Mark Walton and the glory of the ’90s

It’s 2020, and to mark the dawn of the new decade I’m going to open a new car museum dedicated to the 1990s. Timing is everything, and I’m telling you, the ’90s are about to glow red hot with zeitgeistiness. All of us reach a certain age and start to look back more fondly on the cars of our youth – once it was Jaguar E-Types; then Escort Mexicos; now it’s Peugeot 205 GTIs. But tastes change, generation by generation, and any day now, I swear, there’s going to be a wave of ’90s nostalgia. And I’ll be there, cashing in with an £18.50 entrance fee and ‘Museum of the 1990s’ giftshop.

Picture it: visitors to the new attraction would walk around the exhibits to the sound of Kylie Minogue and Bryan Adams. There’d be an in-house cinema, playing Ronin and Days of Thunder on a constant loop, plus that scene from Tomorrow Never Dies when James Bond drives his BMW 750i round a car park in Hamburg using an Ericsson phone, despite the crappy GSM signal.

And then there are the cars. Importantly, the Museum of the 1990s won’t feature the very superest of supercars – no Lamborghinis or Bugattis or McLaren F1. Boring! Expensive! Instead, it’ll be the cheaper cars that the punters will queue up to see, cars that seemed almost within reach back then, and are even more within reach today (especially important if you’re starting a new museum from scratch).

So: a Lotus Elise, launched in 1996. The Elise is the Elan Sprint of its day, yet while examples of the ’60s sports car are still making £30k-£40k, an early Elise can be bought for under £15k. A steal! Admittedly, early S1 cars have a terrible reputation for breaking down, falling apart and locking your coat in the boot when the release cable snaps, but don’t worry – it’s a static display.

Honda NSX, launched in 1990. We’d need an early manual car, and good examples are now making up to £50k. I’d have a waxwork Ayrton Senna next to our NSX display, wearing slacks and sweater with white socks and those little shiny leather slip-on shoes.

A Subaru Impreza is a must, of course, but not a blue and gold 555 car – too obvious, too lurid. No, I’d plump for the early model, 1994, the one that started it all, a Turbo 2000. Incredibly these can be had for under £5k, though most examples now have 350,000 miles on the clock and exhausts the size of pre-cast concrete storm drains.

We’d need a hot hatch, but forget the old-school ’80s GTIs, we need a Clio Williams – launched 1993, the year Alain Prost won his fourth world title in the Williams-Renault FW15C. I was thinking about a Prost waxwork but sadly my Ayrton Senna waxwork has a contract that says they can’t appear together. It’s complicated. Anyway, the Clio would have to be one of the first 3800 examples, with the little numbered plaque and fuzzy teddy-bear seats. You can still buy one for £15k. Surely these should be Escort Mexico money by now?

So many cars, so much to see… picture the Porsche 996 with companion Boxster, side by side to show their identical fried-egg headlights. Bought as a pair for under £20k, this would be an interactive display, where we get unwitting visitors to replace both cars’ faulty IMS bearings for free.

Next door to the Porsches would be the early TVR Cerbera, with its British-designed and -built 4.2-litre racing V8. Launched in 1996, surely this is almost as bespoke as a McLaren F1? A McLaren that was built in Blackpool using polystyrene chip trays? You could buy a bright purple Cerbera for under £20k. Amazing. In terms of bang-for-buck, it would go head-to-head with a 1994 Dodge Viper, with its Lamborghini-designed 8.0-litre V10 and hilarious canvas umbrella roof.

See? We haven’t even spent £200k yet, and the Museum Of The 1990s is already looking great! All I need are a few wealthy donors to front-up the eBay cash, sorry, ‘collection funds’ and maybe a stately home, where we could build our state-of-the-art museum with a monorail. Readers! Together we could crowdfund it! You can all be patrons. I’ll be curator and buyer. And at the weekends, test driver.

Editor-at-large Mark Walton has been writing for CAR since the ’90s, and has tested just about everything built since then, and plenty of earlier cars too