Basking in his Sunbeams

SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. — Wayne Boyd has a couple of dandy little Sunbeam sports cars, and both have interesting histories.

His green 1967 Sunbeam Alpine with black interior and top had belonged to Pat Munzer, a former high school girlfriend who left it to him when she died in 2008. He said they used to rattle around in the car and take it to rallies and auto-crosses.

"She bought it when it was a year old," he said, adding that she used it as a daily driver for years before parking it one day in her driveway, where it sat for at least 10 years. She subsequently had it restored by Kane Motorcar Company, in North Kingstown.

Meanwhile, his white 1965 Sunbeam Tiger, which has very worn black seats and no top, is decked out to race. Boyd bought it in 1979 and raced it at various road course tracks, including Lime Rock Park, in Lakeville, Connecticut, and the former Bryar Motorsports Park — since superseded by the New Hampshire Motor Speedway — in Loudon, New Hampshire.

The Tiger is essentially an Alpine, but powered by a Ford 260-cubic-inch V8 engine courtesy of legendary racer and fabricator Carroll Shelby. Shelby had created the famed AC Cobra two years earlier by initially putting the same engine in a British AC Ace. Production of the Tiger ran three years, from 1964 to '67.

"He put a sledgehammer through the firewall to fit the engine," said Boyd of Shelby, noting that he put 289-cubic-inch engines in the last 50 or so Tigers. The Alpine was originally powered by a 100-odd-cubic-inch, four-cylinder engine.

Boyd's Tiger has a racing roll bar, but he said he took out the side windows and removed the top to reduce the weight. The dashboard has holes where some of the instruments and glove box had been.

There are also holes in the floor.

"I put holes in the floor to let the water out," he said of driving back in the rain from a weekend of racing at Lime Rock and the car was filling up with water. "I got pretty wet in those days."

Boyd also raced open-wheel, single-seater Formula Vees through the 1980s and '90s.

Boyd has owned some unusual European cars over the years, starting with his first, a 1967 Simca 1000 from France that he bought new. He has also owned a 1960 Hillman Husky and a 1964 Singer Gazelle, both from Britain. What was it about European cars he liked so much?

"They smelled nice, were quirky and fun to drive," he said.

Boyd said his Tiger is the second he has owned. He sold his first one in 1977 to raise money to open Narragansett Imported Car Parts, an auto-parts business he owned before selling it in 2003. But five years later, he opened a similar business, Auto Color Enterprises, in Peace Dale.

"Paints and parts for any kind of car you can imagine, mostly imported," he said.

He has not driven his Sunbeams much in recent years, keeping them parked in a double garage. But he said he recently joined the California Association of Sunbeam Tiger Owners — "The cars are saved out there; around here they rusted away" — and plans to get back into running them and possibly racing.

Boyd, 65, and his wife, Sally, have two children and one grandchild, 2-year-old Christian, who is following in his grandfather's footsteps.

"He loves to sit in the Alpine," he said. "He has the transportation gene."

— pelswort@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @peterelsworth