Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Classics World

There is a lot of talk, and indeed a lot of concern, within classic car clubs about the aging demographic of their memberships, together with much debate about how they can reverse this trend. The worry seems to be most acute within clubs that cater to older classics from the pre-war and early post-war eras, although in truth it is pretty widespread. Feared consequences of this aging profile include declining membership, a lack of fresh enthusiasm and energy, plus of course potentially not having anybody to take over a cherished classic when the time comes to hang up your own driving gloves. All of these are very valid concerns, but in some ways they are also the inevitable consequences of changing times. For most readers of Classics World, motoring was…

NOT JUST ANY CAR WWW.CARCOVERS.INFO ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW NOT JUST ANY COVER BIG HEALEY STEERING BOXES AND COLUMNS Price: £1869 Have you been scouring the internet searching high and low for ways to restore your Big Healey's steering? If so, you're in luck because A.H. Spares Ltd have new stock of their quality Austin-Healey late steering boxes and steering columns. All are expertly crafted by skilled engineers right here in the United Kingdom. They adhere to strict quality control and are assembled with care to ensure top-notch quality and unparalleled performance – tighter tolerances give a smoother operation due to the use of CAD design, modern materials and CNC machining. A direct replacement for BN4-BJ8, they can also be used on the BN2s and early BN4s. Available in…

Some people say that you are so much busier when you retire than you ever were when you were working. Well, I’m not so sure about that as I'm working hard and I often don’t have enough hours in the day, but I guess they just mean that you are much busier doing the things you want to do rather than the things you need to do. I saw this scenario playing out in real life when I popped in to see Raymond Denvir and his A35 van. The van was there, sitting in the morning sunshine waiting for my arrival, but Ray wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The only sign of life was a clattering and banging and the occasional buzz of a power tool coming from the depths…

This is not a serious headto-head battle where we are hoping to analyse our two chariots in minute detail and decide forensically which is the better car. Such an exercise would quite clearly be pointless, not least because some 35 years separate the two designs and they were each aimed at completely different markets. However, we did think that it would be fascinating to see how the company’s cars evolved after Triumph was rescued from oblivion by the Standard Motor Company in 1944. The Triumph Roadster belongs to Triumph Roadster Club member Peter Mayes, while the Acclaim belongs to me and has featured in CW before. Both of us have driven many miles in our chosen steeds and as long-term owners we must be pretty well entrenched in our motoring…

PART 6 Last time, we signed off our report with the 1965 Morris Minor Traveller’s doors renovated and its woodwork refurbished. The last thing that I did was to drive the car back from restorer Ian Allan’s premises to my home just outside Spalding in South Lincolnshire. On the way back, a slight snag arose in that the driver’s door would not stay shut. That, if you remember, had been an issue during the drive to Ely, but at least this time the safety catch was preventing it from opening fully. I was concerned that fixing the fit might involve further shell surgery, but fortunately the cause turned out to be just a worn bottom hinge which we’d somehow missed checking during the door refurb. Replacement hinges are available at…

Car manufacturers don’t like to waste money fitting unnecessary parts, so why doesn’t our Jetta simply have a high-pressure fuel pump, gravity fed from the tank? What it actually has is a low-pressure pump in the fuel tank, feeding a fuel reservoir which the highpressure pump sits in. Surely one pump would do the job? Well yes, it would, but not with this type of fuel tank. Remember, lesser versions of the Jetta and Golf had a carburettor. On those models the low pressure in-tank pump on our car would be connected straight to that car’s carburettor float chamber – job done. But even if VW had simply replaced that low pressure in-tank pump with a high-pressure unit suitable for fuel injection, it still wouldn’t have worked properly. The reason…

MARQUES & MODELS THE VAUXHALL CAVALIER The Cavalier evolved at a desperate time for Vauxhall. By 1973, following serious problems with the Viva HC, General Motors decreed Vauxhall would no longer export vehicles to Canada, their principal overseas territory. Sales in other countries and at home were also falling, and Vauxhall’s finances were in an unhealthy condition. That year, Car magazine suggested the company should ‘concentrate on trucks – in which field it has an excellent record – and, on the car side, switch to assembling Opels, with or without styling modifications.’ At that time, Vauxhall was working on the Viva HD, a larger replacement for the HC that would compete directly with the Ford Cortina. However, General Motors cancelled the project in favour of an Anglicised version of the…

