Before Their Le Mans Glory Days, Ken Miles and Carroll Shelby Built The First Sunbeam Tigers
In the spring of 1963, two Englishmen met in a small back room at Shelby American. One was Ian Garrad, a rising star in the Rootes Group organization, recently appointed the manager of West Coast sales. The other was Ken Miles, one of the best-known racing drivers in southern California (played by Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari). Both looked over the little British sports car sitting before them, a white Sunbeam Alpine like the one Miles had just campaigned in the previous SCCA season. When they exited the room, it was with a plan to unleash an animal.
Days later, the two hurtled down a rainy Los Angeles highway in a Frankenstein’s monster of a machine. Their creation was something of a deathtrap — a 260-cubic-inch Ford V-8 barely crammed into a roadster that was only ever supposed to come with half that cylinder count. The V-8 mated to a two-speed automatic transmission, and, according to Garrad, Miles had only managed to stuff in the Ford V-8 using a modified crossmember and flat distributor from a marine application. This was the first Sunbeam Tiger.
