Buckley’s market matters
I recently popped in to Purley Road Garage to collect the ignition amplifier from the pre-he XJ-S that I had rather cockily been swanning about in for a week of commuting to my office/ barn. Despite its scabby silver paintjob the Jag seemed to be getting better every time I drove it, until suddenly it wasn’t… and I had a dead XJ-S on my driveway.
A solution is in hand and, really, what else should I have expected from a 40-plus-year-old Jaguar from the BL period?
I should be thankful, I suppose, that I don’t own a Land Rover Freelander – at least according to Mike Connor at Purley Road. I encountered him fiddling with the various plastic covers under the bonnet of the same, cursing the fact that: “Everything that goes wrong with the thing costs £500.” Or £600 in the case of just one of the headlights. All because the main beam doesn’t work. It makes XJ-S motoring look cheap; even at 15mpg it will go a long way on £600-worth of jungle juice.
On the floor of Connor’s workshop was a beautiful Ford 289cu in V8 he had just rebuilt and I wondered how they ever got them to fit in the Sunbeam Alpine/tiger. With great difficulty: Mike reminded me that you have to remove the rear plugs through the bulkhead. But even that was preferable, he reckoned, to working on a Freelander.
In Swansea, my friend Mark Cosovich of W123 World has had a visit from a customer in a Tesla. It was a cold day, but even sitting inside the car she was all wrapped up in a big jumper and a large overcoat. Why? Because apparently if she puts the heater on the climate-saving, polar-bearhugging wonder-machine runs out of range. There’s progress for you.
I’ve also been watching a lovely interview with Nick Mason about his 40-year relationship with his 250GTO: “I get asked probably three times a month if I’d sell it, which is a reflection of the fact that I’m now one of the poorer GTO owners. I was the rich kid when I got it and now I’m the sad old sausage! But it’s part of me, part of my life. I’d rather be the bloke who owns a GTO than the bloke that sold one.” Well said.