My history. 80's/90's hatches, RSs, 911s and a few bikes
Discussion
In a bid to bid stay out of the pub a bit more this year and having just finished all of the Breaking Bad series, I figured I’d post some pics of the cars I’ve owned over the years. I passed my test in Jan 1995 not long after I’d turned 17. I’m now 37. Wow, that went quick.
Due to the pics spanning 20 years the early part of the thread will be pics of polaroid pics, which in some cases aren’t great quality and also make the cars look a little strange.
I’ll probably do things in instalments, mainly due to photo bucket being slower than some of the XR3i Convertibles I’ve owned. I’ll write any little tales I can remember about the cars as I go. Feel free to just look at the pics though.
I’ll just say a quick few words about me (in my defence) as some of my cars and mods could be deemed as chavvy. I wasn’t a chav, I was a good kid, but looking back I did seem to have an infatuation with dodgy aftermarket wheels.
Car obsessed from the minute I knew what cars were, I couldn’t wait to grow up and drive some.
I started working after school at night, as soon as I turned 16. I used to pack Crispy Pancakes at Findus.
I would pass the time of my bus ride to work by reading Fast Car, Max Power (I know, I know) and Performance Ford, etc.
As soon as I turned 17 I began learning to drive.
My dad had been a mechanic all his life usually with his own garage and he was a massive petrol head, so that’s where my love of cars came from. We weren’t well off though and I bought everything I owned by myself just about. I wasn’t spoilt, well not in the monetary way, but as you read on it becomes apparent I maybe was a bit spoilt in a garage services kind of way. Of which I'm very grateful to my old man.
Right to the cars…
This first car was actually my 3rd. It’s a Nova 1.3SR I purchased about 6 months after passing my test. I owned 2 Novas before that. Both silver hatches with ginger interiors. The first was a 1 litre I used to learn to drive in, the second a 1.2 as it was a bit nippier than the 1.0 and had less holes in the doors. The first one had a checked ginger interior, the second had a striped ginger velour interior. Nobody could say I didn’t like to mix things up a bit.
I loved that little Nova. It had a dash with way more gauges than I’d seen before, including an oil pressure gauge. Cool. I used to love polishing its little flarey wheel arches before slapping half a gallon of back to black on its many acres of plastic trim. I had great fun bombing about in this little car using countless gallons of 70p per litre 4 star. Remember that!?
After many brake pads, tyres and a head gasket later, a few months had passed and I had my all important 1 years No claims bonus. Yippee. What could I buy?
Well, this. Cavalier SRi130
I have no pictures of it in one piece. It lasted 2 weeks before I did this to it.
I blame Max Power for this. No I don’t, I blame only myself obviously and I’m not proud. Let’s just say jumping out of a 70bhp Nova into a 130BHP Cavalier was a bit of a learning curve. I was still a kid basically.
The story for anyone who’s interested was this…
Max Power used to do a feature called Cruise Patrol, where they’d visit a cruise somewhere, in a different town each month, usually late at night.
This one month they announced they’d be coming to Sunderland Docks. Now for anyone that doesn’t know, Sunderland Docks in the 90’s was synonymous with car theft, boy racing and general toe-rags. I’d never been there, as I’d heard all about it and it didn’t appeal, plus I lived 25 miles north. But, Max Power were coming, there was going to be a big turn out and everyone I knew was going to be heading down. Who in their right mind could miss such a moments occasion.
So a couple of days before I casually mentioned to my parents that I was off to a cruise in Sunderland on Friday night. “Oh no you’re not, It’s full of toe-rags, boy racers and there’ll be an accident”. “Yeah, yeah It’ll be fine says I”, but they said no. Now I was 18 and my own person, but I did live under their roof, so had to respect their wishes right?
So imagine their surprise when I rang them from South Tyneside Hospital at 2am on the night of the cruise to say I’d crashed the car. I had told them I was just stopping at a mates house that night. Uh-oh, much grovelling required after that.
Basically I was following a line of cars but had dropped back a bit. Un be-known to me there was a small roundabout ahead. I couldn’t see it due to roadworks which for some reason meant all the street lights were out. So I put my foot down to catch the taillights of the car up the road. Of course he’d been over the roundabout hadn’t he. I barely had time to brake when it came into view and we smashed onto it, hitting the lamppost in the middle and turning onto our side. We (me and 3 mates) had to climb out of the sunroof.
We were mostly ok just bashed and cut etc. Just then all the cars came back and people were saying “Torch it mate, torch it”. I think it was hard for them to grasp the idea that I was in fact the owner, not a car thief. Ah, Sunderland.
The council billed me £1525 (I’ll never forget that figure) for a new lamp, etc. Me and my dad went to a solicitor but she said “Well even if you were only doing the speed limit, that is still to fast on an un-lit road you don’t know”. Great. So my good old dad sent a letter to the council saying “If your lampposts were lit up, my son wouldn’t have crashed” and we enclosed a bill for for my written off car, of about the same value. We received a response saying it was in the hands of their legal department, but we never heard from them again. I thought about pushing for a claim for my car but my dad said “Don’t push your luck son”. He was probably right.
