My favourite photograph by Drew Pritchard
Salvage Hunters star Drew, 50, digs out a print from his parents’ albums that brings back memories of family outings and vintage motor racing
Here you see me in the early 80s at Oulton Park Circuit in Cheshire, which was about an hour’s drive away from my childhood home.
It’s a tricky one, but I think I am 13 years old at this point. I’m wearing this awful T-shirt my mother got me, which I hated, with a pair of trousers which, briefly at the time, were in fashion, with zips all over them and elasticated ankles!
And bizarrely, I’m wearing professional boxer’s boots. I’ve got no idea why. I remember I really wanted them and my mum relented and went to the local sports shop and bought me a pair at great expense. I recall them being really uncomfortable and just ridiculous.
Back then, I was in school and hating it, absolutely detesting it. I did not want to be there. I always thought all the teachers were wasting my time. I didn’t need to know about those oxbow lakes, physics or chemistry. I still don’t, in fact.
I was right all along! It was an utterly pointless waste of my time.
At that age, all I was interested in was music and old cars. I was into all sorts of different stuff, new wave, ska, hip hop, all sorts of new genres that were coming through at that time.
I was brought up around vintage cars and car racing, so this was a great day out for us all – and one of the very rare family days we had together. We couldn’t get many days off together because my parents are self employed. It was always a treat for us all to go out on those days and we enjoyed it a lot. We would have been with a lot of my father’s other friends and family as a big group of us to look at the old cars.
That car I’m standing next to was probably worth six or seven thousand pounds. Now, the same model would be worth probably £250,000. It’s called an AC Cobra and they’re incredibly valuable historic cars. I was always excited if we were going to see vintage motor racing and I’ve gone on to race vintage classic cars myself, so it’s still as exciting for me now as it was then.
People don’t really have photo albums any more. Everyone has everything on their phone or their computer, whereas before you would say, “Stand there”, take the photograph, take the film home, take it to Boots the next day and wait a week. It would eventually come back and you got to see how it actually turned out. It was a very long-winded process. My parents had thousands of photographs at home, so when I was digging out pictures of me with old cars for my book, I found this one.