't solved as it has teased out a lot of lively and interesting discussion in this thread.
Slightly on the contrary, I think it is a common perception that photo doctoring was uncommon or prohibitively difficult prior to the arrival of Photoshop. It was common during WW2 to obscure, or spuriously add, geographic landmarks in photos. It was also used to remove political opponents or disgraced comrades from official photographs. I've seen people get tripped up studying 1950s Gibson guitar catalogs as there is some ambiguity over which images are photographs of guitars, heavily re-touched photographs of prototype guitars and images created by master draftsmen and dressed up to look like photographs. Reproduce these images in sub-optimal conditions (such as a lightweight compendium on public transport) and things get uncertain fairly quickly.
It isn't too difficult to imagine the best photographers in the UK flocked to London during the '60s. The guys who had their own dark rooms and a full trick book of dodging, burning etc (I'm mainly thinking of the guy in Antonioni's 1966 movie 'Blow Up', here). Anything to get sharper and more vibrant images with the subject matter jumping off the page.
If nothing else, the shadow under the front of the mystery car looks incredibly dubious compared to the shadows created by the other vehicles in the shot.
I almost hope the Mystery Car isn't solved as it has teased out a lot of lively and interesting discussion in this thread.
Yes its an interesting discussion.
I'm still firmly of the view that its an actual car and not been retouched in there.
Retouching in the sense you've just described was (nearly always) on black and white and is pretty easy to do – I've been in this business long enough to have done it myself black and white or have commissioned people to do really tricky jobs in colour. Retouching photos in colour is whole new level of difficulty (but still doable, see fashion mags and Pink Floyd sleeves for example) but adding a complete, imaginary car into a crowd scene... hmmm. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I am saying it doesn't make commercial or creative sense. Unless maybe it was to confound 21st century fans of old cars.
I'm still firmly of the view that its an actual car and not been retouched in there.
Retouching in the sense you've just described was (nearly always) on black and white and is pretty easy to do – I've been in this business long enough to have done it myself black and white or have commissioned people to do really tricky jobs in colour. Retouching photos in colour is whole new level of difficulty (but still doable, see fashion mags and Pink Floyd sleeves for example) but adding a complete, imaginary car into a crowd scene... hmmm. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but I am saying it doesn't make commercial or creative sense. Unless maybe it was to confound 21st century fans of old cars.
My conclusion is that there was a car in the photo but someone has carefully retouched their own fantasy design over it which is why some of the edges and other features look suspect, as already observed. The pedestrians are walking around a vehicle, but none of them are giving it a second look because in the original image it was just a model of car they would see every day in London. Something special would have aroused somebody’s curiosity, but no – they all just walk past it.
If it was ever a real car, someone would have come up with some evidence by now.
If it was ever a real car, someone would have come up with some evidence by now.
Dan Singh said:
My conclusion is that there was a car in the photo but someone has carefully retouched their own fantasy design over it which is why some of the edges and other features look suspect, as already observed. The pedestrians are walking around a vehicle, but none of them are giving it a second look because in the original image it was just a model of car they would see every day in London. Something special would have aroused somebody’s curiosity, but no – they all just walk past it.
If it was ever a real car, someone would have come up with some evidence by now.
The bold part I kind of agree with.If it was ever a real car, someone would have come up with some evidence by now.
However, yesterday I drove a 52-year-old Triumph GT6 into Central Milton Keynes, parked it in a multi-storey car park and left it for an hour while I went shopping. Nobody stopped and stared; nobody took pictures on a camera phone; nobody hooted and waved.
Nobody cared.
Ironically it was about the same colour as the Car-that-isn't-a-Sunbeam-Alpine too. Just proves that people in a busy, bustling environment don't pay that much attention to what's around them, car-wise. Consider how common Ferraris / Lamborghinis / Porsches etc are nowadays compared to when this scene took place - back then seeing one of these exotics would have been a real event.
But as GTRene says, we all want it to be a real car.
Designs - and designers - have hallmarks.
There's evidence to suggest that, whoever designed this (on paper, or in real life) was involved in / had knowledge of Standard-Triumph's Project Zebu.
The cowled headlamps, nose treatment, rear wing trailing edge line, front wheelarch, etc. are all-but identical (when adapted to fit the different proportions).
Those headlamps, especially, are very unusual - shared with Zebu, and to a less-extreme extent the Hooper Daimler SP250 Coupe, the Hooper Golden Zebra "Docker Daimler" and very very few other designs. They are not the stuff most dream cars are made of, and very of their time (1957-9 or so).
At the same time, the roof-door detail is very close to the Arnott Climax (the coachbuilder of which we don't know but which, as we've observed, is distinctive), whilst the fastback carries the hallmarks of designs from Peel Coachworks (who were know for taking customers' sketches and turning them into reality) - especially but not exclusively the vent behind the door (although W&P did that, too, IIRC).
