Rover P6 Sophistication

I know how much of a loser this makes me, but when I was at college, I once spent a whole afternoon wandering the streets of Surrey with the sole purpose of looking for a particular classic car, the Rover P6. I think I secretly hoped that upon finding one, the elderly (imaginary) owner might see me and offer his mint (imaginary) P6 to me for a £150 pounds. I did actually find one, a dark green 2.2TC in Ewell. Staring at someone else’s property for five minutes didn’t make me feel any better about my non classic car ownership or diminish the absurdity of the action. A wasteful afternoon was what it was.

Car obsession has over the years affected personal relationships. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I could honestly say that I loved someone (family aside) more than a car I had owned / might own / might never own but loved anyway. I got hold of my first Rover P6 some months after the Rover walkabout incident and meant my college girlfriend thereafter suffered the consequences. The classic car in question was a money burning monster in Avocado Green, bought from an RAF chap for £160 pounds and dragged out of deepest Surrey one Sunday morning on the back of a rented tow truck.

The car was truly an obsession and why not. Despite a couple of rust holes in the ‘bolt on’ wings, the monocoque base was immaculate and so was the burnt orange box pleat interior, albeit a bit musty. I spent hours marvelling at the sheer quality of the dash materials and the clever design details. The best surely is the way the controls for the heater, lights and window wipers are all different shapes so you can identity by touch which one is which without taking your eyes off the road. My P6 didn’t work though, it just sat on the drive staring at me all day and meant clever design details quickly lost their appeal. Its permanent inertia merely fuelled the obsession and in the process turned me into a mean, introverted and uncaring person. Six agonising months of slavish expenditure later won me an MOT certificate and lost me a girlfriend. It wasn’t the money spent she objected to, it was the amount of thinking time I set over for the car itself. As you all know, there is much to think on when you own a classic. Many hours (read majority of) were spent simply imagining the driving experience of the P6. The journeys I would take, all those country and coastal roads and the night drives into central London. The car that tells everyone how grown up and sophisticated I am. Pathetic notions indeed, but this was my first proper classic after all and as it turned out I needed all the imagination I could muster, as it barely lasted a month. My local garage wanted £1200 to replace the clutch, a sum that was six times more than I had paid for the car and nearly as much as I had spent on the new exhaust and brake overhaul. Sophisticated or grown up it was not. I looked exactly what I was in my P6, a slightly odd 18 year old with no friends. Even in the month it was road legal, how I thought this particular car was going to achieve the above aims I don’t know. Avocado green as you might well imagine was exactly that, accept that avocados is not what one first associates with this particular shade of green. Yes I looked like I was driving round in a big rusty bogey.

The classic car obsession means we humanise cars, imparting to them not only human characteristics but free will and the ability to exercise it. I have read comments from more than one classic car owner to the affect of ‘my classic new exactly how much money I had left in my wallet as that’s how much it took to fix’...or...’the car waits until I get a bonus and then it breaks’ etc etc. If this was the case, my Rover misjudged the finances badly. It couldn’t hide behind its worthless MOT certificate forever, when your car won’t move, this piece of paper becomes an irrelevance. Or maybe it just didn’t like me. Whatever the reason, I left for college one morning knowing that by the time I got back the Rover would have left my life forever and in the same manner it had arrived, on the back of tow truck. It broke my classic car heart to see it go, girlfriend or no girlfriend, I loved that bloody thing.

2 + 2 = Classic Car

“...Lorry, red lorry, red lorry, red lorry, red lorry, red...” Yes, when I was nearly three years old, I repeated this phrase for a whole 18 hours straight. I went to sleep saying it and woke up the next day, still babbling the phrase in constant repetition. Ok, so it was a lorry rather than a motor car, but at that age I don’t think I pondered the distinction. What was important was that it had four wheels, an engine and it was red (obviously the latter was of particular significance to me at the time). Although this period of early psychological dysfunction may disturb some of you, it was certainly an early indicator of the obsession taking hold and something I am no doubt wrong in feeling quite proud of. Can anyone else boast of suffering from some kind of car related breakdown of the physiological kind? I’m adamant some of you can. (Surely its no worse than having an imaginary friend...? Yes apparently I had one of those too...called Durn).

Car obsession has its place though and like any addiction, you may find yourself returning to it in times of stress. During my GCSE exams I was utterly obsessed with the Caterham Super Seven and I don’t just mean during this period in my life, I mean I was thinking about this car whilst undertaking the actual exam papers. The car represented escape and freedom and although it’s tempting to blame Colin Chapman for the state of my GSCE Maths grade, surely day dreaming about cars is an escape into our imagination when reality gets too boring. I really would love to have a go in a Caterham.