You really won’t pay much for a Puma. In fact, as little as a grand will be enough if you want a rolling project. If you’re looking for something in top nick, then £3000£4000 is a realistic starting point. When we looked, we saw a 1.7 Millennium with just 55,000 miles under its belt in an attractive yellow at £3795 – and that was from a dealer! More pricey was a limited edition 2002 (51-plate) Thunder with 26,000 miles which was advertised at £7995. Still, at that mileage it would be like travelling back two decades and stepping into a Ford dealership. Price-wise, the highly desirable Racing model ought to be seen as a separate entity; they usually change hands for between £14,000-£20,000.…

FLYING SPUR PROJECT PART 6 If all goes according to plan, this should be the final instalment of our Bentley Continental project. Since my last report, the main issues to be dealt with have been the cracked windscreen and the looming MoT. In some ways these were interlinked. I mentioned last time that the car had developed a crack in the windscreen during a cold snap back in January, and as so often happens it had slowly but surely grown since I first spotted it. With the MoT due to expire on 1st March, it really needed sorting out. And since it was a crack rather than a chip, it couldn’t be repaired, meaning that replacement was the only option. This being effectively a company car, our fleet manager confirmed…

JUST THE WAY THINGS WERE It seems that everyone had a Mini in the 1970s. That was simply the default choice. One of the great things about having friends and colleagues roughly the same age as you is that you remember much the same stuff, and your parents more than likely had a similar car. And for most people in the 1970s, that was a Mini. My dad’s first car was a 1965 Austin Mini Deluxe in Maroon that he bought with redundancy money in 1968 when I was about one. I don’t remember that, but I vaguely recall the Island Blue and White 1966 Morris Cooper 998 which came next, though not as well as the Glacier White 1970 1275GT that replaced it in 1972. Before that came 542…

NEWS NOT JUST ANY CAR WWW.CARCOVERS.INFO ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW NOT JUST ANY COVER The Practical Classics Classic Car & Restoration Show attracted 26,912 attendees to the NEC in Birmingham over the weekend of 22nd-24th March, almost exactly the same number as last year. Over 160 car clubs put on displays, and 13 awards were presented in The National Car Club Awards celebrating the work of the clubs both at the show and throughout the year. Among them, Ray Newell of the Morris Minor Owners Club received the Lifetime Achievement award, whilst the Wigton Motor Club were presented with the coveted Car Club of the Year award. Other winners included the Gay Classic Car Group and Minikits for the Best Stand at Show in the large and small section…

LETTERS EMAIL: CLASSICS.ED@KELSEY.CO.UK FIND US ON FACEBOOK: THE LATEST FEEDS AT WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/CLASSICSMONTHLYMAGAZINE Your family album plea has at last motivated me to write in. For nearly 50 years I have held on to three massive journals that my late father compiled to record his experiences of motoring throughout Europe and the UK from the mid-1950s onwards. Much of the contents are daily diaries of places visited and a wonderful window on how motoring in the 1950s and early 1960s was a major adventure. I was lucky to be a passenger on all his early trips and recall as if it was yesterday sitting between mum and dad on the bench seat of a 1950s Hillman Minx as we made our way across France on long straight stretches of poplar-lined roads,…

LETTERS In the early 1960s my main interest was in two wheeled transport, but family reasons meant I needed to search for a car. With little mechanical knowledge and even less money, a scan of the classified ads in the Kent Messenger produced a possibility. It was a 1955 Fiat 1100 in good condition for £18. Having rung the seller and been assured that the car was well worth a look, I arrived at the address earlier than planned to find him hastily pop riveting a sheet of tin over the large hole in the driver's footwell! My subsequent ownership had some very interesting moments – the rear hinged driver’s door would often open at speed and the failing starter motor meant numerous push starts from passengers. On receiving a…

Over the years we’ve brought you numerous stories of old cars that turned out to be far more rusty than their owners realised initially. Cars without floors, sills made of filler and newspaper, rotten A-posts and nonexistent suspension mounts. So it’s refreshing to present the tale of a late Cortina that didn’t shock and horrify its owner with how badly the ferrous oxide had taken hold. First though, a little background to the model. Codenamed Teresa, the Mk5 – marketed by Ford as the Cortina 80 – was announced in August 1979. Although of similar appearance to the Mk4 model that had been on sale since September of 1976, the Mk5 had a higher roof line that resulted in larger windows all round, and a deeper front valance. The bumpers…

