My Dad had a Sunbeam Alpine which was another lovely classic from that period.
Your version of "lovely" and mine diverge somewhat. A Sunbeam Alpine was in fact my first car. Lest that strike you as odd, a workmate of my father used three Alpines to build one and was looking for a way to divest himself of the remnants and I thought the Alpine was "neat".
My parents allowed me to buy the thing as they thought it would be a good lesson for me and they also thought I had Buckley's chance of ever putting it back together.
They underestimated both how much I had learned and how determined I was.
I had the thing screwed back together and able to be registered just in time to go for my driver's licence test (which sensibly I did not do in the Alpine, but in my mother's Morris 1100 ( a vehicle that the USA was smart enough to prevent import of).
I briefly used the Alpine as a "daily driver" for when I couldn't ride a motorcycle, but it was so problematic (particularly in wet weather) that I bought another car that started, stopped when it was supposed to and which had a proper roof to keep rain and wind out.
Some random memories of the Alpine:-
The "X" chassis was so weak that if you accidentally parked with one wheel as little as 1" higher than the others after 30 minutes you couldn't open the doors.
Armstrong lever-action shocks are an instrument of torture
Laycock De-Normanville overdrive units - enough said, anyone who has ever had one of the blasted things knows...
Cross-flow radiators with the filler insufficiently above the radiator.
Lucas electrics and Smiths instruments (the only things that come close in motorcycle world are Spanish Femsa magnetos and Italian Veglia instruments
Wire wheels with splines made of cheddar cheese.
etc.
But on a fine day when the cursed thing was running well and a member of the opposite sex was accompanying, it was a very fine thing indeed.
I actually refused to believe that the Tiger could be as bad as the Alpine and in a complicated deal I sold the Alpine and ended up with cash and a "fixer-upper" Tiger. In today's world a newly licenced driver is not allowed to drive such things. I am put in mind of the test-pilot report on the Westlands Pterodactyl - "Access to the cockpit is difficult, it should be made impossible."
As you can guess I am even less of a fan of the Tiger than the Alpine - to my dismay it had all the hated faults of the Alpine whilst being able to reach "warp factor 10" on straight level roads. Fortunately I found someone else with a desire to own it.
And if you think my review of what some people mistakenly believe was the Rootes Group's finest accomplishment (it wasn't, the Hillman GT or Hustler in Australia was) ask me for my opinion of Vincent Rapide. Shadows and Lightnings.
Mind you, in the here and now I'd own any off the above in a heartbeat for the "right" price.
