Mystery Car - Pistonheads

I don't know but it doesn't strike me as being particularly well designed or built. The link suggests a special so may be another one-off?

I think the Minx screen is too upright? PA Cresta was suggested in 2015

I can't imagine that it was a hoax. If the photo had a taxi in it, we would have seen the original photo. Also, you can tell the car is real, so even if not in the actual shot it still must have existed.

Surely the taxi in the painting was only put there as it would make a far more traditional London street scene than an obscure little blue sports car.

Has been discussed at length on Pistonheads - conclusion is that wheelbase and other proportions are wrong and the bonnet line would have to be higher to accommodate the Austin 7 engine.

As said earlier in this thread, this car has appeared on many forums and has also been the subject of the monthly 'mystery car' in Classic & Sportscar magazine - all to no avail.

Obviously early 1960s so approx. 60 years ago - there must be someone still alive who knows something surely . . . . .

I do fancy the Rapier rear window as the screen! the angle between glass and roof is more nearly correct than any other i've seen so far. Its also gonna be closer on width.

Another thing, since we KNOW the date the photo was taken (early 62 was it, it's mentioned elsewhere) it's a bit too soon to have the most obvious donor, the Alpine Hardtop. Where would you have got one from? But the Rapier had been around since 58 or 59, so a scrappy donor is possible.

As has been said before, a lot of people at the time were messing about with the, then new, medium of GRP, some more sucessfully than others (it must be said) Personlly, I wouldn't be surprised if the entire car wasn't designed around that window! Finding a complex screen to fit a body design is a lot harder than designing a body to fit a screen! See the Orange car for an example! It's the sort of thing i'd do! The rest of the body also shows many influences from other cars that were current at that time.

With details as good as those in Scimjim's mockup picture above, isn't it time someone BUILT the damned thing, it's such a pretty little beast, it deserves to be reincarnated! With the amount of folk obsessed with this car, you might even be able to achieve a limited production run! Cut and shut a Herald or TR chassis to match the wheel base for simplicity, Slant mounted 998cc Imp motor to keep the bonnet line low (Coventry Climax engine would have been a popular fit at the time amd the Imp is CC derived) and make the rest up as you go along, it's gonna end up with a Q plate anyway! I'd surely love to be involved in such a project, but my GRP skills are, frankly, non existent!

Another thought, generated by the Imp engine idea, what if you used the Imp engine AND gearbox, mounted in the front of the car (gearbox forward as in the Imp) and made it FWD? the shape of the bonnet area and position of the front wheels relative make me think this might be possible. You'd probably need a bespoke spaceframe to make it work but that's no real hardship! And the lack of a propshaft and gearbox and axle tunnels intruding into the interior would make the tiny cockpit less cramped!

Steve

My thoughts exactly! Though I don't know how well I could get involved in the build with Mr V12Turbo in NZ!

I've been thinking MUCH more than I should about this thing and the more I look at it, the more convinced I am that it is the work of a VERY experienced man (or more likely, MEN) The lines are just TOO flowing, the pillars are too thin, the shape is too harmonious, in scimjims projections it looks good from any angle. This is not an easy thing to achieve, the transition from drawing board to engineering reality can ruin a car design (look at Harris Mann's DRAWINGS of the Allegro if you don't believe me!) Even the fact that it HAS hubcaps points to a completely finished concept, The air extractor vents in the rear posts aren't an afterthought, someone at the design stage realized that it would need them cos the door shape precludes wind down windows. It wouldn't surprise me if somewhere we can't see, like between the back of the bonnet and the front of the door, there is an opening air intake vent to allow cool air into the cabin. However you look at it, this a pretty high quality build.

I've also been considering it from an engineers standpoint, IE how would I personally go about constructing this car.

And the conclusion i've reached is that it couldn't be done purely in GRP and it would be almost as hard to do it in Aluminium. The reason being those gull wing doors and skinny roof pillars and screen and door frames.

So I'd start with some sort of tubular steel chassis that extends out under the floors and into the sills, From here, i'd build 3 steel hoops, the front one to be a former for the bulkhead/firewall and the lower screen frame, the second to run up the A pillars and across the front of the roof as the top of the screen/door frames and the third up the B posts and across the rear of the doors and in front of the rear window. Then tie the second and third bars together with another steel box running longitudinally to form the door hinge bar. This bar, correctly shaped, would actually BE the "roof" such as it is! This gives you enough strength to make the thing work with those skinny posts and also makes a kind of built in roll cage. Tie the bottom ends of the hoops together with a nice hefty tube through the high sills and it gets even stronger. Build the doors on a light steel frame and skin them in alloy to save weight but maintain rigidity. Possibly skin the bulkhead /scuttle and sills area the same way. All you'd be left with then are the front and rear "clamshells" and those could be made from aluminium (if you're rich) or GRP if you're not!

Aha! So is this the (plausible) contender for the windscreen source?

The prime suspect for the screen on PH is the Minx III/Rapier rear window with a side order of F series Victor screen.

NOTHING is proven as there is no accurate way of proving the width of the original car from that one picture! Unfortunately these wonderful mockups (which I believe are the work of Borranni72 on PH) have been "adjusted" to suit the screen he favours, though I must say, it looks "right" like that and that's one of the engineer's maxims, "if it LOOKS right, it probably IS right"

The PH thread seems to have degenerated into a bit of a slanging match, which is sad! But still nobody knows what it is, who made it, what powered it, or what happened to it afterwards!


Steve