PART 7 We left the Fiat last issue with a section marked out on the inner wheelarch that I was intending to cut out. It had been carefully shaped so as to encompass all the obvious rust whilst not disturbing any more than necessary the spot welds that held the panel to the A-post. I was also not keen on cutting further into the car right up by the top of the wheelarch because the wiring loom runs very close here. Rather than removing that, I moved it away from the area and stuffed strips cut from an old fire blanket between it and the metalwork below. Keeping the repair quite so localised was always going to be optimistic though, because I could see some serious corrosion in the complex…

BUYING GUIDE MG started out as a private holding of William Morris (later Lord Nuffield), and MG’s Managing Director Cecil Kimber enjoyed considerable freedom in how the company was run. As well as some seriously large and luxurious tourers, this helped create a bewildering flow of much smaller models with serious sporting credentials and revvy Wolseley-derived overhead cam four and six-cylinder engines. MG also carved out an enviable motorsport record with cars like the C and P-Type Midget and the K3 Magnette. All of this came to an abrupt end in 1935 when Morris sold the MG Car Company into his Morris Motors empire. From then on Kimber’s independence was severely curtailed, and MG was forced to rationalise in the pursuit of profits. In truth, this change probably saved the…

Saab 96 This is the cover of a Swedish-market brochure issued in August 1964, so the engine fitted is a three-cylinder, two-stroke 841cc unit. Even though we can't read a word of Swedish, we can deduce from the text that Saab are boasting of how the two-stroke format makes their threecylinder engine very compact but as smooth as a four-stroke unit with six cylinders. Or as they say in Trollhätten: 'Saab-motoren är av tvåtaktstyp och har tre cylindrar. Den är kompakt och ettrig men har en lugn ock vibrationsfri gång. Liksom i en 6-cyl. fyrtaktsmotor från vevaxeln tre hraftimpulser per varv.' We couldn't have put it better ourselves. Hillman Super Minx This fold-out brochure from Rootes is undated, but since it is pushing the new Hillman Super Minx, it must…

WB & Sons, January 27 The year started strongly as the Newcastle auction house kicked off proceedings with its usual mix of classic cars, bikes, memorabilia and, of course, a raft of soon-to-becollectable modern car lots. Everything from a 2006 RX8 to a 1991 Pontiac Firebird graced the auction catalogue, all with very modest pre-sale guide prices. Here were just some of the future classic highlights from their 158-lot season opener. 1998 Jaguar XJR V8 – £940 Apart from a complete respray, this supercharged V8 with 90,000 miles showing and 11 Jaguar main dealer service stamps looked like a bargain. It entered the sale without a reserve and sold for no money at all. 1994 Mitsubishi 3000 GT – £3815 A technological marvel that looks sensational and is brutally quick…

FUTURE Classics BUYING GUIDE If you’ve dreamed of owning a 911, this is the time to buy because you can snap up a 996 for the price of a packet of crisps. OK, not quite – but seriously, prices are rock bottom right now with £10,000 being a not too unrealistic starting price for an early one. Alas, like any gift horse there may be no reason to look in its mouth, but it’s still something that you need to enter into having done your research, particularly as there are a number of issues – albeit mostly with the early 3.4-litre examples – that could quickly render a temptingly ‘cheap’ 996 less appealing. Breaking a tradition that singled out the 911 from inception, the 996 became the first model to…

The Continentals use air suspension all round, and one thing we’ve always noticed with our Flying Spur is that it seems a little nose-down in attitude. Although this imparts a rakish stance, I’ve never been sure it’s quite right. Research reveals that the official ride height for the Flying Spur is 405mm front and 404mm rear (both +/- 3mm) measuring from the middle of the wheel centre cap to the centre of the wheelarch. This is measured with the engine running, nobody inside the car and doors, bonnet and bootlid all closed. As expected, our car turned out to be noticeably higher at the rear than the front, with the rear showing 420mm and the front 380mm. Levelling the car up can be done with the laptop, accessing the ride…

GOT A STORY TO SHARE? EMAIL IT TO CLASSICS.ED@KELSEY.CO.UK OR POST IT TO CLASSICS WORLD NEWSDESK, KELSEY MEDIA, THE GRANARY, DOWNS COURT, YALDING HILL, YALDING ME18 6AL Almost three years since the office of Herbert Austin was painstakingly packaged up from inside the Longbridge plant, the British Motor Museum opened a new exhibit – the offices of Herbert Austin and William Morris side by side – on Thursday 7th March. Austin’s office, taken from the Longbridge plant and carefully reconstructed within the museum, shows visitors the office as it was when Austin was running the show, with all his fixtures and fittings. It is displayed alongside Morris’s office, a long-term exhibit of the museum relocated from Cowley in 1994, but now repositioned and refreshed. Together these offices tell the story…

