ZZ2 - What's REAL, What's NOT .... or MAYBE!

[Peter Nightingale]

Andrew, I totally agree with everythig you have said in your posts on this subject , myself having been a CAMS eligibility officer in the past . regards Peter N....

[driftwood]

thats all i need a couple of sheep fornicators agreeing with allen
mind you it does not mean you are right!

[Andrew Fellowes]

sheep? hey, it was the English that brought them to Oz, from Spain.

[/end History lesson]

[allenbrown]

Originally Posted by Andrew Fellowes

The one CAMS rule I don’t agree with is that if now, you think you should replace your chassis with a new one, the old must be cut up to an extent that it will never be reusable. This to me is vandalism, well intentioned maybe but it’s removing the right of future generations to see the original. You will never stop the fakers and this is the old sledge hammer approach.

I can see why CAMS have come up with this rule - you can't tell someone racing a car that they are not allowed to replace a component with an identical copy on safety grounds BUT you can't allow that original frame to separate and become the basis of a second instance of the car.

I'm comfortable with frame replacement if and only if the original frame is kept with the car. If at any point it is sold separately then the car (i.e. the one with the new frame) becomes devalued and is no longer the sole owner of the pre-replacement history.

When you replace a frame, you start playing with fire.

[Steve Wilkinson]

Originally Posted by Andrew Fellowes

I shouldn't laugh, it can be contagious.
'ant parts' instead of 'any parts'

It's called unconcious humour and Drifty is often guilty of that!

By the way ANT Parts could be very small and might just have been over-looked!

[driftwood]

sheep? hey, it was the English that brought them to Oz, from Spain. Yes after we exported our Convicts

Allen re replacemnt chassis and devaluation can you quote an example? i can only think of the 1 2 3 million quid cars that this may apply to
i think any historic race car we are discussing is in the £3--200k range is not affected
BUT what will affect the value is IF the old chassis is being resurrected and c
arries the "original" number on its plate even with the C or R stamp alongside it while the "original " Plate is afixed to the new chassis regardless of when it was done ie 3 years after the car was raced in period or 15 -20s yrs down the line

[helen]

Like Simon I will play devils advocate. I don't often appear on any of the Forums because it is very frustrating to read so much incorrect information especially about ourselves, chassis numbers & histories - anyway that could be a lifetimes thread - infact I've spent virtually 30 years archiving Chevron material. So I'm not going to answer which cars are 'real' or not. My question is, if a car was crashed in 1971 taken back to the Bolton factory & said crashed car sold to mainly NW England racers who then split the car up in what we now call 'in period' & remade them as new cars with no thought then to chassis numbers what consitutes the 'correct' car? When the AM number has been carefully grafted onto another chassis, who are you to know that it is in fact a fake? When a crashed car was thrown into the Lodge at Bolton but a new one made with the same number durng 1971 what is it? When a car goes abroad in 1971 & the plate is removed and put onto another car for the carnet as they were so expensive and the bond you had to put up was high or the car was sold in say S Africa (no specific reason for this choice) & the chassis plate taken off to put on another car for the return carnet, how do you sort that one?

When you look at a B19 the radiators are no longer made by serck, rose jonts are of modern configuration as they are no longer made in the old style, aeroquipe is used instead of the old pipe, brake pads are different, the aluminium is no longer Dural as unavailable but the closest to it, the camber links on the B19 are in eliptical tube which is now is only available in metric - mind you we have the tube especially hand made for us now so it is the same or is it, it's hand made?! - tyres are different even the Dunlops are a different size, tacho's are electronic, jump plugs & electric fittings are all modern as virtually nothing still available, silicone hoses instead of the old rubber ones etc., etc. Like Confucious said 'if you clasp your hands together even the air inside cannot stay the same'. It is an almost impossible task to retain a car as it was except by not touching it for the last 37 years - there's only one B19 like this - again don't ask me which one.

Having looked at hundreds of chassis plates over those decades I can now see an unoriginal one from 20 paces I am starting to be inclined towards the car is the chassis plate as that is the one untouched piece of the car. Happy for you to argue against me on this. In my experience too the most marvelously documented car can still be wrong, a particularly interesting one was a B19 purporting to be a special car with one of the best document trails I've seen but on inspection it was a B21....!

The FIA were going to work with the manufacturers on creating retrospective Homologation Papers & I certainly think this would be worthwhile to draw a line under the technical aspects of the car, especially whilst a few people in whatever marque are still alive & have that inside knowledge. Here at Chevron we have 6 of the original employees either working for us or with us, we have lost 2 this year and pray to God no more next. The FIA HTP also covers a car so it is technically in period, whereas before, the HVIF was stricter on the technical side as the car was to presented as it left the factory, not a period change for eg like B16 brakes (sorry another can of worms- Simon!!)

