Services
Special Announcements
As I have noted here in previous releases we keep adding to our list of dealers and suppliers of NOS, retro-tuning and race equipment offered for our great British cars. We now have installed and can supply conversion kits to make almost any British car a five-speed super highway cruiser. We have done a Rivergate package on a 1275 for a Morris Minor, a Moss / Ford T-9 in an MGA and now a Toyota gear box behind a van den Akker conversion kit in a TR6. This is certainly one of the most popular conversion packages since Pertronix ignitions! Call us to explore this opportunity for your car.
We recently built from scratch a Vintage Race MG Midget! We have more chassis’ available to build one for you. If you have been thinking about getting into this popular venue, please call us with your needs. We have a solid early Bug-eye with SCCA race history that could be ready to race by this fall or next spring. Call or e-mail us with your interests.
We still plan to expand our reach for new markets with “Facebook” and other linked venues. We hope to reach the “next generation” in this manner hoping they will embrace the British Car hobby.
Finally, we are enjoying our fifth year in business as Southside British Cars. We organized as an LLC in March of 2005 and never looked back. Also, while looking at our records recently we realized that the property and buildings we are in were established in 1910! Another milestone and worthy of a combined celebration! We will be offering some great deals, specials and give-aways over the next few months to thank our current customers and welcome new business. Watch this site for details!
- Race preparation for Spring race season
- Total restoration services
- Power and performance tuning
- Reliability upgrades
- Vintage race builds, preparation and support
- Dealer for Moss Motors, Victoria British, Pertronix, Mini-Mania and more!
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Southside British Cars Crew: From left to right: Tony Dix, Jim Allen, Mike Allen
Floor Sweepings
Will Rogers once said “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. So I’m going to take this advice, catch my breath, and stop doing what I’m doing long enough to update the web site. Trying to keep this site fresh, posting new information and thoughts monthly sometimes seems like a chore. But once I get rolling I remember the enjoyment I get out of the effort.
Lots of stuff to talk about this time…..I looked at the date on the last update and it was June 10th. And now we are more than half way through July. First, I offer a shameless plug for our shop. The summer has been very kind to the business. We have a full slate of cars scheduled to come in and we’ve put a lot of cars through the shop since the end of May. It seems to be the year of the Triumph. We have had two Spitfires, two TR6, One TR4, a TR2 and two GT6’s come and/or go through our shop so far this year. And there is a TR2 and TR3A scheduled to come in within the next few months.
A few issues back we featured a Jaguar XKE on this site. To refresh your memory the car was owned by Dr. Thomas here in Virginia. After many enjoyable years he sold it to Joel Joachim in New York City. We were favored with the task of going through the car and doing a substantial amount of work for Joel to refresh the car prior to the transfer to Long Island. Now that very car is going to appear on a 2011 calendar featuring significant Jaguar cars! There is a link to an article about Joel and his XKE at our links page.
If you are one of the countless British car owners that have discussed, no; even argued, the relative merits of SU versus Weber carburetion it would be worth the time and the five bucks to get the current edition of Classic Motor Sports. Long time contributor and co-founder of the British Motors Trade Association, Carl Hiedeman conducted a very comprehensive comparison of these popular “petrol pumps” with very surprising results. Bottom line….not much difference! Carl includes the methods he used to arrive at the results and it reveals some interesting data about both. We favor the SU’s more because we are purists than anything else. And we run SU’s on our race cars and personal cars with satisfactory results. But this article presents a fair and informative observation of both.
We acquired a red Bug-eye Sprite last month (on Father’s Day actually) that is a very complete 1959 car with a Heritage Certificate. We picked this car up out on Long Island……and that is a subject for another story! Have you ever tried to get from New Jersey to L.I. with a truck and trailer? But I digress and I’ll save this for later! We are struggling with ourselves about the future of the car. Do we keep it and restore it for a “shop car” or turn it over for a quick profit, (profit being a relative thing in this business). As of this writing we have had three offers on the car! I believe our decision may be easier than originally thought!
Finally, we never get a real sense of who reads our contributions to this site. Our “web-master” provides us with a monthly report detailing how many hits we got, whether new or repeat visitors and the search engine used to find us. All of this is helpful and encouraging information but not necessarily telling in respect to the value of the content. If you are reading this we would welcome feed back and ideas for future inclusions with my ramblings. We are going to try a FAQ section with this release but to make it successful we will need questions! You can submit your comments or questions to the Southside British Facebook page or toour e-mail. We will try to be faithful in our responses. Thanks!
