Tips, tricks and nostalgia from a lifetime immersed in old cars
Nigel Fryatt remembers his early attempts at performance tuning
MODIFYING MY MINI
For this enthusiast, owning a Mini was just the start. Budgetary restrictions meant that I couldn’t afford a Cooper version, or even to mildly tune its 850 engine, but that didn’t mean that you couldn’t make it go faster... Obviously performance was going to be improved dramatically when you fitted a Paddy Hopkirk throttle pedal extension, allowing you to instantly become a heel and toe ‘expert’, slick downchanges were then possible, keeping the knackered old A-series engine in its peak rev range…
Speed increased further with the ‘bucket’ seat covers. I couldn’t afford the authentic classic racing bucket seats, so these vinyl covers with padded edges and sides obviously would have to do. The interior’s ‘racy’ look was also improved when I decided to get one of the black vinyl facia inserts that allowed you to move the speedometer from its iconic central location to be ahead of the driver. I could then add gauges and various switches to power the second-hand spotlights I had acquired. The speedo conversion was not as successful as I had hoped, since the speedo cable didn’t stretch far enough and had to be replaced. Not wanting to spoil the look because of this mere technicality, I initially moved the speedo without the cable being attached. A nonworking speedo certainly made everything feel quicker...
Looking back, all this seems somewhat daft, but I was young and just owning the Mini was an exciting, wonderful pleasure. Memory tells me that JEX 505 actually cost £150, yet I can’t remember actually paying any money, since the bank of Mum and Dad sorted out all the paperwork – including the annoying formalities of insurance and road tax – leaving me to get on with the important job of customising my Mini, making it personal, able to stand out from the crowd. And that thought led me to decide that it needed a respray.
Before that, the odd areas of rust needed sorting, especially on the front wings, but it’s amazing what you can do using a Cornflake box, an Isopon filler kit and some cans of primer spray. Of course, I did this all properly, and removed all the brightwork on the car, and all the lights front and rear (resulting in the need for some more Isopon since there was some of the dreaded rust under the front headlamp’s chrome bezels, which also demanded another Cornflake box to support the filler until it set).
The colour had already been decided upon: it was to be a Renault lime green.
To be honest I cannot remember where or why I decided on this, but it could have been spotting a Renault 16 so coloured. Sourcing the paint, two five-litre tins, was a bit of a problem but eventually a dealership in Great Yarmouth managed to order it for me, and somebody that my Dad knew had a backstreet garage and would spray the car (privately, nudge, nudge) if I could do all the prep work and get the car to him. Well that was simple. The filler had hardened, been rubbed down and the whole shell was now a matt off-red, pinkish colour. OK, so it didn’t have any lights or indicators, but I’d just drive it there since it was only six miles away. Road legal? Never crossed my mind.
To make it more ridiculous, I was taking it to the garage in the afternoon, so I drove my light-less Mini to school first (I was a valued and responsible sixth former at the time) left it parked in the street outside the main entrance and drove to my Dad’s carspraying mate when the day’s education was over. A couple of days later it was ready and I drove it back home, straight from the paint shop and still with no lights. Back home, I reattached all the lights and bumpers (and fitted the correct speedo cable). A couple of cans of matt black spray paint on the roof finished the job off perfectly. It looked super cool. Apparently.
Quite how I never got stopped by the police driving the thing without lights astounds me now, but didn’t even occur at the time. And there were police about stopping cars, as we had discovered. When I was learning to drive in the Mini, my Dad would let me drive to school in the morning and then take the car back home. One such school day, he got stopped in the car on the way home; amusingly, as we had been late leaving that morning, he was still wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown at the time...
RACING MY COMPANY CAR
If customising your first car is an important rite of passage, then your first company car surely indicates when you have made it to the world of the adults. In many ways I had been spoiled, since my first ‘proper’ job in motoring journalism had been working for Autocar magazine. Even as a junior production/ sub-editor/tea boy, this still meant that I was able to drive the cars the magazine had in on test, and over time, I actually had my own Long Term vehicles. Some were awful (this includes a basic VW Polo and the truly disgusting Fiat Strada) but some were fantastic (and this included a MkI Ford Fiesta 1300S, complete with go-faster stripe, and was topped with 12,000 brilliant miles in a Fiat X1/9). However, when I moved to Link House Magazines to edit
Sporting Cars magazine I was given my first company car, a 1.6-litre Ford Sierra GL. Dull as ditchwater doesn’t even cover it. Sadly, leaving it unlocked in busy London streets never saw it stolen.
Thankfully I managed to get promoted to become the editor of Cars and Car Conversions magazine, then undoubtedly the best-selling and most prestigious performance and tuning magazine available. With some smart talking to the boss, I managed to persuade him that the editor of said important magazine needed, yes needed, to arrive in a more sporting machine and after some time I managed to get a new Rover 216GTi – on the basis that there was a prestige race series using these cars, so me driving a road-going version made so much sense.
I had a tow hook fitted, as I was campaigning my Caterham Seven in various sprint and hillclimb events and used the Rover to trailer the Seven to competitions. On one occasion I had an entry to a round of the championship that was at Millbrook, but there was a problem with the Seven, which I couldn’t fix in time, and so to avoid wasting the entry, I made the decision to compete in my company car. Modifications for the event were limited to drilling a couple of small holes in the front number plate to fit the timing strut and getting a panel of white vinyl on which to attach my competition numbers. I was then entered in the Up to 1600cc Road-Going Saloon Car Class, which somewhat surprisingly, I duly won and still have the very smart trophy to this day.
Quite what would have happened if I had thrown the car into the scenery and broken something I thankfully never had to find out. Victory was particularly pleasing since the company fleet manager had been somewhat curmudgeonly about ordering the Rover as my company car in the first place, saying “We’ve had to change the rules for you, since the insurance doesn’t allow GTi models you know!” It probably didn’t cover motorsport competitions either, but what the eye doesn’t see…