My views have changed over the years & there are lots of other threads which could come from this ie: why do you race an historic car because you want to win or sit in the car a famous driver drove & so on? But I think now my fundamental point is that for me the chassis plate is my first port of call, how do I know this because 'how can you tell an old man is old?' you just know. Sorry for all the old cliches, I'm waiting for your bows & arrows now.

[driftwood]

I like your post!!
however very disappointed in not telling what is real and what is not
I am reading 1972 73 As race reports and adverts on b19 21 cars i see some cars for sale with plate numbers or driver names
i see articles in race reports joe bloggs racing the ex john hine burton lepp gray b19 in bolivian 1200 meter race so some cars have a trail that is simple to follow and some are just obvious cars that are shunted written off and yet a miracle happens they re appear at an HSCC race in 1983 or 2006
now you do not need to be reader of The Times or Telegraph to work out that somefink as afoot
AND you know some B16 cars where stripped down and parts fitted to b19 21 cars and i do not beleive that Chevron built all teh 21 23 cars as per the build numbers as these B19 cars would hev been kitted out with b21 parts and not given a plate but possibly notched onto the counting stick

SO can we have transparency or will it be a guilty secret?

[helen]

I'm not very good at this forum thing I've put some stuff relevant to this thread on the Chevron B19 thread, so please feel free to go & look on there. I'd move it over but I don't know how to do that.

[helen]

All I can say is when you have, I don't want to say 'poor' records from the beginning it is very hard to build up a positive from that. Nowadays manufacturers are compelled and automatically make comprehensive records about every car they make. It wasn't like that in the 1970's. Though I think if we want to discuss records according to John? we should go to another Forum?

Even so, I'm not going to spend aons of my time letting people know what could well be the true records when almost everytime in the past when people are given information it is misused. I'm afraid all the people still around associated with the original Derek Bennett Engineering Ltd have had their fingers burnt too often to be happy about total transparency.

[allenbrown]

Helen, it really is lovely to have your insights here on this most dangerous of Chevron threads. I quite understand that there's a lot you can't answer. I hope there will also be things you can.

You are quite right to point out some of the events that can happen during a car's life that makes it so difficult to track it and document it. We can never know everything but the more we discover, collate and publish, the harder it will be for someone to falsify history.

I personally don't care if someone wants to race a Chevron B19 that was built in 1971 or in 1989 or in 2008 - as long as they don't try to convince the world that a new car is an old car and then make a profit out of some gullible soul. If a car was genuinely built in 1972 at the factory and has a dodgy second-hand identity but a completely kosher history since then it should just tell the whole story and let everyone see that is is genuine. If a car was built in 1986 for Thundersports and has taken a previously unused number then it should make that equally clear. As I've said before, if the facts are put into the public domain, a lot of the name-calling stops.

For example, I happen to have the results of the 1972 Course de Côte de Beaujolais in front of me and there in 23rd place is Hans Affentranger in his Chevron B19. I want to know which car that was and I want to publish that as it might just help an owner put all the pieces together. I also want to know about Jean-Marie Porcier's and Cyr Febbraio's and Ruedi Jauslin's of course - but I have the advantage of being very patient

Do stick around on 10 Tenths. The more you can add, the more we'll all learn.

Allen

[helen]

Thanks allen,

That is exactly how I feel.

I asked the FIA when the HTP's started could cars have FIA Heritage Papers as new cars so that the cars are clearly logged and easily identified for Organisers. It doesn't matter right now because the few cars that are made we can let the race organisers know about or they can ask but it is important for the future.

I do feel it has been easier though - one positive of the HTP's - to say more clearly whether a car is 'correct' or not as with old HVIF without the paperwork it couldn't race so if you clearly knew a car was not right it was most difficult if they had owned it for 10 or even 20 years to say anything & then it became ineligible to be raced. Now the market price generally tells you whether a car is genuine or not but not always the case. For B19's the market price seems to be lagging behind certainly the B8's so the range of poor through to excellent B19 cars are at the moment for some reason all about the same price. Not that we buy & sell cars - you need to ask Simon more about this market price reflecting the perceived historic status or not - as I am hopeless at selling cars, so just put people in contact with each other.

[helen]

Allen,

A case in point is your query about the B19 at Course de Cote de Beaujolais, I can't or won't answer you with just a plain one line sentence telling you exatly what you may or may not want to hear. Now a days I would want you to tell me as much as you know about the car & then ever so cautiously together, hopefully we would find that we were talking about the same car, your information would meet my archive information & then we sumise what is the true answer by back tracking through archive material & talking to people, drivers, owners, looking at bits of the car, chassis, chassis plate of course. Sometimes we can recognise just by sight who's work it is. This is a totally holistic approach which I believe is the only way forward. Even so, that's all well and good but most Organisers would still not know which is an original, new, fake, replica or bitsa car, they have no criteria for finding out.

