Martin Buckley Backfire
‘Something about the way things fit and the detailing gives it more of the feel of a Torremolinos pedalo than a glamorous GT’
As you may have read elsewhere, I’ve ended up with a Reliant Scimitar. I did not, I promise, go looking for this car; it found me, as is so often the case, this time via pals Richard and Ian at UK Detailing. Good points include the fact that it is orange (a colour I associate with GTES) and is an SE5A rather than a wider, less-appealing SE6. Not-so-good points concern some of Richard’s ‘enhancements’, which I can only put down to youthful enthusiasm, the worst of the offences being the lowered suspension – although I’m told this can be put back to standard easily.
I suppose I could live with the XJ-S front seats (they look surprisingly at home in the black hole of the GTE’S relentlessly synthetic interior), and the Wolfrace wheels are very much in the spirit of the car. Mechanically it seems good – it starts, drives and even stops. The auto ’box bites well and the V6 sounds healthy, through an exhaust so fruity it must be on the limits of legality.
After a rewarding day spent cleaning it up, I began to entertain the idea of getting the Scimitar back on the road. I’d even half sold it to my missus as her new car… until my friend Andrea from Italy stepped in (thankfully) and bought it on the basis of a texted photo. “I must have this crazy English car,” he said, and a deal was done.
Interestingly, Andrea claims to have never seen one – and something tells me it won’t be making the trip to Turin. Still, it’s a cheap car – Scimitars must be among an elite group of cars that have gone down in value rather than up – and a fraction of the price of a Ford Capri, whose engine it shares. It’s funny how there seems to be mass nostalgia for the blue-collar Mk1 Capri when the Scimitar, perceived as a much more desirable thing when new and beloved of the Royals and the country-house set, seems as out of fashion as the motley group of celebrities that owned them, including newsreader Leonard Parkin, World of Sport host Dickie Davies, wrestler Mick Mcmanus and, erm, Stuart Hall…
So how can a car that was so ‘on trend’ in the early ’70s, so widely imitated yet never bettered, be so ignored by the market now? A 120mph four-seater that successfully blended the apparently incompatible requirements of sports car and station wagon, and all this from an obscure maker of plastic pigs that saw the potential in Ogle’s concept and had the gumption to build it. This was a car nobody had asked for, but that a lot of people suddenly realised they wanted.
Today the Scimitar’s problem lies, as usual, in a combination of factors. The perception that they are cheap and cheerful, and susceptible to easy bodging, means that people rarely feel brave enough to spend the money on really good paint and getting original details right; this leads to a dearth of good, sorted, correctly finished GTES to bolster its image and remind people what a bold, innovative product it was 50 years ago.
In the end, there is an in-built prejudice against plastic cars that people just can’t quite get over, no matter how much sense glassfibre seems to make. Something about the detailing and the way things fit gives a Scimitar more of the feel of a Torremolinos pedalo than a glamorous GT.
This is the first one I have owned, but there have been some close encounters. In the early ’90s, C&SC ’s then art man Kevan Westbury bought a white one and, getting into the spirit of high-quality GTE maintenance, used toothpaste to fill the cracks in the paint. A little later I borrowed a much nicer example for a trip to Manchester, which somehow left no impression on me – apart from the fact that the doorhandle came off in my hand. That seemed about par for the course for a car that I had rather dismissively filed under the heading ‘chemical toilet’.
I still do in a way; but I have also warmed to them of late, alongside things such as the Marcos Mantis and the ’70s Lotus Elite. At the Classic Motor Show, I even caught myself lusting over a Gilbern Invader, which is slightly worrying…