Scott Kucera said:
> looking at passing traffic. I have noticed that he has an A-register
> Mark II with disk wheels and a black vinyl top.
That vinyl top is surely non-original. The car is probably the combination
of a front-end smash and a rear-end smash welded together -- a very common
practice on Jags in the '60s. The vinyl covers the joint.
> On its trunk is the key
> to the mystery: "2.4" in little chrome letters. (Most Mark II's here
> were 3.8's or 4.2's.)
Mark II would be 2.4, 3.4 or 3.8 -- the 4.2 came out with the 420G and
the E-type, but was never in the Mark II shell (or 240/340) AFIK.
> The "A" on the number plates means that the car was built in late 1961
> or in most of 1962 (I wish I could check an article in "Your Classic"
> magazine that went into number plates in detail).
"A" is a 1963 registered car. For those who haven't seen the British licence
system (license for OFOTP), it consists of a single letter, a three digit
number and another three letters. The single letter indicates year of
registration. Originally each letter was a calendar year, but the motor trade
complained that new sales were all in January to get the new letter and that
they sold nothing in November & December. So the logjam was moved to August.
There are some gaps in the sequence of letters to avoid confusion with
numbers. Although the 'A' registrations first started in 1963 not all '63-'66
cars will necessarily have a letter; the licencing offices didn't all convert
to the year-letter system at the same time.
The three letters together consist of one sequence letter followed by two
letters indication the issuing authority. The correspondence between authority
and code is very vague, you really have to look it up. Eg Cambridge could be
EX, EW, AV, FL, etc.
The first sequence was Authority Number Year (Eg XEL 633 B):
A - 63, B - 64, C - 65, D - 66, E - 67 (Jan-Jun), F - 67/68, G - 68/69, H -
69/70,
J - 70/71, K - 71/72, L - 72/73, M - 73/74, N - 74/75, P - 75/76, R - 76/77,
S - 77/78, T - 78/79, V - 79/80, W - 80/81, X - 81/82, Y - 82/83
then the year letter moves to the front (as in A 476 JVF):
A - 83/84, B - 84/85, C - 85/86, D - 86/87, E - 87/88, F - 88/89, G - 89/90,
H - 90/91, J - 91/92, K - 92/93, L - 93/94, M - 94/95, N - 95/96, P - 96/97
The year is the year of first registration, _not_ the year of manufacture,
and it is common to buy another number to put on a vehicle. The only real
restriction is that you cannot put an a number that makes the vehicle look
newer than it is -- older is OK. So my '83 Lotus Excel was A 476 JVF when
first registered and is now XEL 633 B, which is a 1964 number -- to the
confusion of many people. The new number cost me GBP35.00 to the vendor
plus GBP80.00 to the registration office for the change.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Causer Setanta Technology mike@setanta.demon.co.uk
Cambridge UK
Utrecht NL
Dublin IRL
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