Hi Joey,
There's not much of a mystery. What it looks like is that somebody read
more into that paragraph of Mike Taylor's than they should have, and
they concluded that the Rootes factory did actually build an Alpine with
the 2.5 litre V8 from a Daimler SP250. Most likely they were wrong - the
engine is way too bulky to fit properly, and the engineers were
instructed to make it fit without many modifications. Note that in the
description the car is described as a "replica". The seller never
claimed this to be a factory prototype - at best, it's an implementation
of an idea that the factory considered and then rejected.
Even though the Ford engine had probably been discussed at some point,
it likely never would have been used as the basis for the Tiger if Ian
Garrad hadn't talked Shelby American, and Ken Miles, into building two
prototypes using his advertising budget, and basically dropped it into
the laps of the Rootes executives as a done deal. The performance and
capability of the prototype was so astounding that they were convinced
on the spot. George Boskoff did the engineering and fabrication on the
prototype, but Ian was the guy who pushed the project through the
crucial first few months, and if he had let up at any time, the Tiger
never would have been.
Best regards,
Theo
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