Compact dimensions and the weight savings of its thin-wall block design were hallmarks of Ford’s new Windsor small-block V8 series upon its debut in 1962. It soon became obvious the little Windsor offered underhood packaging and weight distribution advantages that its cross-town V8 competitors simply couldn’t match, advantages that initially helped land a 260 small-block between the frame rails of Carroll Shelby’s soon-to-be famous Cobra. Before long, however, those same Windsor attributes would work just as well in the not-quite-so-famous Sunbeam Tiger.
Like the AC Ace that morphed into the muscular Cobra, Sunbeam’s Alpine roadster was a good-looking but sluggish British sports car in need of a more sporting engine. When the Series I Alpine debuted in 1959, it was saddled with a 78-hp, 1.5L four-banger that could barely drag the 2,200-pound ragtop to 60 mph in 13.6 seconds. Some glaciers moved faster. While perhaps adequate for England’s winding lanes and cramped cityscapes, such tepid performance was hardly inspiring in North America’s wide open spaces – especially amid the horsepower frenzy that was taking hold in the early ‘60s.
A division of England’s Rootes Group, Sunbeam’s management team rightly figured that more manly thrust could broaden their roadster’s market, especially in America, but the company lacked resources to develop a new engine by itself. The team began looking around for viable engine suppliers to muscle up the real estate between the Alpine’s front fenders. Various powerplant configurations were seriously considered, but sometime in 1962, Formula 1 champion, Jack Brabham, reportedly suggested to Rootes’ competition manager the idea of harnessing Ford’s new lightweight V8. Rootes’ North American subsidiary saw merit in the idea and approached none other than Carroll Shelby to engineer a proof-of-concept vehicle to determine the viability of shoehorning an American V8 into the Alpine’s diminutive British engine bay. After all, he’d done it before.
Shelby’s fee for the experiment was reportedly $10,000 and, commencing in April of 1963, Phil Remington and the Shelby American crew took just one month to transform a stock Alpine into a running prototype of what would soon become the Sunbeam Tiger, fitted with a 260 small-block and four-speed T-10 gearbox. And yes, the swap was a packaging challenge, requiring among other things some “relief” of the firewall, as well as changeover of the Alpine’s old recirculating-ball steering system to a more space-efficient rack and pinion setup. Still, the resulting prototype was a hit with Rootes execs on both sides of the Atlantic, and Lord Rootes himself decided that the new V8 roadster would debut at the 1964 New York Motor Show.
