Car Catcher: No Reserve Sunbeam Tiger MkII

Beautiful.

Tiger owners are an odd bunch.  They seem to think that they own the equivalent of a Cobra when in fact with a modest 164 bhp, they have an excellent competitor to the Austin Healey 3000.

They made 7000 odd cars, all of which were powered by the 260 V8 except the last 600 that got the 289 (with a welcome bump to 200 bhp) but today almost all cars you see at shows have been fitted with 289s (or 302s, as original 289 engines are getting hard to find) and many have had improvements like 4 bbl instead of 2 bbl carbs.

Flawed by being heavy (though this isn't as much of a burden as it was for the 4 cylinder cars) and by having wheels too small to fit decent brakes into (13" instead of the much more common 15") they were also hampered back in the day by a lock of performance tires in that size.

Although better suited to being boulevard cruisers, a few people did manage to turn them into passable SCCA race cars (Hollywood Sports cars did well with them) but they were stuck into B production with Corvettes and such.

IIRC, it got a tad embarrassing when Chrysler took Rootes over toward the end of the Tiger production and there was some feeling that they killed the model early rather than be seen marketing a car with a Ford engine (I don't think their engines of the period could have been shoehorned into the Tiger).

Ditto as said above. Although, I always liked the LeMans specials and thought they would have had a much better chance in the race had some other shop built their motors besides Shelby America.