I've been following your Fiat 500 restoration and it has reminded me of my little Giardiniera mentioned in my letter in the March issue. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of that. Looking back now, I'm sure I could have made an effort to repair the underside as it was otherwise in good condition. I enjoyed the article on the Vauxhall Viva GT in April's Classic World too. I owned an HA SL90 and later an HB Viva SL, and I've subsequently written this piece titled Recollections of a Postgraduate Car Enthusiast 1967-72. This follows on from my Confessions of a Teenage Car Enthusiast 1960-1962 that you published in the March issue. After graduation from Edinburgh Dental School I subsequently moved south to Woking in Surrey to join my first…

LETTERS As usual, the April issue of CW had a remarkably varied range of subjects. Sam Skelton’s feature on the Leyland Princess took me back some 47 years to when, after a series of four Landcrabs, my father was given what turned out to be his last company car, a Brooklands Green Princess 2200HL automatic. It was very comfortable for the driver and passengers, with a large, light and airy cabin and a vast boot. It was also very pleasant to drive with the automatic gearbox and power steering, with pretty effortless performance, excellent handling, modest noise levels and very respectable fuel economy. I was still living with my parents at the time, and the car was insured for all of us to drive. An added bonus was that the…

The opening of the County Classics Museum came amid great fanfare. Taunton council agreed to close North Street to allow lots of local classic car lovers to park up in front of the museum, while a large cadre of press arrived to cover the event and crowds of locals cheered while TV’s Richard Hammond cut the ribbon and threw open the door. This marked a new dawn for a building that has been a feature of the Somerset town’s centre since the early 1830s. Until 2019 it was County Stores, a family-run emporium that sold an eclectic array of food, gifts, clothing and jewellery. There was a café, a coffee roaster and a post office on the premises. It was an old-fashioned establishment, and the winds of modern commerce blew…

It’s amazing the bits you can get for old cars. In some cases, MGBs for instance, you can even buy a brand new bodyshell for goodness sake. But at the other end of the scale, some parts just aren’t available, no matter how big your wallet is. Looking at the high pressure fuel pump assembly on our VW Jetta GTI, I had a distinct feeling I was looking at some parts made out of unobtanium. I didn’t think the high pressure pump itself would be a problem, as it is similar to many others fitted to other cars of the period. In fact it looks very similar to the ones on my old Mercedes 500 SEC. Good thing too, as it’s the pump that has failed. A quick internet search…

Nobody who has seen a GordonKeeble, or even a decent photograph of one, would forget it because this was an exceptionally beautiful design. Nobody who has ever driven a GordonKeeble would forget it either because it was superbly fast and agile. How then did this outstandingly good car have such a short and unprofitable production life, so much so that most of us have never seen one, let alone ever driven one? It can't be said that the car was just a flash in the pan, as its origins go back to 1959 when John Gordon and Jim Keeble came together. Keeble had fitted a Chevrolet Corvette 4.6-litre V8 engine to a Peerless chassis for a USAF pilot named Neilson and took the car to show Gordon. The two men…

Endorsed by Steve McQueen no less, motoring pundits universally loved the Puma at launch in 1997, with road testers raving about its New Edge styling and impressive driving dynamics. Built exclusively at Ford’s Niehl plant in Cologne, it didn’t seem to matter that it sat on the humble MkIV Fiesta floorpan. At the time, the diminutive coupé carved out quite a niche. Certainly, while cars like the Vauxhall Astra Coupé, its cute Tigra sibling and Mazda’s MX-3 were pitched at a similar target audience, nothing in the marketplace could hold a candle against the Ford’s driving excellence. With leech-like grip and scalpel sharp steering response, everything felt just so right behind the wheel, while standard-fit traction control kept everything under control should the driver get too carried away and push…

Jaguar XE (2015-present) A prestige compact exec that’s better to drive than an A4 or 3-Series, what’s not to like? Especially when it’s stacked with kit and comes with a Jaguar badge on the grille. But should it be on your modern classic radar? Prices are very reasonable, so why not? Although for ultimate enjoyment it would make sense to buy the V6. Jaguar launched the allalloy XE in 2014 in the hope of finally burying the ghosts of the ill-fated X-TYPE which was ingloriously dropped from the range five years earlier. Using a new platform with excellent chassis dynamics as well as new engines, it certainly made a better fist of things than its predecessor and did much to tempt buyers away from its German rivals. Featuring a similar…