Colin Clifton-brown 1967 ALVIS TF21

Built in 1967, Colin Clifton-brown’s TF was one of the youngest Alvis models on the show field. “I bought it about two years ago at a Historics auction,” he explains. “I wouldn’t say it was on a whim, because I’d always wanted an Alvis. It had to be a TF because I have a thing about having to own the last of the line. They made roughly 100 and this is number 55 – I would have liked number 100, and I actually met the owner of it at the auction of my car. I just got talking to him and mentioned that the last car was sold a few years ago. He said, ‘I know, I bought it!’

“I’ve got a number of other cars, but this is the only Alvis. It’s fairly standard and, unusually for a TF, it’s on steel wheels – wires were an option and much more common. It’s also a manual, which appeals to me because most were automatics, and since I got one or two teething problems sorted out it’s been brilliant. I don’t know a huge amount about its history other than that it was supplied new in Switzerland, which a lot of them were because of the Graber connection. It still has the Swiss motorway vignette in the window, and although it’s right-hand drive the speedometer is in kilometres. It’s also only got one mirror – on the passenger side, another clue that it spent most of its life abroad.

“I would really like to do the paintwork on it at some point. It’s got layers and layers of paint, which has been chipped and it has had a very poor respray in the past 10 years where they didn’t strip anything off it: all of the lumps and bumps are still there. It really needs stripping back to bare metal, and that’s probably what it will get.”