£1000 Challenge
Reliant Robin
DAVID SIMISTER Our Robin has finally taken par tina summer classic car show! The Ormskirk MotorFest’s petrolheads took a healthy interest in our £600 three-wheeler – but what they might not have realised was that it was actually one of this year’s farthest-flung entrants.
Rewind to two days earlier and
I was feeling a tad apprehensive. The Robin has behaved impeccably on shorter outings – including contributor Richard Gunn’s trip to the Three Counties Dog Rescue Show ( C, 1C1 WSeptember), but getting it to the show in Lancashire would involve more than 200 miles of Bank Holiday weekend traffi c – on one of the hottest Friday nights of the year.
I’d abandoned the A1’s stop-start traffic in favour of an increasingly hotchpotch series of country lanes barely ten miles after topping up the Reliant’s levels and fi ring up the 848cc engine – and promptly hit trouble. Nothing to do with the car (for a change), but a glance in the rear mirror revealed a wasp buzzing angrily above the back seats. And I am t oefrwriafisepds. Cue an impromptu pitstop with the rear hatchback and all the windows down so it could clear off into the Rutland countryside.
CBA settled into its stride once I’d evicted the stinging insect, chomping up mile after mile of quiet country roads and emerging unfussed when it joined the busier traffi c on the A50 dual carriageway just outside East Midlands Airport. It settled down to a steady 55-60mph on the faster roads, but picked up its skirts whenever it needed to overtake a lorry; it would have cruised even faster, had the never-ending series of potholes been a bit kinder to the front suspension!
This was far and away the Robin’s biggest outing with us – and it seemed to be lapping up every moment. I abandoned the route up through Cheshire’s patchwork of quaint villages that I’d planned beforehand and decided to take it up the M6 instead, where it stuck to a constant 60mph as it threaded its way past a constant stream of camper vans crawling up to the Lakes and beyond.
It was dark by the time I pulled off the motorway, but the Robin soldiered on. Sure, it was a noisy trip and my legs had been gently cooked by the heat from the engine, just a few inches away on the other side of a glassfi bre panel, but the Robin was excelling at the sort of motoring it was never really designed for. For all the rush-hour traffic jams, threats of wasp stings and cross-country detours, I emerged deeply impressed.
It completed the rather shorter journey to Ormskirk just as confi dently the following morning, and was rewarded with a spot in the heart of Coronation Park, right next to an R107 Mercedes-Benz SL, which, like more than 90 per cent of the MotorFest’s entrants, had travelled from bits of Lancashire immediately within Ormskirk’s orbit. Showgoers couldn’t quite believe that our tiny little three-wheeler had notched up such a hefty overnight mileage to make it to the big day.
Neither could I, to be honest.