the Jenks scale to differentiate between fake cars and real ones.

available on Amazon.com for 20 bucks

ORIGINAL
 A car is original if it is exactly such as on the day of its exit from the workshop. It is impossible today to find a car that deserves this qualifier. It would have had to be "put under bell" at the moment of its manufacture! The only one is perhaps the Trossi-Monaco which never took the start of the race for which it was built, the Grand Prix of Italy 1935, and which entered the museum the next day!

TRUE
 A car whose chain of owners is perfectly followed, which has never ceased to be kept in working order, endowed with its original organs, which has never been modified and which, when it is indispensable, Has been professionally repaired with original components without altering its technical or aesthetic characteristics.

AUTHENTIC
After having lived his life as a competitor, underwent modifications, the car was either restored to its original state thanks to its original parts that had been preserved, or put back in one of the configurations that had been his at a Time of his career.

RENAISSANCE
A rebirth is a car rebuilt from original elements and new parts, after the initial car was abandoned, dismantled, and of which there are only a few disparate elements left when an amateur decided to give it back to life . So it was rebuilt from its ashes ... some of which had already flown!

RECONSTRUCTION
A car born from the assembly of elements from different cars that had never been brought together before, possibly supplemented by remodeled organs.

INVENTION
An invention is a car that never existed. One copy in addition to the series produced, entirely realized with new parts. It can also be described as false, clone, copy, reproduction ...

REPLICA
Describes the name "replica" as an "invention" that was made outside the normal production period of the car, but by the same firm as the original cars (editor's note: they can also be called " Continuations "). They can sometimes be very difficult to detect

DOUBLE
 Evil was born among the Bugattists. Some unscrupulous collectors sold to two different amateurs the parts of the same car, batches mixing engine components, body parts and chassis pieces. The amateurs, in good faith, completed the puzzle with original pieces - it existed a lot at one time. One morning, two Bugatti of Grand Prix, each one hit, here and there, of the same serial numbers, appeared on a circuit ... Only way out of the situation: buy the two cars to recompose the original car, then sell The remaining organs on the market of the spare part"

Denis Jenkinson was part of the Grand Prix tour. " Jenks " spoke little, listened much, looked avidly, wrote intensely. When he raised his hand, drivers, engineers, mechanics, even Bernie Ecclestone stopped to answer the question he had not yet asked. Jenks was in his nineties, the oldest, most learned, most respected of all Formula 1 journalists.

Jenks had studied engineering, and raced in motorsports on two and four wheels - always alongside the biggest. Without having the financial means to pilot, he co-drove or navigated, even was the monkey alongside sidecar world champion Eric Oliver in 1949, and Stirling Moss won the Mille Miglia of '55 with Mercede thanks to Jenks' inspired navigation notes, one of the most fantastic victories of Moss' career.

But more to the point, and the expertise about race cars, Jenks was a freelance journalist at the end of World War II for the English reference magazine MotorSport , a zealous observer of the starting grids, an attentive reviewer of the engagement sheets and a pugnacious interviewer. He lived seven days a week on the circuits, in contact with the stables, at the drivers' table. And, above all, he noticed everything, threw away nothing, methodically classifying his notebooks and the images he took during his encounters, races he attended - with special attention to everything that touched Maserati, on which he had written reference works.

Exasperated by the increasingly frequent appearance of more and more fake cars in the English historical meetings, Jenks opened his enormous archives.

In 1987, he published the masterpiece of his work under the title " Directory of Historic Racing Cars - The Survivors- Genuine, Authentic and Fake ". This little book, at 190 pages, had all the main vintage racing cars that could be seen on the circuits, describing their degree of authenticity, modifications, recreations, and deceptions ...

Seismologists have the Richter, sailors the Beaufort, and collectors now have the Jenkinson scale

http://www.aonclassiccar.fr/2016/07/vraies-et-fausses-voitures-de-collection-l-echelle-de-jenkinson/

coincidence that this topic was something I recently hit on http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2017/07/how-many-parts-can-be-replaced-before.html