Sprinzel Speaking: Spring 2000

Sprinzel Speaking

By John Sprinzel

I have just returned from a visit to the U.K., where a couple of my old competition cars were auctioned. The first was the original Sebring Sprite which I raced and rallied during 1960, ’61, and ’62. The poor old thing was in a terrible state, after years of neglect—not just in the proverbial barn, but also in one where the roof had fallen in on it! That this wreck fetched well over $25,000 was just amazing, but at least one could be certain that the car was the original one, although very much modified and often crashed since I parted with her in the summer of 1962.

The second car was the Sebring which Willy Cave and I drove on the 1991 Pirelli Marathon. With a complete body of carbon fiber, this ex-California Bugeye had been further modified to be an exact replica of the original car, and the owner had actually purchased my old registration number, PMO 200, from my sister’s Volvo to further enhance the value. This modern copy car went for $15,000 (without the license number) in spite of being beautifully restored, and ready to go on any of the retro events which crowd today’s competition calendar.

All this activity got me thinking about the many restorations which have now appeared. Originally, we built six of these alloy and fiberglass coupes driven by such notables as Stirling Moss, Vic Elford, and Paul Hawkins, as well as myself. A team of them won the manufacturer’s prize in the Nurburgring 500-kilometer GT race, and at one time they held the class lap record at pretty well every British race circuit. Nowadays, in addition to four restorations of the original cars, there seem to be about another half dozen which are even more modern than the Pirelli Marathon car of 1991, and some even carry Triumph Dolomite engines. While I have no objection whatsoever if folks want to build copies of our old Sebring, I wonder at which point the original cars become restored to the point of fraudulence.

Jonathan Whitehouse-Bird has rebuilt one of the old team cars entirely out of the correct parts, and even managed to get Len Pritchard, of the famous bodyworks Williams and Pritchard, to reconstruct the hardtop in the manner in which he built the first cars. Paul Woolmer, who bought my original prototype, has written to me to say he intends to do the same thing. The photo above shows the car in its heyday, with Vic Elford and Paul Hawkins—two future grand prix drivers—in their first international outing on the 1961 RAC Rally of Great Britain. My car, which had been second overall the previous year, was available because I was sharing Hans Walter’s Porsche Abarth Carrera in his drive to win the European Rally Championship. (He succeeded!)

This photo shows the Sebring in 1969 with the new registration number 248 DXN, which the second owner had used. After several inversions and owners, the Sprite now carried a different plastic front (the original had been aluminum) and a Ferrari-like fastback top. The doors, windshield, and platform look reasonably original.

The photo below is of the modern Sebring on the Pirelli Marathon. This was an imported Californian Bugeye fitted with a carbon fiber body and built by Orchard Restorations to a very high standard of finish and performance. Tom Coulthard bought this after the event and has spent years restoring it with the Brian Archer fabricated coupe top. In spite of the excellence of the finished work, the car, which was on display at the London Motor Show on the Brooks Auctioneers’ stand, fetched $10,000 dollars less than the wrecked original (but without the license number)!

In terms of all this restoration business, you really need two or three things to start. One is the chassis number plate fitted at the factory. These are usually complicated and not too easy to fake, but with the current attraction of old Ferrari and Cobra prices, I guess the temptation will always be there. The engine number is far easier. We used to get ours done on a funny machine at the Paddington Railway station, (which was a few hundred yards from our London works), so that isn’t a problem. We did, however, die-stamp a unique number code on the cylinder head, which helped identify original bits. The third is the commission number at the factory. Again, this is quite a complicated plate if it is an Abingdon or Maranello car, but on the cars we built, we again used the station machine and made up our own numbers. The license plate would be the final test, as the provenance of many cars can be traced through the chain of owners.

In the U.K., this used to be the logbook, and an original would give every name and address of subsequent owners. So if you are tempted to purchase one of the sport’s classic cars, you will need to spend a lot of time checking out to see if the car is genuine. Fortunately, in our case, with only six produced, each car had definite idiosyncrasies, so we were able to be sure that even the wreck was at least the wreck of the real thing! One clue was the higher door line for the driver. As I am rather tall, I needed an extra inch or so in order to see out of the side, which needed a taller side screen on the driver’s side. In the days before sticky tires, cars spent much more time sideways, and a clear view out of the side was rather essential. That wonderful proponent of sideways motoring, the late Roger Clark, used to say that as long as he wasn’t looking at the road through the rear window, he reckoned he was still in control!

While in the U.K., I was very much honored to give a speech to the Rally Driver’s Club’s three-year reunion. Called the Ecurie Cod Fillet (don’t even ask!), this is an association of mostly works drivers of the ’50s and ’60s, and the event was attended by over 300 of the great names of motorsport. It was just wonderful to see these guys and gals, some of whom I had not met for over 30 years. While obviously the passage of time accounted for some absent faces, it was rare to find such a collection of talent. The gathering even included the boss of the FIA committee Sheka Mehta, several-time winner of the Safari Rally, and Dave Richards. Dave, who was a very successful co-driver, ran the Bennetton team last year, and is boss of Prodrive, which builds and runs the world rally Subaru team amongst their competition activities. Talking to such a gathering means a lot of research, as you can’t get away with any B.S. in front of these guys! I stuck to mentioning as many names as I could think of, and a lot of the good moments of the great rallies and races of the era. That had most of them daydreaming of their 15 minutes of fame, and I think I got away with it…

Next stop is Australia, where I hope to talk story with the keen members of the Healey Clubs in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Oz has a great collection of British cars—several models were assembled there, and it is always a fun place to visit. I’m looking forward to them throwing another few prawns on the barbie and slurping some more of that great Aussie wine!