Our Classics
Mike’s done the unthinkable and sold the Midget – after 16 years of ownership. What was he thinking?
Ino longer own PCB 120S. And I’m slightly alarmed at how badly I’m taking this news. Part of me is extremely excited at the prospect of getting to know another, very different classic (more on which next week). But part of me just wants to snatch up the phone and babble: ‘Sorry, my mistake. Can I have it back, please?’
This cheeky little pocket rocket was a part of my life for more than 16 years, so I’m not the only one to feel sucker-punched by this development.
One petrolhead friend openly questioned whether I’d finally lost the plot. Another looked at me and muttered: ‘ You’ve done WHAT?’ Worst of all, though, is the look on my ten-year-old’s face whenever the subject is broached. It’ll take him a while to forgive me, I think.
So what, exactly, is going on? The answer, to put it bluntly, is ‘500 miles a year’ – and that simply is not enough. I bought the MG in 2003 on a whim, purely as a weekend toy to hammer around the Lincolnshire countryside whenever the sun was out and the mood took me, fully intending to sell it as soon as I’d paid it off. Then the inevitable anthropomorphism struck – I fell in love with it, in other words. Worse, I spent a fortune on getting it restored instead of just selling it on when I discovered the extent of its corrosion years later. And that, basically, was that.
And yet, I’ve kept coming back to that criminally low annual mileage of late. Work, family, life – they’ve all eaten into my once-regular solo flights into the countryside to the extent that they slowly dwindled, then dried up altogether. I don’t get much free
OWNED SINCE SEPTEMBER 2003 MILEAGE SINCE LAST REPORT 272 TOTAL MILEAGE 115,626 LATEST COSTS £0
time, these days, so why would I want to fritter away what little time I do have by doing something away from my family? Once you come to that conclusion, you have to ask yourself another, rather more disturbing question – why keep a car that you hardly ever drive?
I bought PCB shortly after contracting the classic car bug from a Morgan Plus 8 that I spent an exhilarating hour hammering around Millbrook Proving Ground’s spectacular Alpine Route, one afternoon. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the hood was down and the rumble from the Rover V8 was tickling my ticklish bits like there was no tomorrow. I decided there and then that I wanted my own piece of this particular action. This turned out to be the car that I spotted for sale at Hall’s Garage in Morton – an establishment with which I would become extremely familiar over the years – a couple of months later. Its rear arches were a bit crusty and the hood was a bit ropey, but the price was right. It was mine within a week.
I duly spent what felt like forever chasing the inevitable gremlins that result when an enthusiastic – if not terribly realistic – 31-year-old tries to pile the miles on to a car that has spent the last five years only ever venturing out onto the road in order to attend its annual MoT. The horn stopped working. It ran hot. It sometimes ran like a two-cylinder bag of spanners when it got stuck in traffic. And it frequently refused to even turn over when I tried to restart it after a long run.
Once I’d got over my initial dismay that my new toy wasn’t as turnkey reliable as a new Audi (and a Seventies BL car, too… who knew?), I set about the long process of getting it match-fit. It may have taken me a hell of a long time – and a hell of a lot of money – but the car I drove out of the garage for the last time, last month, was a far cry from the one that I bought in 2003.
Turn-key? Not quite, perhaps, but Hall’s Garage’s expert long-term ministrations eventually resulted in a car that always started first time – even after months of inactivity – idled at precisely 1000rpm and delivered seamless performance, not to mention a whole lot of fun.
Highlights? Too many to list, but joining the CCW crew on a sunsoaked drive up to the Peak District, a while back, must be close to the top of the tree. It may have deafened me on the long haul up the A1 and M1, but I guarantee that I had the biggest grin of all of us when we finally hit the picturesque twisty stuff.
Starring on CCW’s stand under the NEC Classic Motor Show’s lights was another proud moment, likewise lining it up alongside its siblings at MGLive! not once, but twice.
But the truth of the matter is that I was never happier – never – than when I simply dropped the hood, dropped the clutch and headed out into the countryside on a sunny day to leave the mundanities of real life behind in a blast of engine blare and slipstream, if only for a few hours.
So long, old friend.