It’s Mine! 1960 Austin A99 Westminster saloon
Calgarian was smitten with ‘Abbey-Jane’ the first time she laid eyes on her
When you find the right one, you just know it. That’s how it happened for Carla Zacharias one day in 2016. Driving a friend’s daughter to school, Zacharias spotted a car parked on the street.
“I thought it was the cutest little car I’d ever seen,” the Calgarian says. “I thought it would be perfect for my tea business. I took my husband past it several times, always gushing about how cute it was.”
One Monday, though, the car was gone and, when it didn’t reappear, Zacharias was sure she’d never see it again.
“From mid-March to the end of June I drove past the spot where it had been, four times a day. I’d come home and whine to my husband that we’d missed our opportunity. He sympathized with me, but that was that.”
For her birthday in early August, all the couple’s children came over for an early breakfast. After eating, they decided that they should all go for a walk — even the daughter who was wearing a walking cast. As they turned the corner, there was the car.
“I made a comment and my husband held out the keys,” Zacharias laughs. It turned out that after some door-knocking, her husband Doug had tracked down the owner of the car and worked out a deal to buy it and store it until her birthday.
Zacharias’ new car was a 1960 Austin A99 Westminster saloon that was purchased new from the Halford & Valentine dealership in Calgary in February of 1960. It was in remarkably good, original, condition and even came with the original owner’s manual.
Westminster was the name used by England’s venerable Austin brand for their so-called “executive” models: relatively large cars with luxury features and six-cylinder engines. The A99 Westminster was new for 1959, with a leather interior and styling by the renowned Italian studio of Pininfarina, and was produced until 1961. The 103-horsepower, twin-carbureted 2.9-litre engine was the same as that in the Austin-Healey 3000 sports car. A99 Westminsters came standard with a three-speed manual transmission with overdrive as well as front power disc brakes.
After a little coaching from her daughter’s boyfriend — and some repairs to the shift linkage — Zacharias discovered that using the Austin’s column-mounted manual shift was just like using the “three-on-the-tree” shifter she learned to drive on.
It wouldn’t really be an old British car if some electrical gremlins didn’t pop up. In the case of her Austin, the first little problem was a tendency for the horn to blow when she used the turn signal indicator switch. Since the horn is quite loud for such a little car, she says it was quite startling when it first happened. With the assistance of a friend, she was able to trace the short circuit in the steering column wiring and fix the problem. A rainstorm revealed that not only are the window and trunk seals in need of replacement, but that a wire once related to a towing attachment hadn’t been properly insulated. And the odometer and speedometer also need some attention.
When she first got the Austin, it handled rather oddly. The reason was revealed when it was discovered that the tires were badly mismatched. After a little looking, new tires of the proper size were found at a Calgary tire store and the A99 feels a lot happier on the road.
The car’s leather interior is showing its age and Zacharias says it and the headliner, which also has seen better days, will be the next areas to be updated. There are also a few rust concerns to be addressed — a normal problem for a 58 year-old car.
Her Austin has appeared at a number of car shows and Zacharias says it gets a fair bit of attention. Canadians of a certain age remember when British cars were almost the only imports that could be found and older people from the U.K. remember cars like the Austin very well. Younger people are often attracted by the car’s different look, even if they don’t know the car’s historical significance.
One thing that people at the car shows kept asking her was the car’s name, Zacharias says with a laugh. Although she had no notion of naming the A99, people were so insistent that she find a name for it that she finally decided that an Austin obviously should be called Jane. A friend, though, pointed out that a good name for a Westminster would be Abbey, so Zacharias’ A99 is now known as Abbey-Jane.
“It’s a fun little car to drive,” Zacharias says. “I’ll drive it around the city of Calgary all day long doing errands.”
The car even goes on the highway from time to time: “It has some serious pickup. I’m not sitting in the right lane labouring for five minutes.”
The power brakes work fine, she notes, but the manual steering makes for a pretty good arm and shoulder workout.
“Everyone in the neighbourhood knows it’s me,” Zacharias says. “I get people waving and thumbs-up all the time. I’ve enjoyed every second of it. My husband definitely won ‘Present of the Decade!’”