Surely the cars we choose to think about says a lot about who we are, or who we would like to be, at any particular moment. Recently I became obsessed with another Lotus, the classic Esprit.This obsession was structured ar

ound a number of real world considerations. It’s a fairly reliable classic and one I could drive to business meetings. It would also be a kind of statement about my lifestyle choices (read no kids thank goodness, so no need for back seats). Its also a classic piece of British engineering, with classic ‘pop up’ head lights. The very last factor is my wife’s concern. She loves pop up head lights and wonders why more cars don’t have them. We haven’t yet bought an Esprit, as my wife is very attached to her Ford Probe which also has pop up head lights. I am therefore stuck on how to promote the Lotus as a more attractive car? Who gives a damn for aerodynamics or fuel efficiency when an essentially mechanical gimmick is bestowed such weighty importance.

When we first purchased the Probe, I thought it had the design inadequacy of not being able to flash the head lights quickly, as you might do when letting someone out of a side road, or want to bestow permission to a pedestrian to cross in front of you. I thought you had to pop up the lights every time you needed to perform the motoring equivalent of Morse code, i.e. flashing your lights in a certain order to communicate with other road users. Most of us have become casually acquainted to some version of ‘flash code’. Personally I flash once to let a pedestrian cross the road and two flashes to let a car out of a side road. In all cases three flashes or more means hurry up and get out of my bloody way). It was taking me an inordinate amount of time to locate the column stalk light switch to operate the front beam, which was initially very distracting and dangerous. I did a whole week of nearly knocking people over as I fumbled for the head lights and like a twit, wondered why I was getting funny looks. I felt quite the dunce when I realised the Probe has front spot lights, visible at all times within the front bumper and operational without the need to pop up anything. These smaller lights could be flashed in the normal manner, with minimal fuss and at a moments notice. But I’m sure most of you already know this.

Next I would like to introduce you to an example of the Rover P6. It wasn’t my first car, but it was my first classic car obsession that wasn’t just a day dream. Ownership was a test of sanity, but that’s all in the next blog.

The Primera Years

The Primera years started with the end of the Morris Itals. It never actually stopped working, which with hindsight seems quite impressive after ten years active service. It had just got to the point when much newer cars suddenly became affordable, although the decision to get rid wasn’t entirely down to economics. Mum had been moaning for ages about how fed up she was with the effort it took to park the thing and to be fair you did need super human strength to manoeuvre it at low speeds. However the real kiss of death for our Ital was her experience behind the wheel of a brand new Saab 9000 Turbo, borrowed off my dads boss whilst he went on holiday. The Saab had been immediately requisitioned for the school run and dad wasn’t back in the drivers seat until the following Monday when he got to drive it back to work. Thanks goes to Neil from RBS Croydon, who was blissfully unaware his company car was used as a taxi service for one week back in 1994. Climbing back into the Ital after getting used to all that Swedish sophistication was a genuine shock for all concerned and it had mum and dad hurrying down to Wilson's in Epsom to marvel over what the world of motor car manufacturing had produced in the decade since their last major car purchase. It wasn’t long before a fine Nissan Primera was selected.

We thought it beautiful. A maroon, four door hatchback, two litre, 16 valve automatic had entered our lives. What a car and what a motoring revelation. These days a high degree of reliability is not just expected, it is assumed. Compared to the Morris Ital and its ancient engine technology the Primera seemed to be powered by something beyond mere internal combustion. Not until its immobiliser started playing up in 2002 did it once fail to start first time. It felt so futuristic to sit in too, the wonders of injection moulding gave the Primera a snug, textured interior in grey and black plastic, the dash integrating into the doors. We revelled in the warming fuzzy material of the seats which felt so luxurious compared to the Itals cold vinyl. Add to this the electric windows in the front, a tape player that actually worked and a heater that could defrost the car even when buried in a snow drift and we were smitten.

