I believe "shooting brakes" refers to mechanical brakes.
Several marques in the forties and early fifties had hydrolic
front and mechanical rear brakes. Rileys and Rolls-Royce being
among them. It was advertised as a saftey factor for the Rileys.
Should the new-fangled high-tech liquid braking system fail, the good old
reliable mechanical system would still stop you.
The Rileys were also the first English marque to use rack-and-pinion steering
and torsion bar suspension. The design looked mysteriosly like
pre-war French design, however.
The British equivalent of "station wagon" is "estate". That was a
vehicle used by the gentry to cruise around their large tracks of land
and collect taxes from the poor folk who had not yet moved to America.
There are no british convertibles, only roadsters and dropheads.
A fixedhead coupe' is a car whose head (as in headliner) is fixed.
A drophead is the same model whose head will drop or retract.
A roadster is a different in that the head not only retracts
but is usually tucked away out of sight.
If you were to look at say an XK140 drophead and roadster side-by-side
the differenced would be clear. Over the years these terms have been
watered down. Clearly an MGB sould be called a drophead not a roadster, however
the MGA is clearly a roadster.
-Martin Frankford
mfrankford@nebula.tbe.com
|