slotcar7 skrev:But i think this slot is really a Can Am Cooper-Ford.[…]to me, it's completely a Cooper-Ford, even if a bit stylized, and i think the photo you can look at below can maybe let you think in the same way..
http://lascm.com/Slot-Car-Museum/index. ... ts_id=6415So, at the end of the day, it's a matter of interpretation, i guess.
Fine, feel free to call it a Cooper Ford or whatever you like. But this doesn’t alter the circumstance that this body shell isn’t called Cooper-Ford by anyone, or anywhere else in the world. Not even by its maker/manufacturer back in the day.
Food for thought: What would you have called this car if this haphazard “Cooper Ford” sticker hadn’t been attached by someone, sometimes in a past distant?
And what would you have called it if there instead had been a sticker label saying “Ferrari”? Or “Monza Roadster”?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the line of actual facts has to drawn somewhere…
Also curious and a little funny is the circumstance that the LASCM link that is proposed as “proof” for the Cooper Ford theory is a Revell Cooper Cobra, which actually is also a great and well known age-old mismomer, made by Revell some 40+ years ago.
That orange car was neither known as a Cooper Ford or a Cooper Cobra in its racing days, but rather as the ill-famed
”Lang Cooper”, in effect an old Cooper Monaco chassis with a new one-shot body design by Peter Brock, and commissioned for racing by Craig Lang for Dave MacDonald. Not very successful at that, as the Cooper Monacos were at that time long overdue.
Speaking of Cooper Monacos, these were very popular at US race tracks in the early 1960s, a mid-engined lightweight british racing car, easily modified and reasonably suitable for fitting small block V8 engines to suit the taste of American muscle racing drivers, be it Chevy, Olds, Ford, Buick or what have you.
Fitted with a Ford 289 V8 engine the designation by Carroll Shelby became “Cooper Cobra” or “King Cobra”, not Cooper Ford. (Shelby coined the term “Cobra” for many of his creations after the pioneering feat to fit a small block V8 Ford engine in yet another small british sports car, the AC Ace, since then known as the Shelby Cobra and later also the AC Cobra).
The term “Cooper Ford” that’s still alive and well to this day was actually coined by model maker Monogram in the mid-1960s for a series of plastic model and slot car kits. The Monogram kits (as we have seen) were then often plagiarized by other companies. And hence modern restorations of old Cooper Monacos are often called Cooper Fords by a historically challenged modern day racing public that have seen a lot of these “Cooper Ford” toys as kids…
Returning to the subject of this little topic, your “Cooper Ford” that is elsewhere in the world called “Mini B Spyder”:
As Lucio states, this car/shell is in fact called “Mini B Spyder” in the period Mini Dream Car catalog, not “Cooper Ford”. And where there’s a “spyder” (roadster, open, no top type car), there’s often also a coupe (closed, roofed type car), a “Mini B Coupe” or “Mini B” for short.
An there actually is, as can be seen here: Essentially the same bodyshell, but a with closed cockpit and a roof.
And as you´re already familiar with this
Mini Dream Car thread I’m sure you’ve also seen a lot of these closed roof “Mini B”s in there, and also several “Mini B Spyders”, and also the original molds for these shells. Maybe you’ve also noticed that nowhere in this thread are there any mentioning of a “Cooper Ford”…
These Mini A, B and C/Spyder shells were actually not depicting any real cars. They were pure fantasy creations, in popular languge then and now known as “Thingies”.