mk1-forum.net

...and a vivid imagination.

.....and money to burn !!! foxy52

and there was everyone else thinking a "Coupe d'Or" was for 3 consecutive "Coupes" and it was a "Coupe d'Argent" for 3 non-consecutive "Coupes"...

Rough guess: reg number on about 3 different shells/cars for a works event history of that length?

"Original Minilites". With a free dustpan and brush to sweep up the original material?

We all know this was a mk3 shelled car on the Golden 50, Guy Smith reshelled into a Mk1 and a very nice job he did. How much is the works car, how much just works bits?

I'm confused....I don't usually take much notice of these threads like "Works Car found, etc, etc...."
Are we all saying that this is not the actual car that Paddy Hopkirk drove in that rally?
Forgive my naivety but I'm usually too busy shagging my own car to take much notice

YMJ wrote:I'm confused....I don't usually take much notice of these threads like "Works Car found, etc, etc...."
Are we all saying that this is not the actual car that Paddy Hopkirk drove in that rally?
Forgive my naivety but I'm usually too busy shagging my own car to take much notice

Considering David's post I don't think it's going out on a limb to suggest 'the car' in the ad didn't do any of the events on the list! If it was actually the last works incarnation to wear that reg number then fair doos, but evidently it's not even that. Ironically, the thread you've not read YMJ is about a car that is a works Mini!

All very subjective of course and these cars were rarely anything finite, understandably, but it's laughable to read descriptions attached to cars like that and refered to as ex works cars when a real one is labelled as a 'discarded shell'. It's a complicated subject, and few of us are driving around 100% authentic original cars so if someone wants to shell out £150K on what amounts to a good works replica to enjoy at Goodwood etc then so be it, it's (just about) still a free country.

To be fair the car is presented as a very nice works re-encarnation from memory with good detail and patina, it has also done the following events,

1984 Coronation Rally - Guy Smith

1989 Pirelli Classic Marathon - Paddy Hopkirk/Alec Pool

2009 and 2010 Goodwood Festival of Speed rally stage entrant

A very nice car, if you have lots of dosh and want a ticket to Goodwood why not!

Yes, I agree it must be an absolute minefield of claim and counterclaim......which is why I stay right out of it when I can.

A lovely car. As with any works car I wonder how much of it is genuine. Does it have an Abingdon EBL 56C shell or even a body number ? I would like to know what happened to it between its last Abingdon / Vita event and when it was discovered in the 80's, and what it was like then. Continuous photographic history would be interesting, again as with any works car.

spoon.450 wrote:A lovely car. As with any works car I wonder how much of it is genuine. Does it have an Abingdon EBL 56C shell or even a body number ? I would like to know what happened to it between its last Abingdon / Vita event and when it was discovered in the 80's, and what it was like then. Continuous photographic history would be interesting, again as with any works car.

To be fair the car does have a continuous history, it was reshelled by its long term owner into a MK3 shell with many original parts, though maybe the original hand made parts were copied and retained and replicas fitted to the replacement MK1 shell.... Still bloody good car , and if I had the money....

Just for interests sake, has anybody any pics of it in the mk 3 shell ?

billycooper wrote:Just for interests sake, has anybody any pics of it in the mk 3 shell ?

That would be good to see, it's all part of the cars history and very interesting. It would be good to see photos and hear honest stories of how other now restored works cars were re-discovered. It does however seem that some parts of the history of some works cars is conveniently forgotten !

SMOKE GREY wrote:

spoon.450 wrote:
To be fair the car does have a continuous history, it was reshelled by its long term owner into a MK3 shell with many original parts, though maybe the original hand made parts were copied and retained and replicas fitted to the replacement MK1 shell....

All well and good Steve but that pretty much amounts to a replica to me?

Pete wrote:

SMOKE GREY wrote:

spoon.450 wrote:
To be fair the car does have a continuous history, it was reshelled by its long term owner into a MK3 shell with many original parts, though maybe the original hand made parts were copied and retained and replicas fitted to the replacement MK1 shell....

