Re: Giving preserved locomotives false identities
- From: Pete Fenelon <pete@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:28:36 +0100
Andrew Robert Breen <azb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> In car preservation it's almost unknown for one car to masquerade as
> another - probably because of the registration plate issue (though
If only it were so. When you get into the realms of *real* esoterica -
mostly racing cars or very rare sports cars - issues of identity can become
very fraught (or did i mean fraudulent?) indeed.
F'rinstance I know of three chassis numbers that have been on one March
761s and three chassis that have had the same plate on them... and that
was just the works rebuilding things, no intend to defraud at all.
Certainly through the 50s-70s the relationship between chassis plates
and the chassis under them was fairly arbitrary. Partly because, well,
in the days of tube-frames at what point did one frame actually become
another? -- similarly when it was just a matter of reskinning a
monocoque or indeed putting a new tub onto existing running gear, what
really constitutes an "entity"?
And of course, partly because if you bend a car you've got a customs
carnet for at a race, and bring out a replacement for it, well, stands
to reason it's the same car, innit? ;P (Saves time and bureaucracy -
there are rumours that some teams had *many* more chassis than they had
chassis numbers for ;)).
And of course in the days when cars were routinely sold on, perish the
thought that any manufacturer ever switched the chassis plate from some
tired old hack that was being sold on to a customer with a decent works
car that they wanted to keep -- so the customer thought he was getting
"the car that so-and-so won X number of GPs in".
Oh and there's the time when one very famous team actually only *had*
one car present on the first day of a meeting. It was scrutineered, then
pushed round the back of the paddock where the race number was changed,
the chassis plate pried off the frame (if indeed it was held on with
more than double-sided sticky tape), another plate applied and the car
re-presented to the scrutes. The second car actually arrived the next
day -- they were still building it in England!
And we haven't even got into the scams that classic car *dealers* get
into with racing cars when they hit the market. After all, would you
want (say) a Lotus that Fred Bloggs had come ninth in a few minor races,
or one that Jim Clark had raced? ;)
And what about cars that are built up from 'bits' of other entities? -
if you can work out which Maserati 250Fs are real and which are fake,
and why some of the Cameron Millar reps actually have more real Maserati
in them than some of the allegedly "historic" 250Fs, and indeed the
relationship between the chassis numbers some of the bits bore during
their racing career and what they have now... you're doing well!
Believe me, it all makes locos in funny paint jobs look decidedly
benign!
pete
--
pete@xxxxxxxxxxx "Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime"-G Gordon Liddy
.
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