Buckley’s market matters
I’ve just rescued the hardtop for the Mercedes SL280 from my late father-in-law’s garage, not without a good amount of hassle and another pair of hands.
Hardtops are a liability when not attached to cars and, although an SL with a lid is not much use to anyone, I decided the best thing would be to reunite it with the car. The next job is getting the thing advertised and sold along with the Golf GTI and the Mercedes CLK, which have been replaced by the wondrous Audi A2, but more about that elsewhere soon.
I’m getting stuff together for a potential assault on Beaulieu’s Spring Autojumble, but I may lose the will and let my friend Simon Martin take some bits and bobs over to The Classic Car Boot Sale at King’s Cross instead: I’ve got ‘retired’ road signs, a Shell oil barrel, old numberplates, a few books, board games, a set of Rolls-royce Camargue lambswool rugs and maybe a Volvo 240 door, if that’s not too specialised.
A mate who keeps a trailer at my barn was off to look at a Reliant Scimitar the other day. He had got himself all tweaked up about it, only to discover it was the classic mouldy, damp old thing where everything – including the badges and window rubbers – had got a coat of paint in its most recent blow-over. Shame, because it was an SE5 with the better interior, which are few and far between.
The GTE, in all its forms, is definitely a practical classic of the ’70s, but if you had to choose one from the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’80s, what would it be? I think the Bentley MKVI and R-type are probably the oldest usable ’40s cars, and I don’t believe there is anything to touch them at the price. Morris Minors and Volvo Amazons speak for themselves as ’50s and ’60s candidates because you still see them regularly; they are also simple, improvable and you can get all the bits.
For the ’80s I’d have to say the Mercedes W123 or the BMW E30 in their more humble forms, but I seriously doubt that anything from either camp built in the past 20 years will ever make the cut if what I was told the other day is correct. There is, apparently, a particular V10 engine from the Bavarians that suffers from an issue so basic (insufficient oil feed to the crank) that even British Leyland would have blushed at the very idea – and would, rightly, have been crucified by the press. Yet nobody seems to really talk about it.
Meanwhile, in Swansea, the local Mercedes main dealer must have cringed on the day recently when a 40-year-old 200 saloon went through its ticket with no advisories, whereas the proud owner of a three-year-old C-class was presented a fail thanks to a broken front spring. While writing my NSU Ro80 book, I can see how the ingenuity and preoccupation with quality demonstrated by the Germans was, rightly, the envy of the world in a disciplined, proud industry. Today, I’m not so sure.