The detailing on the mystery car is far superior to a great many shed-built specials, yet the proportions in places are off. That suggests it isn't the work of a master-designed, but more of a good coachworks determined to make the best silk purse from the sow's ear of the customer's sketch. Peel or W&P for instance.
And the level of detail is just not IMHO possible to achieve with the skills of most retouchers of the relevant period.
And yet, the circumstantial evidence suggests it is built on some sort of old, humble chassis - so unlikely to be the commission of somebody wealthy enough to afford the best coachworks - even if it does look a little like Michelotti on a bad day
But it has the feel of a brief along the lines of "take the doors of the Arnott, the aesthetic of the Zebu, the windscreen and proportions of the Michelotti Ghia-Aigle Lotus XI, add a fastback, and make it all stack up as a homogeneous whole."
So I wonder who was on the Zebu design/prototype team, and where they ended up? Or who built the Zebu prototype - one of the coachworks, like Peel, or in-house at Standard-Triumph? And where was the overlap between all those and the Arnott Climax?
There's definitely a Michelotti intersection here - it isn't clear if he penned the original Zebu (but it bears his fingerprints, he was renowned for dashing-out endless designs, and it coincides with his involvement with Standard-Triumph); I believe he did that Lotus; he had a period of loving wraparound windscreens for various projects.
So if I was really going to devote my time to this, I think I would start with that Zebu and try to figure out how that and the various other strands intersected. For instance, where was the Arnott built? Here's the open top Arnott Le Mans being prepared:
When posted on Insta, that image was titled "manufacturer Lady Daphne Arnott getting the Arnott 1100cc alloy prototype finished for the 1957 Le Mans. Body “possibly” by Williams & Pritchard."
Where is that? Williams & Pritchard? It doesn't look like Peel, judging by this photo supposedly at their works:
and who is that in the photo with Arnott? Neither Williams nor Pritchard were that old at that date. Edit: this seems to be George Thornton, Daphne's engineer (per http://500race.org/people/gerald-smith/ ) - the driver was Gerald Smith, who'd previously designed streamlined bodywork (and who lost a leg crashing an Arnott during a record attempt).
Also, is it the same car? The nose looks the same as the GT in-period (it was later modified for greater cooling, it seems):
Yet the history online says Arnott only did 2 Le Mans cars; this 1955 one:
and - it is said - the GT. So what's that open-top aluminium-bodied car? The story is clearly quite muddled in places (or I've not been diligent enough).
Here's the W+P works:
is that the same site as the Arnott photo? Unlikely - the W+P works looks 1930s, the Arnott photo of rather earlier buildings. But then this 1955 photo seems to show an older building:
which doesn't match up with the map of First Avenue from 1936, where the future site of the W+P works is empty:
Where were W+P before Edmonton? Co-located with Lotus at Hornsey - more 1930s buildings. So that doesn't seem right.
So where was that Arnott photo taken? Arnott's own works?
And was the GT a modification of the 1957 Le Mans car, with lights and a roof? Or was it a new car. If a modification, did the same people who built the body add the roof?
So many questions...
There's evidence to suggest that, whoever designed this (on paper, or in real life) was involved in / had knowledge of Standard-Triumph's Project Zebu.
The cowled headlamps, nose treatment, rear wing trailing edge line, front wheelarch, etc. are all-but identical (when adapted to fit the different proportions).
Those headlamps, especially, are very unusual - shared with Zebu, and to a less-extreme extent the Hooper Daimler SP250 Coupe, the Hooper Golden Zebra "Docker Daimler" and very very few other designs. They are not the stuff most dream cars are made of, and very of their time (1957-9 or so).
At the same time, the roof-door detail is very close to the Arnott Climax (the coachbuilder of which we don't know but which, as we've observed, is distinctive), whilst the fastback carries the hallmarks of designs from Peel Coachworks (who were know for taking customers' sketches and turning them into reality) - especially but not exclusively the vent behind the door (although W&P did that, too, IIRC).
The detailing on the mystery car is far superior to a great many shed-built specials, yet the proportions in places are off. That suggests it isn't the work of a master-designed, but more of a good coachworks determined to make the best silk purse from the sow's ear of the customer's sketch. Peel or W&P for instance.
And the level of detail is just not IMHO possible to achieve with the skills of most retouchers of the relevant period.
And yet, the circumstantial evidence suggests it is built on some sort of old, humble chassis - so unlikely to be the commission of somebody wealthy enough to afford the best coachworks - even if it does look a little like Michelotti on a bad day
But it has the feel of a brief along the lines of "take the doors of the Arnott, the aesthetic of the Zebu, the windscreen and proportions of the Michelotti Ghia-Aigle Lotus XI, add a fastback, and make it all stack up as a homogeneous whole."
So I wonder who was on the Zebu design/prototype team, and where they ended up? Or who built the Zebu prototype - one of the coachworks, like Peel, or in-house at Standard-Triumph? And where was the overlap between all those and the Arnott Climax?
