ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
The only certainty in life is death. Don’t mean to be lugubrious but I’m writing this on the sixth anniversary of my old father’s expiry. I only mention this because it’s all his fault I’m involved in this classic car lark at all. ‘Mad Mike’, as we used to call him, was fiercely intelligent, incredibly driven, and hugely enthusiastic – I take after my mother. He really was a Renaissance Man, with a passion for delivering babies (obstetrics was his thing), music, calligraphy, wine, gardening and interesting cars.
Being a pupil at a conservative public school, where the emphasis was on maths, science, rugby, cricket and discipline for the scions of the country’s Captains of Industry, meant that I didn’t really fit in. Father used to try to help me with my maths, science and French homework but it all ended in shouty exasperation. Yet he inadvertently allowed me to learn a lot more than that same old, same old. His marvellous study/surgery was stuffed full of instruments of torture, a good few body parts in jars, plus his TEAC turntable and massive Wharfedale speakers. An entire wall was crammed with car magazines dating back to the early 1950s, including Motor Sport, Road & Track, Car and Driver, The Motor and Automobile Quarterly.
So, instead of maths homework I’d select a few tomes at random and read them from cover to cover. From Laguna Seca to Silverstone, Monza to the Nürburgring and Monaco, this world of exciting cars was completely beyond my wildest dreams, living in a small town on the tip of the African continent. Bentleys, Ferraris and Astons were not just exotic – they were unicorns. I loved the actual magazines themselves as they brought the vast panoply of automotive excitement directly to me in my pyjamas. The cars, the features, the writing, the ads, the thrills and exuberance all just transported me away.
I’ve managed to save the one magazine that had the greatest impact and here it is on my desk: the September 1967 issue of Road & Track, priced at 60 cents. The cover feature was the Ferrari 275 GTS/4 NART, headlined as ‘The most satisfying sports car in the world’. Even though it was printed in black and white, the young dude in the swept-back Ray Bans driving the open Ferrari was the epitome of cool.
Any thought of a teenager in South Africa being a motoring journalist was simply not in the realms of possibility. It was like being of the Right Stuff and being an astronaut at Cape Canaveral – unless your name is Elon Musk. So father, being a great medicine man, an average car restorer and a lousy maths teacher, furnished me with the left-field education I didn’t even know I was receiving. Just wish he’d turned that bloody Beethoven down a bit. Or, even worse, the Abba!
And here we are, 6000 miles north and with Octane’s 218th issue about to hit the presses. That NART Spider? Yes, I finally drove one, thanks to reader Clive Beecham who casually tossed me his keys and let me loose. ‘One small step…’ and all that. What have I learnt on my personal journey? To embrace change. The classic car world offers almost limitless opportunities to satiate our passion and enthusiasm. When I was young and stupid my fixation was MORE POWER!
With my Porsche 356 I drove Tony Standen, Barry Curtis and Andy Prill mad in the search for ever more horsepower. Those legendary specialists managed to boost my car’s original 75bhp to 125.7bhp (note the all-important 0.7!) thanks to a ridiculously highlift cam and massive 44mm Weber fuel buckets. Maybe I did then have one of the quickest 356s on the road, but it had also become recalcitrant, obnoxious and snatchy unless on full throttle, when it would sing magnificently.
The 15-year affair I’m having with my Jaguar XK140 is all change. I’m focused on refining the old lorry so it’s relaxed and well-behaved in city traffic as well as quiet and swift on the motorways. So the cams are a mild XJ6 grind on the advice of experienced HWM racer Kirk Rylands, who points out that Jaguar knew what it was doing and so the D-type cam ‘hop-up’ is nonsense unless you keep the revs above four thou’. I rarely do. Carbs are stock and the twin exhausts are quiet and, with the XK mill stretched to 3.8 litres and balanced like a Swiss watch, its sweet spot is a sonorous but illegal 100mph.
Change? This month’s cover feature is a case in point. Some years ago I tested a Batmobile and RS at Spa, where it was clear that the Porsche was the superior weapon, being faster and more immediate on the circuit. Now? I’d want the big BMW, which is almost as responsive but has all-important added civility. Am I maturing? No, just becoming less stupid, realising that in life we must enjoy classics often, not just on occasion. How many summers do you reckon you have left?
‘I HAD ONE OF THE QUICKEST 356S, BUT IT WAS ALSO RECALCITRANT, OBNOXIOUS AND SNATCHY’