Classic Car Buyer Magazine No.233 Will Barn-Find Bubble Burst? Back Issue

It’s strange how a train of thought
can run. The recent spell of good
weather has made me eye up
cheap MG Midgets. This is part of a
familiar ‘cycle of wanting’: In winter I
covet big hydropneumatic Citroëns
while in the summer I convince
myself that I need a small British
sports car, with the odd hankering
for another Series Land Rover in
between.
Mentioning that I was looking at
MGs brought up the thorny issue of
‘what makes a sports car?’ in the
Classic Car Buyer office. Something
new to me was the apparent
difference between a ‘sports car’ and
a ‘roadster’ – a distinction I hadn’t
really thought of before. It seems
that a roadster is an ordinary car
with sporty bodywork while a sports
car is something more bespoke.
We then received a letter from
a reader gently correcting Paul
Guinness on some terminology in
his Morris Minor piece last week
– apparently the early Minor softtop
was sold as a Tourer not a
Convertible. All this terminology
piqued my interest and I took to
the internet to see if anyone had
laid out the differences between a
convertible, a tourer, a roadster, a
coupé and all the others.
It turns out these terms have a
long history, starting back in the days
of horse-drawn carriages before
being transferred to cars. Until the
’Fifties each had a very specific and
well-understood meaning, most of
which have now been lost.