[driftwood]

I disagree with what you have just said HelenA case in point is your query about the B19 at Course de Cote de Beaujolais, I can't or won't answer you with just a plain one line sentence telling you exactly what you may or may not want to hear. This smacks of secret squirel club
why should allen tell you something if you are not prepared to put it here- that is when i start to think somink not right here
I have just sat for 3 nights flcking through Autosport for 72 73 cars for sale ads pit n paddock race results/reports and ive found already some interesting points on b19 21 cars just for the British owned cars

For example robin smith had for sale B19 esq car that was built from nowt

he does not give it any number just chevron Gp6 or protype for sale he even states who made the chassis and it was in lancs!

talking to Brian robinson at the weekend
he bought ken walkers b16# 7 ex red rose and had it converted to B21 raced with Migault sold via bob howlings in the end ( he thinks maybe usa?) then bought ex DART B19 but it was not the eddie regan DART car

Humble had the B16 spyder car ran as B19 then it was crashed cut up threw chassis away so end of that car ( but 2 fakes exist!!) and sold suspension to Welpton/smith who built their own B21 ( they had it in kit from factory ) in their garage

Humble then had a new B21 kept the ft and motor from B16S as spares for their racing

trevor Twaites had B16 and ordered new b21 stripped out what he needed for the B21

same thing for B16#35 ro Roger Heavens became B21#16 in feb 72 AS has his advert selling the chassi body for £750 he even list the number it went to USA and has been there ever since yet 2 fakes B16#36 exist

all the while the info stays "secret" it allows the BS to carry on
FIA need to retract any papers on cars that are duplicating chassis numbers and allocate them blatantly obvious out of sequence numbers

[driftwood]

it does need copying here John where are you when we need you

[Dr. Alexander Lienau]

I fully agree with Helen`s approach how to clearify the history of a car.

If somebody comes along with a question about the history of a chevron B19 or B16 or B8 he should be the owner of the car in question or in front of the car and going to buy it. In that case he will have information concerning the history in his hands and can present some or all supporting history and can ask very concrete questions. In that case you get answers from people who really have information. That is my personell experience.

I think it is a very wise attitude not to tell the history of a certain chassis numbers to anybody who is not deeply involved as owner of the car. Only the owner or seller should decide, if he wants to make the history of his car public and to open a dispute about it. I did that for my car after I have made my homework completely and got the aproval from the FIA, which is the only relevant institution in that matter, if you like it or not.

If you have not such a clear history, but going clearly to 1972 or 1975 nobody should doubt to much about the correct number, because there might be in many cases a mixture of chassis and chassis plates by tax carnet or whatever reason. For example your brought your car in 1972 back to england and sold it there and bought a never B21 but attaching to that car the old chassis plate and "reimported your car".


In cases, where the history starts later as may be 1976 or after 1980 than you have to be very very careful because you nearly can be sure that there will exist another car, which will might have the papers from the original chassis number in period.

[allenbrown]

Drifty - it isn't the act of replacing the chassis that devalues the car; it's te act of selling the original chassis to someone else.

[driftwood]

that is what i want to hear as nobody is prepared to state that fact !!!
i do not even feel the old chassis has the right to even be associated to the car or history or even wear the plate with old number and be stamped R or C !!
yet the fia inspectors are happy to allow this

[allenbrown]

Are they happy? I don't know of an original chassis being separated from a car and then getting an HC.

[driftwood]

HC or HTP its all the same to me the old chassis should not even be allowed to get htp with the original number stamped on the plate with R or or F
If it has to have papers and a plate it should get a number out of sequence like 102

[driftwood]

