Talk:Cooper Mark IV

Merge
Considering the T11 and T12 are variations on the Mark IV design, they should be merged into this article. The T12 article also has some factual innacuracies. --Pc13 (talk) 23:18, 3 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Merge them. (Lose the drawing.) Also, the 500race claims need to be confirmed. Kettlewell makes no mention of a Monaco debut or Schell.  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  04:00, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
 * That's because the Monaco debut is for F1. The car was designed for F2/F3, and Schell's use of the car in F1 is an anomaly. 500race.org mentions heat wins by the Mk IV at Brough, Brands Hatch and Silverstone (British GP support race, by Moss) before Monaco. --Pc13 (talk) 10:40, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
 * If there'd been an F1 Cooper at Monaco in '50, Kettlewell would have said something. It doesn't appear at all: no Schell, no F1, no Monaco. Same source, different volume, in his article on Monaco, he doesn't mention a Cooper debut, either.  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  13:19, 4 September 2011 (UTC)
 * So you're disputing that Harry Schell took part in the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix in a Cooper T12? Really? --Pc13 (talk) 00:06, 5 September 2011 (UTC)
 * No, that it needed confirming by a reliable source, since the reliable source I have (i.e., Kettlewell) says nothing about it, & I would have expected him to. If this passes the RS test, I will consider that enough. (IDK if it does.) Feel free to resto mention of Schell.  TREKphiler   any time you're ready, Uhura  00:52, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Wow, what a farce. Ask the same question in two different places and you get two different outcomes. This whole mess could have been avoided if someone had just written a brief article about the Cooper 500 and its various incarnations, bringing together all the various (and complex) mark and T-number iterations. There are plenty of highly reliable sources for all this information out there, not least of which are Doug Nye's excellent "Cooper Cars" book and the 500 Owners' Association website. Splitting the various mark numbers down into separate articles is bad enough, but slicing those hairs even finer by insisting on T-number distinctions (when the 1000 version was usually just the 500 with a couple of extra inches in the chassis) is lunacy. As far as Schell's Monaco '50 entry is concerned it was indeed an anomaly, but it did happen and so represents both Cooper's first World Championship entry, and the first entry by a car with its engine behind the driver. He's mentioned in almost all sources and there are plenty of photos and discussion in the Nye book. As Kettlewell doesn't mention this I'd take that as a serious question mark over the reliability of that source. As it stands this page is still a complete mess. Why, why, does this article suddenly start describing the Cooper Bristol half way through, for Heaven's sake? And as for "Stirling Moss' unsuccessful Cooper-Alta was actually built by a different John Cooper, Autocar's sport editor." What?? Seriously? If that is verbatim from Kettlewell then the book doesn't just need discarding, you should probably burn it as even use as toilet paper is likely beyond it. The Cooper-Alta was a T23 (the Mk2 version of the Formula 2 car commonly called the Cooper Bristol) with, wait for it, an Alta engine instead of the Bristol unit. It was a proper Cooper, built at Ewell Road by Charlie and John Cooper's Cooper Car Company. Anyway, that is by-the-by as the Cooper Bristol and its variants are a completely different beast to the Cooper 500/1000 series which this article is purportedly about. This episode is really quite disappointing as I'd been hoping to find time to put together a decent article about the Cooper 500 for a while now. The story of the cars' genesis and their subsequent development over the next decade is fascinating, and would be much better handled in a single article than lots of little snippety pages. Unfortunately, my Wikipedia time is dwindling lately and so I can't do more than an odd hour or so a week, here and there. If ever there was a case of "if you want the job done properly" it is this. :-(  Pyrop e  20:23, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

INACCURACIES
This article should be scrapped and re-written, since it contains huge inaccuracies. The fact being that Charles and John Cooper used the same “Mk” reference for various types of cars, based on totally different concepts. Whereas in public acceptance “Cooper Mk IV” refers more specifically to an evolution of the rear-engined design originally build for the 500cc category, one can as well find “Mk IVs” referring to the 1952 front-engined F2 design, or a rear-engined Formula Junior ten years later… Hence a total confusion in this article! Besides, the remark: “Stirling Moss' unsuccessful Cooper-Alta was actually built by a different John Cooper, Autocar '​s sport editor”... is inappropriate. That one-off was actually a front-engined Cooper T23 chassis, modified to accommodate the Alta unit, and disk brakes, for Stirling Moss in 1953; subsequently, a pair of Cooper-Altas were produced in the course of the same season, under reference “T24”. [References: http://www.500race.org/web/Marques/Cooper.htm; David Hodges “A-Z of Formula Racing Cars”] F3promo (talk) 09:17, 20 January 2016 (UTC)