Chris Weedon and The Morris Marina Owners Club and Morris Ital Register.

I learnt to drive in 1975 with BSM in a 1.3 Marina Deluxe – they had fleets of them at the time. My lessons were in an early car with the tiny 6in clutch and these were very easy to stall – if you could master pulling away in a 6in clutch Marina, then you could drive anything. It certainly taught you well. Then I forgot about Marinas until 2003, when I decided I wanted to go classic rallying. Even then I couldn't afford a Ford Escort, but I remembered reading Car and Car Conversions in the 1970s when they ran a series on the build of a 1.3 Marina coupé by Leyland Special Tuning, which the magazine then rallied quite successfully. That car must have stuck in the back of my mind because I decided that I would do the same.

I wanted a TC, but couldn't find one anywhere because even in 2003 they were rare, so I decided to go for a 1.8 Super Deluxe coupé instead. One popped up on eBay and I won it for £700. There was a hole in the sill, but the guy said he would patch it up and get an MoT, so I was able to drive it back from Plympton to Bedford. I still have that car, and the build has been featured on my website at www.marinacoupe.co.uk.

I had realised on the drive home that the front end was rather wayward, largely because of worn bushes in the front tie bars. Fortunately, Superflex do a very good range of polyurethane bushes for the Marina and Ital, so the first thing I did was to change those. I never did go stage rallying in it though, because in the end I moved from modifying for that kind of event to modifying for fast road use.

As I became more involved in the club, in 2008 I became an Area Rep, then the Area Rep Coordinator, then Club Secretary and finally in 2016 Club Chairman. I don't have an exit strategy yet, but eventually somebody a little younger will need to take over. We do have quite a number of 20 and 30-something members who like these cars, which surprises some people because youngsters such as this wouldn't remember them from back in the day. But the car is what I would call an underdog car, which I don't mean in any derogatory way, it is just that they do attract people who like the underdog. I go to plenty of shows and occasionally get people mouthing off about how bad the Marinas are, and we still have the occasional armchair warrior who thinks they can attack us anonymously on social media, but it is nowhere near as vehement now as it was at the height of the Top Gear nonsense.

Overall the general public appreciation of the car is on the up and we get lots of classic car enthusiasts coming onto our stand at the NEC, asking sensible questions about prices, insurance costs, parts availability etc. Clearly they are thinking about buying one, and with prices doubling over the last two or three years, who can blame them? It helps that as a club we are working on commissioning the manufacture of those parts that are keeping cars off the road due to them no longer being available. We don’t aim to compete with commercial suppliers, but to supplement their businesses.