If somebody comes along with a question about the history of a chevron B19 or B16 or B8 he should be the owner of the car in question or in front of the car and going to buy itRUBBISH this is how people get conned you get only what they want to tell you if you are open then you can have other info that can confirm things ie mechanic who worke don car or he willsay this car is fake becaus ei cut it up and threw it in the scrap metal bin
In that case he will have information concerning the history in his hands and can present some or all supporting history and can ask very concrete questions. In that case you get answers from people who really have information. That is my personell experience.It is NOT my personal experience i research each car myself and often the owner has some wrong info or even TOTALLY wrong!
I think it is a very wise attitude not to tell the history of a certain chassis numbers to anybody who is not deeply involved as owner of the car.and then you can cry to your mummy later when you find out that the owner told you lies!!
Only the owner or seller should decide, if he wants to make the history of his car public and to open a dispute about it. Most info is out there in magazine race perorts car for sale adverts all it needs is 6 people putting all info into the pot plus what the owners tell you to get the truth
I did that for my car after I have made my homework completely and got the aproval from the FIA, which is the only relevant institution in that matter, if you like it or not.WHO are the FIA to say what you present is the real truth! Do they then employ another guy to check what you say is true and do other research if they do not do this then they are not the best to say your car is real!- Dr A i can show you 3 cars in orwell that ar enot true cars but have "nice" race history with race wins good driver s race dthe cars but the cars are not from 1971 2 3 races all ne wcars after the real car was destroyed
If you have not such a clear history, but going clearly to 1972 or 1975 nobody should doubt to much about the correct number, because there might be in many cases a mixture of chassis and chassis plates by tax carnet or whatever reason. For example your brought your car in 1972 back to england and sold it there and bought a never B21 but attaching to that car the old chassis plate and "reimported your car".we do make allownaces for carnet papers with chassis numbers being moved around for EEc race travel BUT they wil lget re fitted after the race or it even sat with tape holding it on for 10 minute custom inspection!
In cases, where the history starts later as may be 1976 or after 1980 than you have to be very very careful because you nearly can be sure that there will exist another car, which will might have the papers from the original chassis number in period. THIS is exactly why we want open disclosure not secret squirrel club there are cars in EEc that raced in Italy only and went to the mountain races cars in japan raced there and then parked in garages or maybe crashed that you wil lnever know about 3 or 4 cars sold to USA new and then later 2 or 3 more sold via bob howlings to guys in 74- 76- as far a si am concerned anyone who keeps the info secret has something to hide and i will say here is a probem car

[allenbrown]

Dear Helen

I may have given you the wrong impression in my last post. When I said I wanted to know which B19 Affentranger had in 1972, I wasn't expecting you to tell me, I was just making the point that this was one of the things I intended to find out from contemporary records or by asking someone who knew him or who spoke to him before he died - such as Roman. I know you guys have worked on many of the cars and will have access to original records but there's no particular reason you should know second or third owners of all the B19s.

All this will come out in time - just as it has on Chevron B24s or Lola T332s or Maserati 250Fs or any of the other types of racing car that have been examined in detail.

Dr Lienau is keen to keep secrets. Fortunately, he'll find that difficult. Indeed, his attempts to keep things secret will just arouse the suspicion of more people and make it even more likely that the truth will out.

Allen

[Dr. Alexander Lienau]

Hello Mr. Driftwood (if you are not hidding your real name).


I feel we come from different religions. I prefer to believe in well documented facts and a clear chain of owners etc. Thats by the way the same religion I feel the FIA trusts.

You prefer to believe in hearsays and rumors supported by journalist, which as we all know only report the absolute truth. Instead of the owners you prefer the opinion of the selfcalled experts and specialists.

I do not know, how both religions can find to live together. My proposal is to accept there are at minimum two categories:

- genuine B19`s which means cars with clear history (and in future HC-Papers + HTP Papers, if the owner wants to race them)
- copies faked or whatever cars, which may have today as well earned a history because they are used for racing since twenty or thirty years, which have HTP-papers. If you like to race those cars, they are fully acceptable and have a very high value, which is not so far away of the value of the genuine car.

There may be one or more cars, which would deserve the status as a genuine car, but cannot prove it because original papers are lost and the owners do not find a way to prove the history, bad luck.

[Simon Hadfield]

Dr Lienau, if it ever came to the point that these histories had to be put to the absolute test I can guarantee that the "self called experts" you are so quick to denigrate would win the day. The very point you make about them having no vested interest is what gives them their credibility - they have no axe to grind, no commercial interest to protect, their interest is not in pricking peoples pomposity but history for histories sake, and I suspect that is what is so threatening to so many.....

[driftwood]

Dr A

My religion is no to kick sand in your face but to hear all the info and facts and then a picture forms
it is just the same as a murder mystery film
what you think at the begining of the film is different to the end when you hear all the facts
By having discussions with the cars early year owners look at race dates hear when they win or crash gives the info you need
Also finding the mechanics is useful they often know more than the car owner!
already in the last 24 hours a chevron b48 and ralt rt1 cars history and info have been posted all because 1 man talked to a car owner of a brabham bt36 and other info flowed that filled in the gaps of 2 other race cars and 1 that i knew was not an F2 car but in fact an F3 car

so the more people you talk to the more info is gathered and the truth comes out

the FIA is not god either ( more a pain in the neck at times) and i do not bow before them