I didn’t own a car until I was 32. When I was 16 I had a Yamaha FS1e moped, and a series of bikes after that until a SMIDSY nearly cost me a leg and my job. After that I got a Suzuki SJ410 which I kept for a few months then went onto Landies.
Mini 1275GT – 1981 – big bore exhaust, outsized carbs, stiffened suspension, complete hooligans car. MOT check says is was last on the road in 2007. For me it expired when I bent the crankshaft, mechanic said he had never seen that before.
Some truly fab cars here. And some shockers somewhat predictably. A mate has a Cavalier like the one up there when I was at Uni. We didn’t have any street cred but I’d still rather walk then get a lift. It was canary yellow.
I had a MKIII escort after my first car died and then an AlfaSud (I think). The escort was brilliant and boring. The Alfa was mad and rusted as I watched.
My Bro has a 2CV as well. His ace mechaning skills somehow increased the petrol consumption to that of a Chieftain tank. Which is why we had to push it home four miles one day 😉
There was something fab about early cars. Now knowing if it’d start or if it’d get you where you wanted to go. Every journey requires the spirit of adventure 🙂
My first car, when I was 18 was a Mk2 Escort, 1600 Ghia X, 4 door with a black vinyl roof with square headlights.. It cost a whole £100 and managed to get it sideways on the drive home from picking it up.. I also got banned from driving, tbh it probably saved my life and others! On the motorway you could watch the fuel gauge move, not as bad as a 2.8 Capri, but definitely still noticeable.
The floor was rust, I found this when trying to jack it up and the jack went up, the car did not. The heater matrix leaked, the windscreen leaked and the radiator leaked. The brake master cylinder had a leak, so you HAD to pump the brakes for them to work. Anything under 35mph and it would start to overheat. If you went round a corner at normal speed it would lean on to its bump stops, anything faster and it would zigzag out of a corner, hitting the left bump stops, then the right, then the left… I fitted a stereo, but it only worked if you shoved a 3.5″ floppy between the fascia and stereo.. Funny thing is I mentioned this to a friend and he had the same stereo, we worked out it was his stereo, 10 years before we knew each other.
But… It was my first car and I loved it, it was red, actually it was near white when I got it. With a lot of sweat and T-Cut it was bright red by the time I scrapped it!
I had a magnificent Rover 216 Vanden Plas EFi at 21, like this one (in tasteful Oyster Beige as well). Amazingly all the electronics worked, and the engine was pretty gutsy compared to the 900cc Renault 9 that I learnt to drive in. The steering was unassisted and heavy. Not a bad car but succumbed to the demon rust and was scrapped.
Had the engine out a few times though to fix clutch and gearbox issues. Support engine underneath, take off rear bar, undo some bolts and push car away from engine. Very easy engine removal.
Tundra green mini 998. PCG231P. Bought for £200 at 18 from a friend in a garage (was a trade-in). I ran it through university. Happy days chugging up and down the M4/5 Devon to London and back with my sister# and our all belongings.
#Officially wife for the purposes of RAC membership – which was used rather often, usually by her. It did break down once in London when I had the comment “didn’t I see this car last week?” – which was a new one on me!
Mini Mayfair 998cc in silver, with Sprite alloy wheels and a leaky sunroof with much gaffa tape applied. The car would have been 14 when I acquired it.
I was 23 and bought a 1971 MG Midget 1275cc for £500 – off a work colleague like the one in the photo, it was a basket case and it took me about 6 months to get it running / MOT as it needed a fair bit of welding, new gearbox and clutch, new suspension bushes – it was semi-tuned with a highlift cam, bigger carbs and a straight-through big-bore exhaust. I resprayed it Ferrari Rosso Red but because it had a different tyre at each corner had an alarming ability to go sideways. The clutch bearing went one morning and it sat on my drive for 2 years before someone offered me £100 to take it away….
What seems to have changed is the car that 17 year olds seem to expect these days.
