What became the troubled Triumph Stag started off as a simple request from Giovanni Michelotti to Triumph design chief Harry Webster. Michelotti had strong links to Triumph and wanted a donor car for use in…
Posts tagged British Cars
John Black to the Rescue: 1935 Standard 10
“Standard” came to mean something else entirely by the 1950s and mirrored today’s definition of “basic” by the 1960s, but in the early days of the Standard Motor Company, it meant “having standards,” or possibly…
Celebratory Special: Morris Minor Million
It was the fourth of January, 1961 – freshly returned from the holidays, the workforce at Cowley reached a very special milestone – the 1,000,000th Morris Minor rolled off the line – the first British car to hit that milestone
Vauxhall PA Velox: Motorama to the Midlands
With Buick selling Opels as a response to new imported cars in the U.S., it wasn’t a surprise that GM also sold stateside Vauxhalls from 1958-62. In those days Vauxhall and Opel were largely separate,…
Panther Lima: The NeoClassic that Could
Robert Jankel had always been a car enthusiast and restorer, but he was a fashion designer by trade until, on a trip to Spain, he was offered a princely sum for a Rolls-Royce he’d restored….
Canadian Cargo: Ford Cortina MkII GT Estate
After Ford UK’s CEO, Sir Patrick Hennessy, discovered in 1960 that Ford of Germany had been gifted an unused front-drive Detroit compact (“Project Cardinal” – the Taunus 12M), he convinced Dearborn to allow Dagenham to…
Peak Rover: The P5B Coupe
The term “4-door Coupe” is overused today to the point of being meaningless, but for decades there was only one car that used this term and actually pulled it off. Rover’s P5 Coupe was an…