What is a sports car?

It has never been easy to define a sports car. A member of the V.S.C.C., we believe it was Cecil Clutton, once suggested that it might be any car which you cannot walk through while wearing a top hat.

Be that as it may, we notice that Safety Fast, published from the M.G. factory, in its price list of B.M.C. sports cars, includes under this heading Mini-Cooper and M.G. 1100 saloons. And at the end of July Autocar included in the middle of its section devoted to The Sport (a feature about motor racing and competition work which it has published since the nineteen-thirties when S. C. H. Davis conducted it, and which is now run by Peter Garnier) is a description of the special Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow built for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. This is a long-wheelbase version of a car not normally associated with motor racing. But with rules being changed as they are at present it could well be eligible for the 1968 Le Mans race, especially as, we read, ” extra night illumination has been fitted.”