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.
