Motoring
CONFESSIONS OF A PETROLHEAD
Enthusiasm is attractive. Most people in the motor trade have it, whether sales staff, mechanics, designers, chief executives, upholsterers or engineers. They’re in the trade because they like it.
One garage owner, from whom I bought a Mark 2 Jaguar before prices went silly (when they did, it was stolen), insisted that he simply had no choice. As a young man, he was buying so many cars for himself that the only way to avoid ruin was to make a business of it.
I recently spent an agreeable Saturday morning with another victim/ enthusiast. Gerry Wadman, proprietor of Sussex Sports Cars, has been indulging his passion for classic cars for 38 years. He’s escaped a few times – to a bank; teaching in Japan; windsurfing in Sussex; running a juice bar – but each time the reek of the oily rag lured him back.
He used to deal in Triumph TR6S in the days when you could buy for £1,000, improve and sell for £1,250, but had to set up properly when he found he had 22 outside his house. His Lewes-based company is a collection of huts that form, as he puts it, a classic car village. He buys, sells, repairs and restores from his workshop, where a £125,000 works Mini rally car with racing pedigree currently awaits fettling.
In an adjacent shed Steve Camp runs The Trimming Centre, cheerfully undertaking the laborious business of interior trimming, hoods and sunroofs (he has worldwide rights to Webasto). I watched him work on one of the most sensuous of muscle-cars, a gleaming Jensen Interceptor.
In another shed, 31-year-old Sam Howard (an Oldie reader, via his father) runs howdetailed.co.uk, a kind of super-valeting service preparing cars for show or sale. When I visited, he was just finishing 60 hours of detailing work on a 1936 Alvis Speed 25, which included removing and invisibly repairing a wing.
The show shed is decorated with a couple of old petrol pumps advertising fuel at five shillings fourpence halfpenny (27p) a gallon, and a multitude of antique metal signs, wheels, car radios, leather suitcases, lamps and tools. The office, with tea and coffee – essentials of the trade – continuously available, is lined not with photos of naked women but with rows of car books and magazines. One of the chairs is a converted car seat. The whole place is both a refuge and an opportunity for enthusiasts.
People came and went, drank coffee, sat in the cars or on the bench in the sun, talking wheels. There were strangers out window-shopping, friends who were sometime customers and customers on the way to becoming friends. A young teacher brought her convertible Morris Minor in for evaluation and stayed to discuss her PHD plans and what should be done with her father’s Mark VI Bentley. A man brought his MGB in for evaluation and almost walked away with a Sunbeam Alpine. Just about every car in the showroom had a story behind it. Among my favourites were the 1969 MGB GT for £13,950 (I prefer the Pininfarina-designed GT to the more popular roadster) or, the bargain of the bunch, the 2005 MG TF – 36,000 miles, £2,750. But the one I’d have really liked to take home – having an incurable weakness for them – was the 1958 soft-top Series 2 Land Rover at £7,950.
Although the days of £1,000 TR6S are gone and everything is more expensive and more regulated, there’s a buoyant market for good cars with good provenance. Gerry does it because he loves it – the best reason for doing anything.
The best reason for buying a car, too. Could I possibly justify owning two Land Rovers?