quote:
Originally posted by Rheinubung
Hello Runt
If the car you remember was blue, it was CF 8 which I attempted to buy in London from an advertising executive in 1976. The car was featured in a number of Brit car mag road tests in 1968. It was snatched out from under me by an eclectic American investor from a Chicago suburb called St. Charles, Illinois. I regret that I do not have his name at hand, but I managed to visit him some years later (late '80's, I think) when I was in his area. He was a contractor who built golf courses. One of his other cars was an original F-code '57 T-Bird which I examined in close detail. CF 8 was alive and well at that time.
Best Regards,
Mike Reed/Rheinubung
Hello Mike,
I'm not sure if you'll remember me, but I'm Chuck "Number 3" the son of the fellow [Chuck Jr.] who bought the AC coupe in question... Your memory is pretty good, but you are a bit off on some of the fine details.
If I remember correctly... The fellow in London who was selling the car was named Whitlam who lived on Baker Street London (with a number very close to Sherlock Holmes's flat... 121 or 122 Baker if I remember right). For some reason I thought he was a doctor, but maybe it was Mr. Whitlam who had bought it from a doctor. It's been over 30 years and I was like 14 at the time.
Anyway, The car, CF
7 by the way:
, was listed in a US auto magazine's want ad's in late 1975 or early 1976. I saw the ad and showed it to my father who pursued it's purchase/importation.
As I remember, Mr. Whitlam had interest not only for my father but a fellow from Seattle Washington (You, I presume, Mike) and he decided that whomever got him a down-payment first would get the car. Remember that this was a time before FedEx, email and the internet, so buying a car from overseas makes today's eBay look like Tiffany's. The fellow from Seattle mailed a cashiers cheque via 1st Class Airmail, my father Wired $1,000 down-payment via Western Union and my father's payment beat the fellow from Seattle by a day, maybe two at most. So we won the right to buy the car.
So it wasn't so much that my father "snatched" the car out from under the other fellow, but rather he sent money via a quicker method. It could have easily worked out the other way.
Incidentally, the fellow from Seattle later flew over to England and enlisted the assistance of Mr. Whitlam to find him an AC coupe to import. The car the fellow from Seattle bought was Silver if I remember correctly as we had contact with him later in the 1970's... It turned out that he had grown up, and his parents still lived, in a town a dozen or so miles north of us. Later on, in the late 1970's or early 1980's we had the pleasure of a visit from the fellow from Seattle who wanted to "see the one which got away". If I remember correctly he arrived on a black Kawasaki KZ 1000 (or similar) with some very nifty black chrome on it which we hadn't seen the likes of before. Perhaps you'll confirm or correct my memory. ;-)
Anyway, we had Mr. Whitlam take the car to the AC Factory and prepare it for life in America, and he sent it off and we sent off funds for the car (and halfsies on the AC servicing) and because both parties were scrupulously honest, the deal went through without a hitch.
The car was originally a very pale-green metalic color as painted by the factory.
Not even British Racing Green, but rather the sort of pale green metallic color you might imagine on a faded AMC Hornet. Not very attractive at all. Either the first owner of the AC [besides the factory] or Mr. Whitlam, choose to paint the car a beautiful medium Blue color from an Aston Martin paint chip set.
There are some areas on the tubing around the inside of the bottom of the hood where one can still see the original color. But the car remains the same AM blue color with black leather interior currently as shown.
So the car originally was pale green [metallic], not blue. I wouldn't call my father an investor but really more of a collector... He was a "c
ut me and I bleed Dearborn Blue" Ford guy who really wanted an Cobra 427 but started looking about 1 year too late as the values jumped from about $8k through $16k to about $33k in the space of a year. The values of the 427's always seemed to jump ahead of his ability to land one.
The T-Bird you remember was not an
F-Code T-Bird, but you could be forgiven for thinking/remembering so... It actually is the earlier
D-Code Twin-Belt Supercharged 1957 T-Bird, built in January 1957 [instead of the later F-Bird's which were built in May] which he had to race it on the beach at Daytona to get it.
Anyway, my father passed away a number of years ago and when he died he had about 12-13 cars squirreled away at various places. His first love was the early V-8 Fords, in particular the '32's and he had a small business he ran on the side [of Golf Course building] making, straightening and customizing 1930's era Ford frames ranging from simple setup to complete boxing and adaption of Jaguar or Corvette suspensions... Of the cars my father had, I managed to convince her to keep four of them [and believe me, I had to lobby long and hard for those four] and among the ones we kept are the D-Supercharged Bird and the AC. So as I say, he was more of a collector than a "buy this because it'll be a good investment" sort of guy.
They are kept in a secured, heated garage and are in pretty good shape, but they haven't run in a number of years as my sister and I have been sending the funds necessary to get them back to driving trim to the U.S. Government in order to settle the Estate taxes from our parents. As a result we have had to take the restorations much slower than we would like.
The D-Bird and the AC are among the more problematic to restore because each one is so bloody rare. The AC production figures I could quote but they are probably well known here, the D-Bird... They only made either 12 or 14 of the D-Code Supercharged T-Birds, one of which is in the Museum in Dearborn, the other was sold in Georgia in the early 1980's and no one knows if any others survive. I am very good friends [as my father was too] with the editor of the Chicagoland T-Bird Club newsletter and he knows of no other D-Code Supercharged Birds which survive to this day. So we want to take any efforts to get these fellows streetable very cautiously.
Anyway, On a lark this morning I did a search on AC 428 and happened across this forum and later this query and I thought I'd post a "shout-out" for you all.
Incidentally, one of the ways we know the car we have was the car used for testing [aside from the folks at AC telling us so] was the wrinkles in the leather driver's seat on page 3 top of the Motor Test 30/68 article:
[Yeah, that one!] ... is
exact as the wrinkles on the drivers seat in CF7. The factory told us that this was the factory loaner/test car for several years until one of the folks on the waiting list got antsy and was offered CF7, which he took them up on. While it was owned by AC it was frequently used for testing variations in the interior and other items. One thing you'll note that currently CF7 is sans the AC nose badge. This is the way we received it, and later examples had a small vent located within this badge. CF7 also is sans the small "Logo vents" behind the fuel filler and sans the Frua badge behind the side panel vents behind the front wheel. All of the vintage articles show the same configuration (save for the first picture on the Motor Road Test article for some reason...).
I'll note that a number of years ago, Brookland books had a compilation of articles on the AC 428 (as well as some AC 289 and AC 427 filler articles) offered for sale in book form. I'm not sure where my copy is, but if I should run across it, I'll scan them and make them available for the peanut gallery.
In the meantime, I do have a [rather HUGE] PDF article I can share on my webspace:
http://home.xnet.com/~cmaddox/motorin/AC_Article_AQ_v29-n4.pdf Which is a 6 megabyte PDF document of a very nice writeup on the AC 428 by Automobile Quarterly. It'll take some time to download even with high-0speed internet, save it and open it with a PDF reader. [at least that's my adice]
Mike, I would love to get back in contact with you if for no other reason to catch up with you (irregardless of if your the fellow from Seattle or not] and perhaps to swap some old stories... Please email me! We'll talk!
Whew, this turned out to be a long post too!
I'll sum up. We were told by the factory that UPF 428F was CF 7. CF 7 is resting currently secure and awaiting the funds that will allow it's reawakening.
Hope this is greeted as good news.
Cheers and I look forward to learning more from you all in the future!
Chuck [Number 3]...
P.S. Pre-emptive thought/statement,
not for sale. Don't bother asking...
