HS30-H

That's because it was designed and engineered to be part of the factory Sport/Race Option 'Orange Box' CD Ignitor, coil and distributor:

A slightly more accurate (honest?) description of the car here: https://rallysportmag.com/feature-legends-reunion-with-classic-datsun-240z-rally-car180518/ Although.... "The car was reshelled after Roy Fidler rolled it on the 1972 Scottish Rally, but other than that, it still retains many of the works parts." No it wasn't. “When I purchased the car I received the original UK registration papers, log book and FIA papers,” he adds. The original UK registration papers for what though? What we are looking at is what started life as a standard 1970 S30 Fairlady Z-L road car, and which has had a bunch of ex-Works rally car parts bolted onto it. The chassis number of the bodyshell - last time I saw it - told the story.

As pictures are probably much better than my old waffle, I took the opportunity to fire off a couple of shots on the mobile to illustrate:

Sorry, I missed the question the first time round. 'Bead Stoppers' were a somewhat old fashioned way of keeping a wide race tyre on the rim in case of a deflation. Modern wheels tend to have safety beads on the inner and outer parts of the rims, and wide modern race tyres tend to be easier to mount too, so they are not considered necessary. What you did was retract the bead stoppers by loosening the lock nuts and wind them back so that the tyre could pass over them and be fully seated on the rim. Then they were wound back into position (imagine a rounded post protruding into the air-filled space inside the tyre) and locked. There was a rubber seal to stop air escaping. In the case of a puncture, the bead stoppers would physically prevent the tyre bead from rolling into the central 'well' of the wheel and potentially causing bigger problems. They would also - hopefully - allow a short distance to be driven (possibly getting the car back to the pits) and with luck prevent the wheel from being ruined too. On the RS Watanabe re-pops the bead stoppers are non-functioning dummies.

Nothing wrong with replicas of course. Just worth knowing what's 'real' and what's not, I think. Especially when it comes to buying and selling... ;-)

[Nitpicker]Those particular examples being the recent RS Watanabe-made repops in Aluminium, with the non-functioning bead stoppers.[/Nitpicker]

Don't understand why this seller is claiming 1969 date for this car? It's a mid 1970 production date chassis number all day long.

If any of the above is hard to understand or unclear (probably because I haven't explained properly...) then please feel free to ask for clarification.

Here's a photo of the above hand-painted 'representation' of the original Japanese carnet plate attached to one of the other two cars that were sold by Bonhams at the 2005 Goodwood sale, to illustrate just how mixed-up the parts and stories became whilst in Mr Arthur Carter's hands: The above car was (is!) actually 'LAL 909K', the ex-Samuri Conversions race car, originally built up from a standard UK market HS30 prefixed 240Z in period and (somewhat amazingly) raced in several UK rounds of the World Sports Car Championship. It was fabbed-up as an evocation of a works rally car later in its life, and it's time in the Arthur Carter Collection - pretending to be something other than it was - arguably saved it. The car is now in the hands of a sympathetic owner who intends to restore it to its Samuri Conversions-era race spec.

(my bold) Just more blarney from the writer of the piece, who wouldn't know what he was looking at anyway. When the car(s) were at previous long-term owner Mr Arthur Carter's farm, various fabbed-up plates were attached to them at various times. None of them were the original Japanese temporary export 'carnet' plates that the cars were issued with. It seems fitting that a re-assembled rag tag of parts should have a hand-painted 'representation' of the original plate attached to it... Putting someone like Lofty Drews on the spot about a car like this is unfair. I don't know what he was told about the car he looked at, but I can only imagine it would have been difficult for him to come to an accurate view without a little bit more background info.

Gavin, "It's like Deja Vu all over again...." The story can be taken completely apart and shown for what it is in just a few lines. Complete fantasy. The car concerned - running on UK registration 'PTD 524K' - is one of the 'Arthur Carter Collection' cars that were auctioned off at the Bonham's Goodwood Festival of Speed sale back in 2005. I attended the sale and had a very good look over the cars, but already knew a fair bit about them beforehand. Essentially what was being sold was what started out as three standard road cars with a selection of leftover ex-Works parts attached to them. No genuine ex-Works cars or bodyshells, but parts and paper identities of long extinct ex-Works cars hung on other cars. The car wearing the UK registration 'PTD 524K' (the UK number issued to Works 240Z 'TKS 33 SA 696' when it stayed on in the UK after its carnet number expired) is actually a Japanese market Fairlady Z-L, manufactured in mid 1970, chassis number 'S30-02552', which was originally brought to the UK by a USAF serviceman on an exchange program with the RAF. When I saw it at the Bonhams sale the firewall-engraved chassis number was still intact and unmessed-with, but the engine bay tag had been - laughably - overstamped with the original chassis number of 'TKS 33 SA 696', but leaving the 'S30' chassis type and 'L20' engine type sections of the tag unaltered. There was a surrounding story about the engine bay tag which I won't bother going into here (mainly because it's embarrassingly misinformed) but suffice to say that the big irony is that the original car had an Export type Datsun 'HS30' prefixed engine bay tag, in English. Overstamping the original Japanese tag for the car is pure bathos. Couple of photos from the Bonhams sale: I don't want to break a butterfly on a wheel here, but FFS come on. It's like having a photocopy of the Mona Lisa and telling people it's THE ONE.

