Andrew Boddy, the man who looks after Vauxhall’s heritage fleet

Senior vehicle restorer at the Vauxhall Heritage Collection

I still start every day at 7.30am and finish at four, as I have since I began at Vauxhall. I could always get home to have tea with my kids, although my son’s now 24 and my daughter 22. It’s weird but my first day at the company is still etched in my memory – 3 September 1979 – as is my clocking-in number, 080021.

I was 16 and came straight from school. I was car-mad. If you weren’t into football then it was cars, and at school it was always Ford-versus-Vauxhall. For some reason they all called me ‘Vauxhall Ted’.

To start your engineering apprenticeship you had to pass quite a strenuous aptitude test, which took a whole Saturday morning. Then I had proper training in all the basic skills: grinding, milling, sheet metalwork and so on. My first position was in the service department, looking after the company’s own fleets of Vauxhalls and Bedfords.

There was quite a focus on heavy vehicles then. I tuned one Bedford truck engine to give an extra 27bhp, which I was very proud of, and it was used at our Millbrook proving ground for years to tow a water bowser. Soon I was spending a lot of time there, because my job evolved into durability testing. Sometimes we drove American GM vehicles round-the-clock, getting miles and miles under the belt, critical stuff in vehicle development. I know a lot about tolerances!

When this Heritage Centre job came up, I was the only person internally who applied. That was 19 years ago, and the collection has grown from six cars in the 1970s – including our famous 1909 B-type Prince Henry and an early Bedford truck – to about 72. It’s hugely varied. At one end we have veterans, at the other the Lotus Carlton and VXR8.

But it’s a working collection. Not many manufacturers let journalists drive their museum pieces, but we do. It does Vauxhall a power of good for people to see our historic cars in newspapers and magazines. The public needs to know what an amazing past this brand has. Vauxhall is the only existing British carmaker eligible for the London-to-Brighton Veteran Car Run, and we usually field our 1903 5hp and 1904 6hp, come rain or shine. We did a media event at Bicester Heritage recently, and that was fantastic – plenty of room just in case any of our guests couldn’t get to grips with the heavy steering!

Having said that, I always give tuition. It’s rewarding when journalists learn to drive our cars and I love seeing the smiles on their faces. I’m quite calm, but it can be worrying. I’ll say to a young writer about to borrow our Lotus Carlton: ‘It has no traction control – do be careful.’ Then I’ll see the pictures and smoke is coming off the tyres… I’m getting older and I think you should treat classic cars with respect, even if they’re very fast.

This job makes you a bit anal about detail. You have to keep a lot in your mind. This morning I’ve hardly been off the phone with queries to the DVLA and a call from a guy in America who’s coming to our annual open day on 10 June just to see our L -type Wyvern.

I am sort of front-of-house as well as a technical expert. We have only half an hour for lunch and I’ve got into this bad habit of answering emails as I eat my sandwiches. We get so many queries from the public. People think we have a warehouse full of parts, but sadly we don’t. None of the press tools were kept, so original panels are very hard to find.

Much of my time is spent maintaining our collection, making sure they’re roadworthy. We still MOT all our cars even though we don’t have to, and happily they hardly ever fail. Some of our oldest cars are surprisingly tough. The Prince Henry can withstand overheating – there’s a cooling fan but no water pump. And I marvel at the epicyclic gearbox on the 1903 5hp, our earliest car; the thinking behind these things was all-original – the designers had nothing to go on.

I concentrate on restoration whenever I can. Recently, we renovated our two M-types, which hadn’t been touched for at least 16 years. A simple cylinder head change quickly became almost an entire engine rebuild, and took two weeks’ work spread out over four months of grabbing odd hours.

If I have a regret, it’s that we rarely have time to go away and learn new techniques. A 3D printer could be hugely helpful, but I think it’ll be a while before we can afford one. Like everyone, we have space and budget restrictions. The last car we bought and restored was a Viva GT in 2013, and that was a major job, with the body totally stripped. We do look at lots of cars, though. After all, my bosses say: ‘If you think we really need it then we might be able to find the money…’

‘we usually field our 1903 5hp and 1904 6hp in the london-to-brighton, come rain or shine’