There's definitely a Michelotti intersection here - it isn't clear if he penned the original Zebu (but it bears his fingerprints, he was renowned for dashing-out endless designs, and it coincides with his involvement with Standard-Triumph); I believe he did that Lotus; he had a period of loving wraparound windscreens for various projects.
So if I was really going to devote my time to this, I think I would start with that Zebu and try to figure out how that and the various other strands intersected. For instance, where was the Arnott built? Here's the open top Arnott Le Mans being prepared:
When posted on Insta, that image was titled "manufacturer Lady Daphne Arnott getting the Arnott 1100cc alloy prototype finished for the 1957 Le Mans. Body “possibly” by Williams & Pritchard."
Where is that? Williams & Pritchard? It doesn't look like Peel, judging by this photo supposedly at their works:
and who is that in the photo with Arnott? Neither Williams nor Pritchard were that old at that date. Edit: this seems to be George Thornton, Daphne's engineer (per http://500race.org/people/gerald-smith/ ) - the driver was Gerald Smith, who'd previously designed streamlined bodywork (and who lost a leg crashing an Arnott during a record attempt).
Also, is it the same car? The nose looks the same as the GT in-period (it was later modified for greater cooling, it seems):
Yet the history online says Arnott only did 2 Le Mans cars; this 1955 one:
and - it is said - the GT. So what's that open-top aluminium-bodied car? The story is clearly quite muddled in places (or I've not been diligent enough).
Here's the W+P works:
is that the same site as the Arnott photo? Unlikely - the W+P works looks 1930s, the Arnott photo of rather earlier buildings. But then this 1955 photo seems to show an older building:
which doesn't match up with the map of First Avenue from 1936, where the future site of the W+P works is empty:
Where were W+P before Edmonton? Co-located with Lotus at Hornsey - more 1930s buildings. So that doesn't seem right.
So where was that Arnott photo taken? Arnott's own works?
And was the GT a modification of the 1957 Le Mans car, with lights and a roof? Or was it a new car. If a modification, did the same people who built the body add the roof?
So many questions...
Edited by skwdenyer on Tuesday 14th February 12:49
I also had this book 'when I were at school', (possibly mentioned previously) and, as a car-mad youngster, I simply just put it down as yet another car I didn't recognise and I still had the book until a few weeks before this car hit PH so, unfortunately, can't now refer to the original item.
So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
TarquinMX5 said:
I also had this book 'when I were at school', (possibly mentioned previously) and, as a car-mad youngster, I simply just put it down as yet another car I didn't recognise and I still had the book until a few weeks before this car hit PH so, unfortunately, can't now refer to the original item.
So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
A sensible post.So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
nicanary said:
TarquinMX5 said:
I also had this book 'when I were at school', (possibly mentioned previously) and, as a car-mad youngster, I simply just put it down as yet another car I didn't recognise and I still had the book until a few weeks before this car hit PH so, unfortunately, can't now refer to the original item.
So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
A sensible post.So many people now seem to think that if they can't find the item / answer via Google, it doesn't exist and cannot have existed, whereas the reality is that there is so much information pre-internet that is simply not available online.
The book is about buses, which are clearly what the photographer was capturing, not specialist cars, and it's simply not credible to think that somebody would have gone to extreme lengths to doctor the original image in order to create conspiracy theories 50+ years hence or to make the buses more interesting.
The simple answer is that PH members (and members of other fora), despite their collective knowledge, don't know the answer to every conundrum.
There were so many coachbuilt car bodies, specials etc. etc. around in those days, and prior to that, that an unknown car would have been nothing unusual and not every pedestrian is, or was, a car-nut, hence it not attracting attention. People have become so used to, and some obsessed by, photographing everything with their phones and posting images online, whereas it was a totally different world back then. There aren't any photos on the internet of breakfasts I had in the 70s but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
IMHO, the answer is simple; the car was there but, 60-years later, nobody has yet identified it, which is not an unbelievable concept. The type/constructor of the car is currently a known unknown.
We do know, however, that it's not a Sunbeam Alpine.
I'd love to have the time to devote to scouring libraries, microfilms, and so on for evidence of this car. But that'll have to wait until I retire - just in case this thread is still running many years into the future
I've send the picture to a car yearbook classics company, no idea which email I had to choose, but mentioned if you do not know, please send it forwards 
its on from 2015... so if we all who seen the picture can't figure it out, it must be something rare, zelf made, one off, rebuild? changed? whatever lol.
even then, I would like to know that mystery, even when its just a 'made photoshop one', who designed it, who made it up.
I think it looks beautiful, I guess because its also a mystery? maybe a time traveler came in the spot when the photographer took the picture
its on from 2015... so if we all who seen the picture can't figure it out, it must be something rare, zelf made, one off, rebuild? changed? whatever lol.
even then, I would like to know that mystery, even when its just a 'made photoshop one', who designed it, who made it up.
I think it looks beautiful, I guess because its also a mystery? maybe a time traveler came in the spot when the photographer took the picture
Gassing Station | Classic Cars and Yesterday's Heroes | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff