Monterey Car Week, Pacific Grove Rally

[jrlucke]

In watching a video of the Pacific Grove Rally during this week's Monterey Car Week there was a brownish Acceca and later a V8 powered Acecca was announced as the winner of the Best British Car (or at least I believe that was the award).

Would that have been AEX521?

There was also a nice grey 1930's AC tourer in the event.

[Aceca289]

Yes John - That was my Aceca (AEX521) at the Classic Motorsports Magazine Monterey Kickoff show. The award it won was "Best British Other" (they had separate awards for Best MG, Triumph, Jaguar, Mini & Austin Healey). It made me happy...that makes it 3 for 3 for top awards in its class this year at car shows. The award I'm most honored to achieve was a "Best in Class" at the "Cobra Day Show" at The Cobra Experience Museum in June where it went up against 3 other nice Acecas. It's really just great to get it out and drive it after 16 years of restoration work! It's only been on the road for for a little over a year now and I've logged about 1,600 miles so far.

For those of you that don't know, my Aceca has been in my family since 1968 (55 years - 23 in my garage). A High Performance 289 was installed early in 63 as a brand new motor straight from Ford...with a little assistance from Shelby to source the motor and his guys in Venice supplying parts and advice (according to a period article on the conversion and a 19 page invoice of the work including phone records).

Best,
John Thompson
AEX521

Btw - The 1930's AC at the show was a 16/70 Drop Head Coupe (L594). The owner has only had it for 2 years. I shared info about the ACOC and Rinsey Mills book.  I believe he will be joining the club. :)

[jrlucke]

Congratulations on the wins John. The Aceca looks good in that color as does the restoration. If I recall it was red when I saw it at Walt Peterson's shop in the early 1970's.

John

[administrator]

Thanks for all the info and news.  It would make a great article for ACtion!

[dkp_cobra]

John, do you have a picture of the mounting brackets for the additional lamps on your front bumper?

[Aceca289]

Peter,

Here's a pic of the mounting bracket.  The shop that did the work used a type of crimp on threaded insert in the back side of the bumper tubes. They initially had issues with the tubes wanting to twist when they tightened everything up...so they had to massage things a bit to get the tubes to align straight. It came out clean looking, but If I had it to do over again, I might have chose another option. The fit is really tight. We considered mounting the lights on a horizontal bar spanning between the bumper brackets, but that obscured the grill. Another option was to build individual brackets coming off of the bumper brackets from either end. The final option was to build a bracket that came off of the flat ledge of the aluminum bodywork below the grill. It appears that is where fog/driving lights are mounted on Ace's an Aceca's without bumpers...although, I wasn't sure if there is enough structural integrity on that ledge or if some strengthening beneath the bodywork would be required. Perhaps others may know about the latter mounting point and if it needs strengthening.

[dkp_cobra]

John,
thank you for the picture. Did you get my e-Mail to your aol.com address?
Kind regards,
Peter