All well and good Steve but that pretty much amounts to a replica to me?

True!!! What you need is a car/original shell...........

billycooper wrote:Just for interests sake, has anybody any pics of it in the mk 3 shell ?

http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C588412

Gentlemen,
With a few exceptions, you are not very charitable with regards to restored competition cars, that nobody could really expect to be original when by the nature of the beast, they were more or less ruined on each event!

EBL had two shells with the works, and then went on to the very destructive televised rallycross when owned by British Vitafom, and driven by Paddy Hopkirk. all part of it's rich history.
It was purchased from Vitafom by the boss's son, for the grand sum of £1, and subsequently passed to Graham Brown for considerably more. Graham continued to rally the 2nd works shell very hard in national events, before having a final coming together with a road traffic accident outside a petrol station!

Graham re shelled it, in the days when the car was worth £100, not 100,000! in to a Mk3 car to go rallying in, which after all is what it was designed for. It did a multitude of very rough events in the North, and competed in the 1982 Golden Fifty, and he had a lot of fun.

Graham moved on to a Chevette, and I was lucky enough to aquire it through Motoring News in 1983, for the princely sum of £1400 and then spent seven years of my life restoring the thing to it's former glory.

The car was reshelled into a beautiful Mk1, and contains all the parts which had been transposed into the Mk3, plus a load of stuff which Graham Brown had retained, including the genuine Irvine seat belts with Paddy's name engraved on them. He was very helpful with parts and photographs.
I recall he said that when he first got the car, he found a co drivers ex works sandwiches still under the headlining!

For the record: The Comps Dashes and very unusual group 1 double wiring loom had survived into the Mk3 and were transposed with long hours of electrical knitting. The Four lamp mounting bar, Halda, route card holder, speedo, works throttle pedal, passengers horn button, fuse panel, the Aley Roll cage, headlining, sun visors, both Irvine belts, the Q/L jack points, the oil cooler and brackets brackets, alternator bracket, the steering wheel, boot rubber and bracket, front grille and moustache, the column lowering bracket, map light and door lock padding, are all off the original car.
Namely, all the special Comps built stuff, which was added to a standard Cooper S.

This car is not full of replica parts, as I took great care to preserve everything original that I possibly could.
Replica stuff was not even available in those days as it is now.
Where possible the rest was built with 1965 period BMC bits, and I went to great pains not to make it look like it had come out of a showroom.

The long hours and passion were rewarded, when I was fortunate enough to put Paddy Back in it for the 89 Pirelli Marathon. His first Mini drive in 25 years. he was so impressed with the car, he tried to buy it off me..unsuccessfully I might add.

This is a continuous iteration of the car, doing exactly what it should be doing.
It had the original green log book with it, and a long and continuous history has been proved in court with Old No 1 Bentley. If this car had not been wrecked and rebuilt and wrecked and rebuilt, it would not be so famous, and you lot would not be discussing it on a Forum over fifty years later.

For the record, I sold the car in 2002, with a full detailed photo history file, documenting it's history, including photos of it in MK3 form, and the purchaser was well aware of it's reshelled status.

I am very proud of what I did to restore EBL 56C, and it's subsequent use again by Paddy, and I have always believed that it is not 'what' you do in car restoration, but how you do it, and how you portray what you have done.

If a car like this cannot be seen in a positive light, as opposed to a negative one, then there is really something wrong with the world, or the people concerned are desperately uninformed!

It seems that negativity about works minis has become open season, (driven by values and jeolousy) with little information, understanding of their hard lives, or thought about the dedication and respect for the long hours spent, because we love these cars and their part in British history.

Guy Smith

Pics of inside of the restored car, including the originl panels and wiring, and the seatbelt. Then of the Mk3 in 1983 as requested.

