£1000 Challenge
Rover 216 Coupé
THE STORY SO FAR Miles driven 709 Total mileage 98,514 What’s gone wrong Nothing this week ( Damn it – Ed.)
DAVID SIMISTER Nope, this isn’t a misprint – I really have nabbed the keys to our £1k Tomcat from its regular custodian, features ed Chris Hope. Or rather, he thought he’d rub in the pain of our Reliant Robin’s failure to proceed thus far by putting me behind the wheel of a bargain classic that, well… works.
Luckily, I had just the mission in mind to make sure that its ropey idle really had been cured once and for all. Managing ed, James Sadlier – who seems to spend pretty much his entire salary on snapping up old Fords – had a car-buying itch that he needed to scratch. Again. Only this time he needed a helping hand with picking up a rather splendid Peugeot 406 Coupé.
I fired up the Tomcat on the big day and discovered that it was a very different animal to the one that I’d encountered on the way back from its big trip to the Le Mans Classic ( CCW, 18 July). Back then I remember the 1.6-litre D- Series being perfectly content on motorways, but feeling very unsettled whenever we pulled up at a set of traffic lights, its idle flickering erratically back and forth.
But it seems that the Rover 200 & 400 Owners’ Club’s advice – and Chris’ subsequent work on replacing the coil pack and rotor arm – has worked a treat. It no longer feels like the four-pot is stuttering at idle in stationary traffic, and it seems to run more smoothly than it did on my initial encounter with the car during the long drive back from Portsmouth to Peterborough.
It also meant that I could enjoy my own little trip down Memory Lane on a predictably fault-free foray to Rugby to deliver James to his freshly-purchased Pug. Readers with long memories will know that I’m a big fan of Rover’s R8-generation models, and ran a 214 SEi for more than three years. The way it seems to hum excitedly at about 3500rpm at motorway speeds – even with our Tomcat having the larger Honda unit rather than Rover’s own K- Series – took me right back, as did the lovely wood-effect strip that curves around the dashboard towards the passenger door, and the in-built digital clock that never, ever seems to work properly – no matter what Rover or MG it’s fitted to.
I’d be interested to hear what James makes of our Rover – particularly because his own swoopy two-door, by sheer coincidence, costs roughly the same – but for all our Tomcat’s little flaws I’ve long reckoned that the 200s and 400s of this generation are among the best cars that Longbridge ever made – and especially so with the Tomcat, with its rev-happy demeanour and restrained good looks. It’s a genuinely likeable car for only a grand.
Just don’t tell Chris that, whatever you do, otherwise I’ll never hear the end of it…