It was the family workhorse that ferried us all over the country for eight years and it did us proud. We never went abroad on holiday as my younger brother had terrible asthma as a child and needed to be within a short drive of an A&E. Mum also had claustrophobia, so planes were out of the question, plus we had sod all cash. So during our teenage years we mainly went camping and this brings me to the most amazing facet of the Primera. I challenge anyone to produce a car that in relation to its external dimensions, has more internal luggage space. It is quite extraordinary what you can fit in a Primera and we had no trouble fitting all kinds of camping equipment into its cavernous boot. If you don't believe me, buy one off eBay and see if you can’t fit everything you own into the back of one, especially with the back seats down. Mums Primera lasted until late 2002. We took H678 FBB back to Wilson's to trade her in for a newer Nissan due to the intermittent immobiliser fault. Mum was most put out when they would only offer £500 for her in part exchange and on asking why so little, they tried as tactfully as possible to suggest that with 196,000 miles on the clock, they considered it a reasonably high mileage vehicle. The visual assessment was equally as damning, revealing at least one dent in every panel, the cost of rectification they said, outweighed the value of the car.

When I met my wife years later, she also drove a Primera. A 1.6 litre manual in black, with Nissan alloy wheels and a big noisy exhaust. It was a Primera with a very different character to my family car and yet my wife and I loved it until the day we blew its head gasket coming off the M61. Being my wife's first car, she felt the need to personalise and 'upgrade' the interior, which of course meant adorning it with animal print seat covers and massive pink fluffy cushions, all of dubious taste. At the time we could only afford to run one car and 'Princess' (that was our black Primera, not my wife) was what we used for the daily commute. I was briefly the shipping manager of a commercial importer in Cheatham Hill, Manchester and I remember with a mixture of embarrassment and pride my first day. Arriving late I had to drive past the warehouse lads, who were outside having a smoke. Princess, with her pink cushions and zany cow print seats were in full view. It’s fair to say they laughed their socks off and as a result I was shown very little respect from them during my time there. I didn’t mind as it was a fabulous car to drive, the stubby gear stick with its short throw produced satisfying gear changes and it handled beautifully. It also accelerated off the line very swiftly, but only nought to thirty. Anything of greater speed took an age, which was perfect for my wife, who loved driving fast but who was a rubbish driver at the time. Princess ended her days banger racing. We found out that she lasted just the one corner, being shunted from behind and on losing control received a terminal crunch into the tire wall.

To the original Nissan Primera then, a quietly British built car introduced in 1990. Despite denting very easily, it was in my opinion, streets ahead of the competition in terms of price, reliability and practicality. Ford took another three years to launch their Mondeo and that was more expensive, far less fun to drive and had far less internal space. Writing this has made me want to get another Primera. Maybe I will. So what is next you may ask? Before I get started on some of the other cars in my life, my next couple of blog posts will be on the nature of the classic car obsession itself and some of the consequences involved in its pursuit.

Adolescent Ital

Vivid, block colours on cars are perennially inflicted upon us by most car makers. The Italians seem particularly at ease with dousing anything from their outlandish Lamborghini Murcielago, to their chic Fiat 500 with paints described as ‘Fluorescent Green’ or ‘Tropicalia Yellow.’ In Great Britain, such gregarious displays of colour are now mainly confined to cars like the Ford Focus ST (btw how would Ford badge an ST Diesel variant?) which of course is available in, among other questionable colours, ‘Electric Orange’. Irresponsible use of colour peaked; it seems for us British, during the 1970’s. British Leyland were splashing all kinds of nonsense across our motor cars and seemingly no hue was spared the spray booth; giving us mimosa yellow, blaze orange and even cosmic blue. But whatever happened to the vinyl covered roof? No dubious paint option of the era was ever complete without a resplendent piece of mottled vinyl to cap it off. Examples of this practice include Triumph’s Dolomite Sprint and Jaguar’s XJ Coupes. I’ve never thought of vinyl as an engineering or even cosmetic necessity on the exterior of a car, since the vinyl is stuck to a roof that is already doing quite a good job of covering the top side of the vehicle. However, I’ve read that Jaguar used it on their XJ Coupe’s to cover rough weld markings, but that sounds rather suspect to me. More likely they thought it looked stylish, but as with any fashion device, perspective can be a harsh critic and I imagine people now either love or loath their vinyl roofs, but it still doesn’t explain their permanent extinction...or does it?

Style over substance, vinyl roofs and garish colours leads me straight into my next car, of which I was a passive occupant for nearly a decade. A 1981 Morris Ital. It looked as though it had been dipped in cheap custard, before having a black bin liner steam transferred to its upper portions. Friends, relatives and sometimes complete strangers would often remark on our whereabouts weeks after the event, so conspicuous was our ride. And it wasn’t just the looks (if anyone has a photo of one in yellow with vinyl roof I would love to see it), it also had a droning engine / exhaust note that was quite unlike anything else I’ve ever heard, possibly because even by 1984, the technology was so outdated, there was nothing left on the roads to compare it to.

