James Shaw III

Rare Rovers - P7/B   HXC 21C

Brake Project Development Work

A record of some of the development work carried out on this vehicle between January 1966 and April 1967 has survived. During that period 17,457 miles were travelled , the clutch changed from manual to hydraulic operation, two different makes of brake servos and two different makes of brake callipers and two different pad materials were trialled.

This car was similar to P7/A in chassis specification but incorporated the V8 engine. The handling was greatly improved by the reduced engine weight and the road noise attenuation was much superior to P6/B as was engine refinement.

The record card format shown here was without doubt created by my father, Jim Shaw, for this purpose. He often designed aids and publicity material, though I don't know if any of his ideas made it outside of the engineering department.

front face of record card
P7/B Brake Project Vehicle Record Card
rear face of record Carried
Report of Work Carried Out on P7/B

(Note: The record keeping obviously wasn't perfect as an operation carried out at 10,436 miles has had to be 'slipped in' after the second task at 8,735 miles. There is a useful lesson here: personal recollection can be faulty but so too can the contemporary written record!)

A general point, (that I have made elsewhere but bears repeating), is that prototype/development vehicles never had a fixed build state, they weren't built and then maintained with spare parts as listed on the build schedule. Rather perfectly good parts might be removed for examination and then replaced with a different pattern of part for comparison.