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I just received my new issue of Tiger Tales (July-August) containing an article about Tiger Panhard bars co-authored by Mike Jones and John Logan.
Those gentlemen might be strangers to many of us here on the west coast so I'd like to mention a little about their backgrounds.
John Logan, Sr. is now retired after a long and very successful engineering career with Ford in Dearborn. A few months ago John was displaying his Tiger at a car show when an elderly person in the crowd announced, "When I was a young engineer at Jensen I worked on these Tigers". That was Mike Jones who had handled chassis development for Jensen and was Jensen's Project Engineer for the Tiger.
John and Mike chatted at the show for over an hour and the article in Tiger Tales is a summary of one of the items they discussed.
The background to the Panhard bar changeover is quite interesting to me.
On May 15th, 1964, about a month before the Jensen line started modifications on the production Tigers, Mike was driving AF-4 home after work in a pouring rain. He entered a curve that he had driven earlier that day only to discover in the interim the road had been torn up and concrete barriers were scattered across what had been the road way. Mike swerved off the pavement onto the grassy shoulder only to discover a hidden tree trunk that helped to both pole vault and roll the Tiger. It ended up on its roof, the windshield frame crushed but the GT's hardtop largely intact. He escaped with only bruises and scratches.
Mike has recently told me that after that rollover crash he gave more thought to Tiger handling. The first thing he did was to address the Tiger's asymmetrical Panhard bar as described in this Tiger Tales article. (Later he proposed a design exercise to evaluate the installation of a De Dion rear suspension in a Tiger. Rootes used the prototype he'd crashed, AF-4, for that testing.)
As I recall, Mike eventually became Jensen's Chief Engineer. Later he was the Chief Chassis Engineer for Land Rover and then Lotus. He now lives in the greater Detroit area.
Mike recently accepted STOA's invitation to be their Guest Speaker at next summer's TU which will be held in Sacramento. So next summer we "west coasters" can visit with Mike in person.
Those gentlemen might be strangers to many of us here on the west coast so I'd like to mention a little about their backgrounds.
John Logan, Sr. is now retired after a long and very successful engineering career with Ford in Dearborn. A few months ago John was displaying his Tiger at a car show when an elderly person in the crowd announced, "When I was a young engineer at Jensen I worked on these Tigers". That was Mike Jones who had handled chassis development for Jensen and was Jensen's Project Engineer for the Tiger.
John and Mike chatted at the show for over an hour and the article in Tiger Tales is a summary of one of the items they discussed.
The background to the Panhard bar changeover is quite interesting to me.
On May 15th, 1964, about a month before the Jensen line started modifications on the production Tigers, Mike was driving AF-4 home after work in a pouring rain. He entered a curve that he had driven earlier that day only to discover in the interim the road had been torn up and concrete barriers were scattered across what had been the road way. Mike swerved off the pavement onto the grassy shoulder only to discover a hidden tree trunk that helped to both pole vault and roll the Tiger. It ended up on its roof, the windshield frame crushed but the GT's hardtop largely intact. He escaped with only bruises and scratches.
Mike has recently told me that after that rollover crash he gave more thought to Tiger handling. The first thing he did was to address the Tiger's asymmetrical Panhard bar as described in this Tiger Tales article. (Later he proposed a design exercise to evaluate the installation of a De Dion rear suspension in a Tiger. Rootes used the prototype he'd crashed, AF-4, for that testing.)
As I recall, Mike eventually became Jensen's Chief Engineer. Later he was the Chief Chassis Engineer for Land Rover and then Lotus. He now lives in the greater Detroit area.
Mike recently accepted STOA's invitation to be their Guest Speaker at next summer's TU which will be held in Sacramento. So next summer we "west coasters" can visit with Mike in person.
