As you can imagine, I saw plenty of interesting cars while at Monterey Car Week, which makes sense, given the name of the week. It’s right in there: Monterey, which I believe is Old Dutch for “place of the automobile.” There were many beautiful cars there, many fascinating ones, rare ones, and I’d like to think all of them are harboring some little detail, some little secret, just hoping to be found.
I think I found a good one of those, and it’s one I really can’t quite figure out, so I do what I always do when baffled: write it up as a Cold Start and ask all of you for help. Then I get an idea for a Cold Start and hopefully an answer! We all win!
Let’s get to it; the car is a really lovely one, too, this 1935 Aston Martin Mark II Bertelli Sports Saloon:
Stunning car, right? They only seem to have built 24 of these, as they cost about £700 pounds back in the day, which would be around $86,000 today, so they weren’t cheap. They were quite elegant and fast, with a 1500cc engine that made between 84 and 100 horsepower, depending on the tune, which was pretty spectacular for the mid 1930s.
They had no running boards, those wild separate front fenders, and a very stiff chassis for the era, making them quite capable driving machines, a genuine four-seat sports car. But here’s the detail I don’t understand:
This thing. What is this thing?
It’s not unique to this car, as I can see it on other examples, like this one, if you look carefully at that corner of the roof.
Oh, while looking to confirm other Mark II Sports Saloons had this detail, I found a picture of this car prior to restoration, and, wow:
It looks like the chrome part may be missing there, but I think I see the little hole where it was mounted?
It’s just aft of the A-pillar on the roof, right above the leading upper corner of the front door. Is it a vent of some kind? If so, why? I’ve never seen a vent like that, and it looks like if it was that, it would be to expel a bit of air rather than intake any. But it’s so tiny; how much air would that thing even move? And, again, why?
Could it be a connector for something? Something maybe snaps into that little slot? If so, what? And again, why?
This is a remarkable and fantatasic-looking car, but I can’t get past that little chrome whatever screwed onto the roof. What is it? What does it do?
Help!
I’m guessing some kind of gutter downspout for that roof
Reversed and rotated NACA duct?
If James Bond has taught me anything about Aston Mattins, those things are for either the smoke screen or the oil jets.
My guess: attachment point for a windshield visor
For such a lovely and expensive car it seems oddly half-assed (mono-buttocked, to use Autopian-speak) to have that ridiculously exposed wiring harness just dangling below the rear lights. Was that the norm back then? The wiring harness does seem to be well wrapped but one would think it’d be well-concealed or at least have some modicum of protection such as flexible metal sheathing as seen on BX cable…
That was the norm back then. Taillights were an afterthought in most car designs well into the 40s, and so even on expensive cars, they were generally just tacked on purely to satisfy a regulation. Since these taillights and registration plate are mounted on the spare wheel, which looks to be mounted to the trunk lid, they’d have to move with the trunk lid and so an exposed wire was probably the easiest way to get that done.
I second it being a sunroof drain and add a picture of painted ones, front and rear, on a much cheaper (£132 for a 2-door sedan with sunroof) Morris 8;
image (4430×2880)
If it is a drain, the even classier option would to make it into a gargoyle.
It’s an air vent for the rich, so they won’t have to smell what the commoners smell.
It was pretty normal practice to reach outside and crack open a cold one on your roof-mounted bottle-opener back then. A stout lager made you a more careful driver.
Bottle-opener was my first thought as well.
It’s a wonder the best drivers in the world don’t all come from Ireland.
I have actually seen my lap times drop after a few beers on my sim. The problem is that it rapidly deteriorates with additional beers.
It’s the vent that lets the smoke out causing the electrical system to fail.
Is it a roll top roof? Maybe you manually roll towards the front and strap it down to the brackets on both sides.
Notice that the car has a sunroof.
Sunroofs are not watertight.
These are the scuppers – which allow water that drains into the sunroof channels to exit the bodywork rather than flooding the interior of the car.
A British car with a sunroof in 1935, now that’s where elegance meets optimism!
But honestly, easily accessible sunroof drains are something that modern cars need, it seems like almost everyone has a clogged drain horror story.
They were fairly common even on cars like Austin Sevens that were far, far downmarket from this one.
IMHO it seemed that the main cause of plugged sunroof drains at my Toyota dealership was the car having been parked under or near a tree. Debris got in the sunroof tracks, meandered to the drains and…usually blowing compressed air thru them cleared them out. I make sure to keep my sunroof opening debris free. Been a while.. I’m gonna go check mine now! Lol
Its true – and while you’re at it be sure to check the scuppers in your cowl (where the wipers are) as those are frequently clogged on open-air parked cars, causing rust and flooding your footwells too.
Good point. Not keeping the hood vents clean, sometimes would lead to debris getting into the blower motor for the HVAC. Sounded like baseball cards in your bicycle spokes! Uh oh…dated my self there! Couple hours and we’ll have that all fixed up for you Mr, Customer! Sign here!
I want to know more about the little lights on top of the front fenders. Are they an early attempt at cornering lamps? Do they actually light up, or are they merely reflectors?
They’re sidelights! I talk about them here: https://www.theautopian.com/i-saw-some-great-classic-examples-of-the-least-utilized-type-of-car-lighting-at-goodwood/
Thanks, that makes sense. They didn’t look like they could have been much use as cornering lamps at that size. If you want to make sure that an approaching vehicle can see your dimensions at night though you don’t need them to be very bright.
A couple thoughts: The car has what seems to be a sunroof (unless it had a different name in ’35 than it does now in ’25), and the chrome bit opens downwards over the rain gutter. Could it be the outlet for water that falls around the roof’s seal?
Modern open-roof cars have little tubes that take water from around the sunroof or convertible top and dump it under the car, this may have been a very short and pretty version of such a system.
I say this because there’s clearly a hole in the sheet metal behind it, it opens down and rearwards, indicating it would be meant to expel something, and it’s very close to the corner of the sunroof, which is the lowest point of it, so it’s conveniently located. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a similar, but better-disguised feature towards the back.
Another thought: The C-pillar is much wider than the A-pillar, so perhaps the rear drains did go all the way down like they do on modern vehicles.
edit: last one, I swear: I suspect they have nicely integrated, hidden gutters for the rear corners of the sunroof, and at some point during development they either changed the rake of the roof or realized the sunroof didn’t actually seal well enough for all the water to be blown backwards before making it past the seal, and the chrome solution was tacked on.
It is exactly this, my big car has a near identical set-up. And it works very well.
It gives hostile quality gremlins easy access to the electrical system and free in-and-out privileges to the rest of the car. Keeps them happier and less destructive. It may not seem like it, but those British really knew their stuff folks.
It’s a bracket for an arm that holds out a jar of grey poupon for a car passing the other direction.
But of course.
Does it hold a clip of some sort, for strapping things to the roof?
This was my thought, especially if it exists on both sides.
Were the doors air/water tight when closed with the windows rolled up (like the Beetle)? If so, that might have been a pressure equalization vent. Just a W.A.G, but it’s all I can think of. Unless there’s a tiny lightbulb in there that illuminates the door, although that doesn’t seem like it would be very useful.
I’d be really surprised if this body was air tight, especially from 1934. And light is interesting but yeah, what exactly would it be illuminating? And I think a light of that era would have had a little lens on it.