1976 | San Francisco
My friend Tom wanted to show off his recently-restored Sunbeam Tiger, with fresh engine and Ferrari-red finish. It was impressive, with reverberant exhaust and firm suspension, up to a point. Tom was channeling Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt, hauling through the city’s narrow streets over the tall hills. He wasn’t ready to slow down, and I wasn’t ready to die, so I picked up my camera to amuse myself as well as I could. At a level of white-knuckle discomfort that I would call fear, I was able to relax my hand and eye and let them do their best work at 1/500th of a second.
▷ The Sunbeam Alpine was a modestly peppy two-seat, four-cylinder sports roadster, which via some design work by Carroll Shelby, was produced as the vigorous V8-powered Tiger. Better known is Shelby’s earlier sleek yet brutish Cobra, with an even bigger V8 shoehorned into the original six-cylinder AC Ace.
▷▷ Frank Bullitt drove a different make. You might enjoy the movie.