Bowling along to Bicester and back
of the Reverend Adam Gompertz here at Octane –see in issue 198 for his full back-story – so, when he asked if I’d take part in some filming for his online REVS project with my Model T, I was only too happy to accept.
REVS is not a churchy thing, as such, but it aims to help ‘restore’ people in the same way that we restore cars, by celebrating our mutual love of interesting machinery. Having started as a series of small-scale car meets, it’s migrated online and now boasts some 5700 members (search for REVS-Limiter on Facebook). The plan was for the owners of an assortment of cars – from pre-war Aston International to the latest Polestar 2 – to be filmed on the test track at Bicester Heritage and talk a little about their machines.
My filming slot was scheduled for 2pm, which meant I had plenty of time to take the backroads from where my ‘T’ is garaged in Worcestershire. The ‘T’ is happiest at about 35mph, so I needed to avoid A-roads and stick to country lanes, and the route I came up with equated to about 2hrs 30min of driving on minor roads linking a score of tiny villages. It’s a journey that would otherwise have taken an hour in a modern car – but that’s all part of the pleasure of vintage car ownership. Imagine the road surface made up of dusty, compacted stones instead of tarmac, and you could be driving through an England of 90 years ago. We’re so lucky to have big swathes of countryside that remain largely unspoilt.
The ‘T’ ran like one of Mr Singer’s proverbial sewing machines and I arrived at Bicester well before 2pm – only to discover that, due to rain forecast in the afternoon, the video crew had pulled forward their timings and knocked off at lunchtime. Ah well. At least I got to meet up with some old friends, including car designer and hot rod fan Peter Stevens, John Housego and Richard Rimmer (below).
The return journey wasn’t quite so pleasant due to a persistent and forceful drizzle, which became increasingly needle-like as I bowled along in the windscreenless ‘T’. After a few miles, I pulled over and dug an oily T-shirt out of my running-board toolbox (a repurposed beer crate) and wrapped it around my face, bandit-style. It got me home with only a mild case of hypothermia.
Jobs to tackle now include replacing the very tired radiator, which has developed a slight but persistent leak. Not wanting to fit a new core, which would look out of place on such a ‘patinated’ vehicle, I persuaded Richard Rimmer to sell me a good secondhand rad from his parts stock at The T Service (www. tservice.co.uk). I also need to fix my Series I Land Rover and get the Alvis 12/50 back on the road, which I’ve hardly driven since buying it more than a year ago. No rest for the wicked – but I’m sure the good Rev will forgive me.