In My Humble Opinion

Mike pays homage to the unlikeliest cars you could possibly miss after selling.

 One of the many questions I seem to be asked by relative strangers – and of course, people who know me well – who are aware of my antics is: which car do I miss not having any more? Over the years, I’ve owned and driven some really lovely examples – private, company and many showroom demonstrators. You name it and there’s every chance I’ve had a steer in one, from shagged-out jalopies to supercharged Jaguars, Rivas to Rolls-royces. I seriously reckon that if I were to include buses, coaches and HGVS into the mixture, the number must surely be in its thousands – honestly!

But sticking just with cars owned or run on company business, there have been some nice things over the years. Some that come to mind include a number of Saabs, a last of the line V-plate Rover 620Ti, a brace of Land Rovers and various VAG products. To come to an ultimate decision as to which one I look back to with rose-tinted fondness isn’t as hard as you might imagine. Of all the motors I have been the incumbent of since 1989 – the year I qualified to be a public nuisance on the highway – the one I miss most of all is a 1990 Rover Montego 1600LX.

No, that’s fine, I’m quite happy to wait a while as you chortle, snigger and spray this page with your expelled tea. Are you quite finished now? Good – then allow me to explain, please. If like me, you champion the virtues of self-spannering, Rover’s last hurrah of the good old bad old days of British Leyland was a textbook lesson in how to snatch defeat from the snapping jaws of victory. Packed with technology when launched in 1984, but even more simple to assemble than a bucket of Lego, it beggars belief at just how Austin Rover managed to cock it up.

That said, Montegos were pleasant to drive, totally idiotproof to mend and by the time the facelifted versions came on song in late ’88, they became reasonably reliable. My first Montego foray was a trade-in bought for £150 from a mate’s Hyundai dealer. It was a 1993 ex-vodafone mobile engineer’s diesel LX estate. Standard equipment included loads of rust, an MOT with expiry time you could almost measure by holding your breath and, due to a blown head gasket, a thirst for water that could give the Flying Scotsman a fright. It was only bought to help move to a new flat; it worked out cheaper than renting a Transit Luton for a weekend.

Print constraints restrict me from explaining why I kept it for a further eight months. I welded up the B-posts, sorted the head gasket and put it through an MOT. It ran for another couple of years racking up over 270,000 miles before it succumbed to the scrappie in the sky after being shoved up the backside by a Volvo after I had sold it on – Alan, the acquaintance I sold it to, was truly gutted. A couple of years later I bought another one, only this time it was a red 1.6LX that cost me little more than a handful of magic beans. The salesman simply didn’t have the heart to weigh it in.

Moving forwards and, after a few years of Montego-free motoring, I bloody well ended up with another after seeing it at a Cambridgeshire motor show. I was bored of my Rover 75 and he was unsure whether a one-owner, 20,000-mile, utterly immaculate Montego was ideal as his daily driver. We swapped details, met up a week or so later, fell in love with each other’s cars and did a cash-free straight swap. The Monty wasn’t mint, though – the central locking worked on only one door, there was an oil leak starting from the camshaft carrier and a whole list of other niggly things to put right. At the time, I was running a company car, so there was no real rush.

One-by-one the job list got smaller and the car earned itself the nickname of the “Mintego” owing to fact it was rust-free and from 20 yards looked better than something brandnew. It even took pride of place on the Maestro Montego club stand at the NEC Restoration Show where a certain Ant Anstead made a beeline for it, telling me his father had an identical model back in the day. They say that time heals old wounds, owing to the fact that during its production run it was a troubled soul. I distinctly remember them slowly being replaced for newer models and their already dismal used values dropping quicker than a weighed-down stone.

But after getting the car reliable and throwing on a pair of new rear shock absorbers, it trundled around with a kind of happiness you only find with a retro-wreck. Old boys at fuel stations would come over and chat, the odd overtaking motorist would roll by, toot the horn and nod in appreciation. Suddenly I was back in a Zircon Blue world where motoring was a joy once more, a cat meant nothing more than a fourlegged family pet and your fellow motorist wasn’t out to tailgate you into oblivion. The whole world almost slowed down and, since then, I’ve rarely been happier behind the wheel.

Sadly, I had to let the old girl go owing to a cashflow issue – namely more of the stuff was flowing out than coming in.

I was offered a seriously good cash price to sell her to a retro car collector, and the deal was sealed. So, there you go – not all of us motor trade diehards need a howling V8 and a sub-6sec 0-60 time to smile. Some of us need nothing more than a pile of old but reliable rubbish to be content. That’s mine; so why not write in and tell me about unlikely one that got away?

“Standard equipment included loads of rust, an MOT with expiry time you could almost measure by holding your breath and, due to a blown head gasket, a thirst for water that could give The Flying Scotsman a fright...”