That's sweet! and my favorite color. What's it feel like to drive a classic? How do they compare to the first couple gens?
How do they feel? Coarse, noisy, rattly, buzzy, harsh, loud, wind roar-y (no A/C) leaky, cheap, lousy seats, terrible in other words - and yet more fun than you can believe! :biggrin5: But any modern Mini feels like a Cadillac in comparison.......
So I drove the Racing Green Mini home today from Lawrence via Baldwin city and a bunch of back roads, about 60-70 miles and I'm happy to say it ran fine - it got a little warmer than I'd like to see when I pushed the speed a bit but slowing down let it drop back to normal. I have a new aluminum radiator that I think will cure that. I do wish it had a taller final drive, or a 5 speed but it'll do, I'm not planning to change it. The Play Mini exhaust really barks and pops on the overrun, but overall sounds great - fun stuff! I only have a very few things I'm planning to do, like add a 12V port for my Garmin and maybe some coil-overs to improve the ride but other than that I'm just gonna drive it.
D-Type sold for $21.8 million. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/20/luxury/shelby-cobra-jaguar-dtype-record-auction-sale/index.html
Yes a previous owner went to considerable expense to fit those front and rear, I'm not too sure how I feel about them...... I wonder if this is a Canadian market car...KM speedo, left drive and daylight running lights......
Wow, that is huge for a Jag -- or any British car. 21.8 was the final price with fees, so the hammer price must have been below 20-million, but still way more than any Jag has sold for before. I believe that probably exceeds rare Aston Martin prices. That should give E-Types a bit of a bump in value, at least for a couple of years. CD
BTW, about ten years ago, I shot a C-Type for a magazine, and it ended up on the cover. A few months later, I was in the sponsor's suite at a Concours, and Sir Sterling and Lady Susie Moss popped in for some coffee. i got to sit and chat with them over coffee for a while, and happened to have a copy of the magazine with me. Sir Stirling autographed the cover for me. It is framed in my office. CD
Well, sorta.....it does have 13" Rover wheels, but those sure aren't sportspack arches - I haven't figured out whose arches they are exactly, but I like them OK. And thanks, wish I'd had it a few months ago when I went to MMW, but I'll have it for the next one I go to.
Sorry, I missed your question earlier, no those are Rover 13" wheels - I think. Either that or copies like those JBW sells......I have a set of those also. I'll be taking it up to school to put it on the rack and do a few things - it needs the wheels balanced for sure, then I need to do a general inspection and see what all it needs before I take it out of town on our first classic Mini run in October. I'm thinking seriously of pulling the engine and changing the final drive - that was one of the things I did on Buzz that really made the car more drivable for long distance runs. I'll go 3:1 instead of 2:76 this time, that was just a tiny bit too tall.
How I tell - Sportspack arches have little indentations at the top of the arch for the side marker light, and also pockets on the front for the bumper ends to fit into - these have neither. Yesterday I took the car up to school and I'm happy to say I found no rust in the bottom of the car, sills, floors, boot etc are all solid. I did find a leaking shift rod seal as expected but I also found evidence of some new parts - a new steering rack, outer CVs and tie rod ends. All good stuff, that. While I had it on the rack I went ahead and balanced the front wheels, it had an irregular but strong shimmy in the front end and balancing the fronts only seemed to take care of 95% of it. I may take another run at them and see if I can smooth them out even further, but I'm pleased that's all it was. Now I'm ready to send an order off for some fun parts for the suspension, and get a few things done to make it mine. I've decided to change the diff ratio over the winter from the 3.44:1 to a 3.01:1, that should drop hiway revs about 800, so 70mph will be more like 3700 than the current 4500. I also did a little sleuthing on the vin - turns out the car was a 998 originally. Who knows what else was changed? I wonder if it might have been RHD after all and somebody swapped it over? Edit: more research indicates it was LHD from the factory. based on the vin A friend swapped his 3 clock dash over to a center binnacle and gave me his three clock instrument pod, which had a "miles' speedo with almost exactly the same mileage as this one, but with magnolia faces on the instruments. I'll be putting those in as soon as I figure out how to reach the wing nuts that hold the wood dash in place! Then I won't have to do math every time I look at the speedo to figure out how fast I'm going! :biggrin5: More as it happens.....