Wayne:kiwicapri wrote:the only thing suspect is your own car-58 could not have been produced in October. for a start, there is no way BG would have been able to produce 58 or so cars in one month, October being the begining, and these cars were built in the UK 3 moths earlier.Do you have a SVO tag? Bet you don't know what that is, or how to determine when the car arrived from the UK, and then into BG,and for the second, i have documented proof that the car is origonal, and was not from Cape Town.Third, but not least, I started out seeking information, and shareing my years of restoration knowledge, in Capris, and have years and years of ford factory parts books, service bulitons, magzine articles and actualy research things before i make assumptions.
If you would like to conatct me off line, i can provide you with a spread sheet of the numbers I have collected, relivant or not.
Capris in South Africa, like virtually every car on sale at the time, would have been buiilt in South Africa, initially from partial CKD kits, then with increasing amounts of locally produced parts.
Other than perhaps a few pilot cars, we would not have imported European built cars.
In general local legislation made it very difficult bring in fully assembled cars, although it does seem that Ford SA were good at finding ways of getting fully cars into South Africa (100 Mk1 RS Escorts for exmple, complete with SVO plates that became the first 100 Escort Peranas)
I'm not sure whern Capris went on general sale in South Africa. (Jacques, Lino can you have a dig in your CAR mags?). Basil Green certainly had his hands on Capris very early on. He built the Z181 race car in late 1969. He had built at least 11 V6 Capri Peranas by December 1969. I'm not yet sure of when V8s were started, but certaily he was up to 20 V8's by August 1970, and in the thirties by October 1970. Motoring Mirror road tested a V8 prototype in January 1970.
SVO plate on a Capri is interesting - my sample is very small, but I have only ever seen one Perana V8 that may have been an SVO.
Everyone: I don't think anomalies in numbering shoud be discussed in public forums - If you think you see something odd, PM or email each other.