The most memorable event in our Ital, was a collision with one of those shiny milk lorries on our way to Pevensey Bay in 1985. Approaching a Give Way junction that admittedly looked like a roundabout, my dad mistakenly thought it was his right of way. He was wrong. Ignoring the oncoming tanker and continuing on, the Morris Ital suffered the indignity of being rammed in the front passenger door at some speed. I remember the tubby milkman jumping from his cab with remarkable deftness and being very nice to us all in the aftermath. The Ital took the punishment like the tank it was and only needed a new front door and a bit of paint. It didn’t even stop us from continuing our journey to the campsite and apart from being a little shook up and a few tears out of my younger brother, we were all fine.

My parents had chosen a school virtually outside our catchment area, so the 4.5 miles to ‘middle school’ were undertaken in the Ital, I don’t think there were any direct busses, suffice to say that none of my class mates had ever heard of the village I was from. Mum with two other mums with children spilt the school run. We had the worst car by some margin (the other two cars were a mark 2 XR2 and a Mazda 626). It didn’t help that one of the other kids we drove to school with thought he knew everything worth knowing about cars, as his dad was involved in some form of motor sport and always drove around in a brand new Vauxhall Senator. This lad was constantly telling us how shit our car was and how his dad could perform high speed handbrake turns; this claim seemed particularly enviable at the time. By the late 1980’s I would exit the school gates cringing at the sight of the Ital and wishing that at the very least, it could have been painted in something less yellow, which is so typical of an adolescents ungratefulness isn’t it. My Dads cars have always been worse than my mums and his two car purchases during the late eighties didn’t help matters. They were (in order) a mark 1 Vauxhall Cavalier, which had the most pristine bodywork but died of terminal engine failure in a matter of months and its replacement, a Datsun cherry estate, which lasted a couple more years. The Datsun had the most amazingly sweet engine, but the bodywork of a Lada bathed in acid. Its colour? Yellow, but only where it wasn’t brown and flaky from the rust. It failed its MOT test when the tester could put his hand through one of the holes in the bodywork. To this day that car is my dads personal favourite.

Briefly back to the Ital then, a car which holds many happy memories that doesn’t include why or exactly when we got rid of it. Perhaps I have blocked it out as a painful recollection. Or maybe it’s because the memory of the day we got our next car is emblazoned. Our Nissan Primera ushered our family into the truly modern age of motoring, the car and its magnificence I will explain in a later blog. In comparison to the Ital it felt like taking a ride in an alien spaceship and it comes as little surprise that the Morris Ital was voted the second worst British car ever in a poll in 2008. Some cars are ahead of their time and some cars are just behind it.

The Classic Car Obsession

‘Car’ was THE first word out of my nine month old mouth, so I thought it fitting for it to be my first blog word too. Yes, my car obsession appears hard wired, innate and to this day, an unstoppable force on my tiny little brain. This blog is for those of you who suffer the same illogical fascination with cars, but one that stops short of physical love, those poor auto-fixation people have nothing to learn here.

Were there any particular ‘car’ influences exerted upon me growing up?? Not really. My dad’s not remotely interested in cars and my first memories of these unholy machines (circa. 1983) are of my parents two grubby (read rusty) blue Hillman Avengers. I think we had two because there was always a 50/50 chance one of them wouldn’t start, maybe they were sold in pairs and in the same colours, to disguise the fact one of them would always be out of service. I loved them despite their unreliability (I was walked to playgroup after all), they also colour matched my best corduroy trousers and when my dad would studiously park one of them up in the little garage behind our miniature terrace, I was allowed to sit on his lap and pretend I was the one guiding it in. Marvellous.

To the Hillman Avenger then (and not the exotic tiger sort), you were an anaemic and sickly motor car with less CC’s than a period Mini GT, humdrum in engineering terms and described by my dad as ‘tinny’ (surely not an adjective any car manufacture aspires too). Yet with a compliment of four doors, a reasonable boot and ‘coke bottle’ rear haunches (a very British evocation of those glamorous American muscle cars), our brace of Avengers provided, working in shifts, transport for my two young parents in Surrey for three years. That is until one day in early 1984, when according to my dad, both were sold and one new(er) car came into our lives that replaced both....Next blog post I will introduce you to the world of our magnificent, canary yellow, vinyl roofed Morris Ital, the car that would power our growing family (with my creeping embarrassment) throughout the remaining decade and into the early 90’s. So my thanks goes to Hillman, a British company that was eventually swallowed whole by the Chrysler empire in the late 60’s and was sadly defunct, as a car manufacturer, by the time I took my first car journey, in one of those Avengers.