> On Oct 5, 2021, at 1:25 PM, Daniel J. Matyola <[email protected]> wrote: > > Mine was a 1964 that I bought in 1965, when the owner flew his jet into the > Atlantic.
When I bought my 69 B I was teaching performance driving about one weekend a month at the local race tracks. I bought it for a buck, spent a few thou getting it in shape and it was my daily driver commuting about 40 miles each way, as well as spending a few hours cumulative a month at speed on race tracks. It was pretty damned reliable, until I decided that the engine needed to be rebuilt, and after that pretty much everything that went wrong could be pretty squarely blamed on my attempts to get “a little more performance” out of it. In college I had a ’68 Sprite that was all in all pretty reliable. When I graduated I bought a ’64 midget body and “rebodied” it, ending up with the nice earlier body, the big 1275cc motor and disk brakes. Unfortunately, a couple years later, I was in stop and go traffic, thought I saw someone crawling over the barrier on my left on the freeway, and just as I looked the car ahead of me stopped. I did get it back on the road, but the suspension was wonky and I ended up selling it to a friend. I may have already bored some of you with these pictures of two incarnations of my sprite. The first is of when it had the ’68 body, the second was right after I turned it into a ’64: http://www.red4est.com/lrc/racer_html/miscpix.html The fun thing about the photos of the later incarnation isn’t the skinny earlier version of myself, it is that the older chap in the photos is Donald Healey. One day, I went with some friends to an autocross in Sacramento, about 120 miles away. Our little caravan was one Sprite and three Fiat X1/9s. We had to stop about every forty miles to fix something on one of the fiats. At one of the stops I made the mistake of trying to deal with a miniscule water leak and ended up tearing one of the radiator hoses apart. The Ford Cortina I raced was terribly underpowered, but pretty damned reliable. > > Dan Matyola > *https://tinyurl.com/DJM-Pentax-Gallery > <https://tinyurl.com/DJM-Pentax-Gallery>* > > On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 4:22 AM John <[email protected]> wrote: > >> That must have been a while back. When I got mine (early 90s) you could >> get >> every part for one - including a complete body - from Victoria British >> Ltd. in >> Lenexa, KS (looks like they've been bought out by Moss Motors) or from The >> Roadster Factory in Carlisle, PA. >> > >> > -- > %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > -- Larry Colen [email protected] -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
