As I write this, AN5L 501 should be loaded on its second container ship and on its way from Cartagena, Columbia, to Edison, New Jersey, where we can retrieve it after the long voyage from Australia and begin our quest for concours gold! The gold medal we seek will (hopefully) come when we bring the car to the Austin-Healey Club Enclave in the Pocono Mountains this September, where the car is entered in the Concours judging competition. Our goal at this event is to attain “gold” certification which means that out of 1000 possible points, we are able to attain 950 or more, as determined by a team of four judges and a roughly two-hour stem-to-stern inspection.
If you’re unfamiliar, this level of Concours judging is not for the faint of heart. This is the equivalent of what I imagine a physical exam would be like for a prospective NASA astronaut, an exam that presumably leaves no stone unturned. The judging we face is very different than, for example, the Lime Rock Concours and other similar prestigious Concours events where there is only five minutes of judging and the awards are distributed on a slightly more subjective basis. For these national club events, the scrutiny is at its highest level and the standards are very well defined. The judges will be looking for accuracy of every single component; every screw, every bolt head, every date stamp HAS to be correct for the car. Not only that, but each component has to look as good as it did the day it was installed, which poses a real challenge in some cases. The parts have to be accurate AND in mint condition, and this is often difficult to deliver!
You might be reading this and think that anyone who attempts to build a car to this standard is nuts. But the reason we’re interested in this, in particular, is that we want to return 501 to the way it looked the day it would’ve been purchased from a dealer’s showroom. The concours judging is our test to verify how well we have done in this quest. Nothing quite describes the experience of watching four official judges rip your car apart because you’re missing a lock washer here, or a gasket there. But that’s the game and the adventure that lies ahead. We did this once before for car AN5L 552 (gold level, 967.5 points); certainly, the exercise helps to sharpen the accuracy of the information we put forth to our customers and the accuracy of the copy in our parts catalog. That’s what makes going through all of this well worth it.
Our concours challenge is particularly intense because we only have three months to get this right. Since the car won’t arrive until sometime in July, our preparations are already well underway to source and secure specific parts we know we will need based on the photographs we have of the car in its current state. All the ingredients for this build are being are being sought and staged in an “operating room” where 501 can be wheeled in and surgery can begin. There are some fairly major components that will need to be removed for the sake of accuracy and originality (and concours points). For example, we are going to have to change the hard brake lines, which are currently copper-nickel and the wrong color; thus we have to rip-out perfectly functional (and corrosion-resistant) brake lines in favor of correct steel originals.
In spite of our massive parts inventory, there are a few “hen’s teeth” that we will have to purchase, such as a properly-dated turn signal flasher. If you’ve never noticed, the factory flasher is a little silver canister on the stock Bugeyes. The original Lucas unit has a date stamp engraved in it; that stamp has to be before the date of your car’s manufacture to get all of the points available for that component. So in our case, 501 was built in March of 1958. Therefore, our flasher has to be stamped with a date equal to or prior to that. Here’s a picture below of a 1959 flasher (the oldest one currently in our building); if you’ve got an earlier one you’d like to trade, or if you have one you want to sell with the correct date for us, please get in touch!
And so it begins! In the coming weeks, we will be aggressively gathering all the old stuff that belongs on 501 so that it’s a perfect recreation of its former self. Remember, as you can see in the pictures of the orange Bugeye in the next post, this car was left for dead with wire wheels and a roll bar in the 1970s once a previous owner was done racing it. It was restored during the past 10 years by a passionate “Bugeye Guy” in Australia and many of these details for Concours standards have been addressed already by him, as he too was accumulating an inventory of all the accurate bits and pieces. There’s more to do and that falls on our shoulders, to honor the car and honor the work that he (the late Tony Bennetto) has started. We will keep you in the loop as we return 501 to what is hopefully the new gold standard!