Oh I don’t know about that, in 1995 when I was 18 I announced, very loudly to my Step-Dad that I was going to buy a BMW 6 series, not any one either, I was going to have a M635CSI as I’d just read in TopGear mag or something that as they were all about 10 years old at this point they were ‘only’ £10k (about £20k in today’s money) oh and it had to be Dark Grey or Black and a later, dechromed one.
I was earning about £300 a month at the time stacking shelves in Tesco after school. How he didn’t breaking down in tears laughing at me I don’t know.
I thought about it for about 6 months, didn’t do anything of course, but spent every penny I made in the pub thinking about it a lot and decided I’d probably over-estimated my affluence a bit and should think about something a bit more modest, at least to start.
The next 6 months were spent thinking about Porsche 944s, but only an S2 (but ideally a Turbo) they were about 6k a the time… I was still earning £300 a month.
Might be part of the reason why I didn’t own a car until 23, by then my income had risen up to my falling ambition and I got the Golf.
wasnt the engine int that a pump engine or something not origianlly designed for a car
Not exactly but close. It was a Coventry Climax unit (brilliant engine when properly cooled – which it wasn’t in the Imp). It was used powering a portable pump used by fire brigades.
17 (but I bought it a couple of years earlier to do up), 1959 Morris Minor. I stress this was only in the late 90s, I’m not that old! Was a bit different as all my mates had novas and such.
I passed my test at 17 and my first car was a Triumph Dolomite Sprint in Mimosa yellow.
What a great car from a fun perspective when it was running properly. Went like s**t off a shovel but needed 2 feet on the brake pedal to try and slow it down again.
The overdrive gearbox was a thing of beauty at the time.
Had 2 more of them over the years and wish I still had one….
Oooh! Dolly Sprint! I had a white one, I loved it. It was curious in that one side of the car was bolted together with imperial stuff and the other side was metric! Loved the driving position, went quickly, except round corners and I rebuilt it many times and thanks to Triumph Tune, did lots of fun stuff with it.
it wasn’t many first car though, about my third. My first, at 17, was the family hand down Hillman Super Minx, which was already on its second engine and gearbox with panels of differing colours 😃
I was 20 and at Uni. On the back of a summer job I bought a 9 year old 1.6L Capri in Beige for £600. Thankfully no photos exist. Sold it for £600 12 months later when I left uni and got a MK1 Golf GTI. Talk about chalk and cheese.
I hadn’t a very silly MK11 escort. Yellow, rs2000 front end, pinto engine, a huge k&n filter,relatively massive rear wheels and zero mechanical simpathy (or knowledge for that matter). My Nan gave me £800 just before my 17th and I bought it off a mate.
Positives:
it taught me what to do when you’ve been “a bit silly” with the throttle.
it looked cool
negatives:
Mate hanging out the window on washway road coming home from Manchester manually operating the wipers as the connector had broken. Again.
i bump stared it for the last six months I owned it and put one side of the drivers seat through the rusted floor. Shoved a jack under one side so it was level so fixed that.
the rear tyres were so big and the suspension so shot that if you opened the boot you could see the wheels.
i ignored all the essential mechanical issues and spent all the cash is had getting it resprayed an even brighter yellow and tinting the windows. It died shortly afterwards.
18. Bought a 1986 Mk3 escort 1.3 Laser which i think was just a special edition to get rid of the last 4 speed boxes. Ocean Blue, big spotlights …. and that’s it. Saw it maybe 10 years ago running around Aberdeen with different coloured wings and the spots missing from it.
Mine was a cut&shut MK3 Escort 1.3L that stank of curry every time you put the heater on, leaked when it rained so you had water sloshing about the footwells when you drove. Was an awesome car.. not because it was awesome, but because it gave me freedom. I went everywhere in it, usually full of mates, did alot of things for the first time in it. Awesome. Needed constant maintenance just to keep it running…and it never ran that well. Kids these day’s don’t know they’re born.