Just about every E87 type FS5C71B 'box fitted to S30-series Z cars sold in the Japanese market had the flange type output. When I asked why - a long time back now, and my question relating specifically to S30-series Zs - I was told that it was to align the S30-series transmissions with those fitted to Japanese market Skylines, Cedrics, Glorias et al, which always had flange type output too. So this transmission could easily be from a Japanese domestic type model, and may well have arrived in Australia as a used part.

That figures. Maybe if it had the Stars and Bars on it your panties might get a bit moist.

Shirley is just "Surely?" turned up to 11. I know you're a few years behind the times down there and your family cars are Vauxhall Vivas in drag, but come on...

Shirley the deciding factor on body kit/body panel legality (apart from good taste...) will be the rules and regulations of the races the car is going to be entered in?

True, but that wouldn't necessarily make it an 'RS30'/'Datsun 260Z'. Could - theoretically at least - be a late '73-on Japanese market S30 body. I've seen such a car with an identity swap (firewall engraving changed with an 'R' prefix to suit...) here in the UK. Naughty. But the car in question here seems legit to me. Being a (very) late HS30 it will have some details on the 'shell, and parts bolted to it, that are in my opinion probably some of the least well documented and understood in the S30-series Z Export range. There's plenty known and understood about early production cars, but the late HS30s? Not so much. 'Hiding in plain sight' comes to mind.

Please don't listen to stuff like that. It's nonsense, and a completely wrong-headed way of thinking about all this. Nissan made constant rolling changes to these cars. Yes there were major updates which they announced in their technical bulletins, parts lists and workshop manuals, but there were also many many incremental changes which were noted in retrospect. Parts and details were shared over a wide range of variants that were built at the same time, so you have to bear that in mind and look at the wider picture. Nissan Shatai was engraving 'HS30' prefixed chassis numbers onto the firewall of these cars from 1969 right through to late 1973, and there was great variation between them during that period. In just the same way, Nissan Shatai engraved 'RS30' prefixed chassis numbers onto firewalls from late 1973 through 1978 and there was great variation in those too. There was a period where late HS30 unibodies were very similar to early RS30 unibodies, but thinking that a "late 240Z used a 260Z chassis" or "early 260Z used a 240Z chassis" is very much the wrong way to look at this. Watch out for misleading information - especially when it is from the USA. USA-biased data and conjecture is not necessarily directly transferable to cars made for other markets. This is especially true when it comes to '260Z' models. Good luck!

It's really simple. Pull the bonnet release handle, walk around the car so that you are no longer in the road, stick your right hand under the bonnet to release the safety catch and raise the bonnet. Reach down, raise and engage the stay. Job done. It's safer to do that at kerb side. My neighbour insists on unloading their kid(s), the car seat(s) and all the other unbelievably complex kit that seems to be required when moving modern kinds around (wtf IS all that stuff?), on the road side of the car. Doors wide open, arse out in the traffic. Not looking. Crazy. Agreed about the torsion bars. Makes a big difference to adjustment/sit/fit, as well as not actually needing the stay half the time...

I think a key point - lost in a lot of our 'Top Trumps' style comparisons - is that if you bolt a Tugger of a driver in any car he won't realise its potential. This is one of the reasons why an underdog will sometimes shine. It's no good having the best car on paper if the driver is a wanker* *scuse my French

*RESPECT*

A lot of the time I find it hard to know whether you are lampooning yourself, or if you just don't know that much about cars. You talk about the "240Z" as though it was somehow the best thing since sliced bread, but - as I pointed out in your other thread - it only seems to stand up to scrutiny if you narrow the field with a price limit, as products from the likes of Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini and others, on the market at the same time and even before your "240Z", would knock it out of the park on a stock-for-stock basis. And if we are talking about stock-for-stock (it's hard to tell....) I might just laugh at the specs of your stock "240Z" and pull the 'Z432-R' card out of my pack of Top Trumps. I find it hard to take seriously anyone who wants to tell everyone how good the "240Z" was, but either ignores or forgets its more powerful, better equipped and far more sporting siblings. Conceived, designed, engineered, constructed and sold by the very same people no less... But if we are talking about The Green Hornet as our reference point, what is it? Is it an out and out race car? Is it a track-focused road car? What rules and regulations does it conform to, if indeed it does? Is it a short distance sprint car or does it have endurance race capabilities? How big is its fuel tank? How long do its brakes last? What tyres does it use, and how long do they last? If we are allowed to include totally re-engineered period cars in our comparison, I think it would be hard for The Green Hornet to dominate as you seem to imply that it would. How would it cope with the Low Drag E-types that now dominate Goodwood, or even the Lotus 26Rs? I like the "Eurocentric distortions" jibe. Maybe I should include something with a Waggott in the back of it to keep you happy?

To be fair, if you similarly up-engined (and up-transed/up-everythinged) many other 60s designed/engineered cars and maximised the potential of their drivetrains and suspensions, you'd be likely to get similar results.

Where I come from, the above is a good example of what we'd describe as "...a load of old bollocks...".

Gazundheit.

I'm going to bow out of this thread for a little while as I have a 12 hour flight to look forward to. I'll set you some homework for while I'm away: Try looking up the results for all the races in the World GT Championships from 1969 through 1978 (hint: whilst Nissan was making and selling the S30-series Z) and see if you can find any Nissan/Datsun product in there.