With the odd exception, I think everyone is usually very fair to what frankly are often very serious (and maybe criminal) misrepresentations of many such cars.
Owners may well not be the ones sparking some of the downright lies I have seen perpetrated by auction houses etc. - but where else do some of the adverts/features seen acquire their erroneous data?
It is very interesting to see the excellent records that can be posted about such cars, as in the previous post, but that does not warrant a description elsewhere of any car as being "THE" car that did a list of major rallies as a works entry when it blatantly was not the same car. I may have more recent research experience of works rally Escorts and Cortinas than Minis but I am not about to stand by and accept any fraudulent descriptions anywhere (and have taken up a few with major auction houses who make false claims). It is no good pretending we can't define fairly closely what makes a unitary construction shell "original" or one that was "reshelled" by a works team (whether "reshelled" from a bare shell, from a new car or by number plate swapping). We do know how many panels, and which ones, might reasonably be changed to still warrant a claim of "original" shell.
Cars with a chassis or part chassis are a different matter. From what I recall of the printed proceedings, the decision on Bentley "Old No.1" (by a legal entity without full knowledge/experience of such things - such is the general failing of our adversarial legal system) is one not all independent readers might agree. We have at least one D Type Jaguar that became two cars with one identity, due to its basic construction.

Smithmaps wrote: negativity about works minis has become open season, (driven by values and jeolousy) with little information, understanding of their hard lives, or thought about the dedication and respect for the long hours spent, because we love these cars and their part in British history.

Hello Guy, I thought you were doing alright until you said that! I think it's a little wide of the mark to presume anyone that has a viewpoint on these things is either jealous or misinformed, I've personally never met anybody like that. There's lots of people on here who have an appreciation as to how much work goes into a build like that and the history of these cars. I think the thing that gets many people scratching their heads is when auction adverts refer to a works registration number as if it's one car or one entity, or that the restored car is the same as the one that did 'such and such' a rally or race in 196?. Maybe people just need to have a little more imagination and take these things less literally, trying to make sense of some of these cars (as we have done on here with the original GRX 309D) and their described history is like trying to plait yoghurt! To my mind an original works Mini is one that still has it's shell as registered and used by the works but that's just my personal opinion, once it's been rebodied several times in private ownership to me that's then a replica, as I say my personal opinion (and Stuart Turner's to be fair). You could say the same for any early Mini though couldn't you? I think it's also fair to say some very moody so called works Minis that have appeared over the years haven't helped the cause.

I agree.
I have taken several owners to task over the years. But auction houses and dealers are a law unto themselves, unfortunately, and seem to do it with impunity.

However, there is a complete spectrum of 99% genuine cars down to 100% replaced cars, and everything in between.
Each car needs treating differently, and that is why the register try's to record what is and what isn't. It is an important historical task, and believe me, each car's history is known pretty much if one cares to research it properly.

EBL was about half way I reckon.
What matters is honesty, and I have never misrepresented it. I have no problem with a 100% replaced car if the owner is honest, as I would rather see it exist than not, especially if it is done well.

But it is a complicated subject, and with the now changed situation of high values and potential of Law suits by very rich owners, it has to be understood that whether you may like a car or not, the legal owner of the registration and it's associated timeline and history, is important in it's own right. Nowerdays, one has to be very careful indeed about putting in print (and that is what this forum is) deformation of something that is legally held and has changed hands for big money.

Certainly the MCR has to be very careful, more careful perhaps than a private individual. It is a much bigger picture now, as to state that a car is GRX or GRY in print, potentially brings a whole heap of unholly legal c__p along with it, if a car's value changes from 100K to 20K and the owner is a multi millionair!
That is why you will not find me commenting in print about negative provenance. I will only speak about what I know, and can prove.

My comments about negativity stand.
You can argue all day about the merits of replica vs restoration, but it only serves to diminish a very positive thing that took years of my life to achieve. I hope to the benefit of all who see and admire the car over the years.

I've said enough.

p.s. I've always like this one myself! Accuracy to die for