I never did sneak off again, or go to Sunderland for a drive.
So I kept my NCD but had no car, hence I had to start again. Armed with £400 borrowed from my parents, I bought a Mk4 Escort off a mate. It was Burgundy with RS kit, wheels and Ford Motorsport written in white. No pics thankfully. It wasn’t even the CVH motor, it had the old OHV engine. I was promptly named “Pushrod puff” or “Motor-smoke” by my mates as it was a bit smokey and wheezy.
A month or two passed and I was able to buy something half decent again. What did I buy?
Well given my massive success with the last Cav, I bought another.
This one lasted a couple of months before I ran a cow over.
The farmers fence had collapsed so he was liable. I took the car to a local high end bodyshop. They quoted £1000 to repair it. Amazingly, as the car wasn’t worth much more, they agreed to repair it. Even more amazingly they sent a cheque directly to me. My dads mate then fixed the car for £100. Result.
So what did I buy with the £900 change? Well, what any 90’s 18 year old petrol head would, of course. A big amp and the biggest sub that would fit in my boot. I also bought my girlfriend an Amethyst ring. Real Amethyst! None of this diamond malarkey. Oh I knew how to roll back then! 
One last thing, I obviously had to complete a claims form for the farmers insurance company. this involved before and after sketches of the incident. The first was a view from above of the cow about to clatter into the side of my wing with a comment from me saying “Cow runs out of trees into my car”. The 2nd was the view from above of the damaged car and the cow running off. The caption said “Cow runs off unhurt apart from slight limp”. This amused a few people even though I was just giving an accurate description of the event. I kept a copy for a few years though.
A couple of months passed and I was missing the fun factor of a hatchback. I decided I needed another and only one type would do. A 205GTi 1.9.
As it happens when I was buying the 2nd Cav, the sellers mate turned up in a 1.9GTi. We got chatting and he worked at the body shop mentioned above. He’d stripped the car and repainted it in it’s original gloss black. it was like glass. Stunning. It even had the optional rear wing and reflective rear strip on tailgate. So after a few weeks of pestering him he agreed to sell it to me.
Now before I bought the car the lad brought it round to my dads garage for inspection. My dad said “The clutch is worn son and they’re a pig to do”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I. “Well I’m not touching it when it goes.” says dad.
I bought it anyway and a few weeks later a clutch spring fell out of the clutch and wedged between the pressure plate and the flywheel. Que an argument with my dad after he said “I told you so”, which ended in me saying “Fine I’ll ring Mr Clutch”. I rang them to be told “Nah we don’t touch those mate, they’re a pig to do, try the main dealer”. So once I’d rang the main dealer and come around after fainting, much grovelling was in order and my old man took pity on me and did the clutch. Phew!
Apart from the clutch going though it was flippin’ awesome. I gave it hell every time I drive it too. I don’t know how it survived.
So by now I was still 18 and had left the heady heights of crispy pancake packing behind. I was now working as a glamorous assistant at my local Ford dealer parts counter.
Now one day, me and some mates were sitting down at our usual haunt, at the seafront near Whitley Bay, when a lad we knew from the next town drove past, but he wasn’t in his dodgy Nova with Cav Sri engine in. He was now in a dodgy Escort convertible, but this thing looked cool in the summer sun and to top it off his rear passengers weren’t sitting on the rear seats, oh no, they were sitting on the rear shelf with their feet on the rear seats. Cooool! Who wouldn’t be convinced that this was the best way to travel ever. It was like Miami Vice but in real life and I thought “Wait a minute! That could be me!”
So I bought this.
XR3I Convertible. My dad had said before I bought it “They are flat as a pancake, as they weigh a ton and the roof always leaks, avoid them”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I.
Now this thing was flat with a capital F. It couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding but I enjoyed the roof down cruising. It wasn’t so fun when it rained and both front corners of the roof leaked, resulting in the driver getting a wet right leg and the passenger a wet left leg.
I must admit too that it probably looked better when I got it than after I’d fitted the black hood and clear indicators. You live and learn. Well, I do further on anyway.
So after a month or two I was really missing the speed of the 205. Round about then a workmate at the Ford dealers took me for a spin in his tuned S2 RS Turbo. It was a real mint thing. Immaculate, pampered and bloody quick. I was converted and needed Boost in my life!
Now I didn’t have “mint” money, so what did I buy to emulate this stunning car I had been taken out in?
This of course-
A rather rough S2 RS Turbo with only 13 former keepers, yes only 13. This was 1997 and the car was 1988 so thats a mere one and a half owners a year. What could possibly go wrong?
My dad went to view it with me and said “Son it’s a dog. You can still smell the paint it’s so fresh. There is something not right about that car”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine”, says I. Besides I didn’t have the money for a minter.
Well by this time I’d been made redundant from Ford as they were quiet. The place was like a revolving door for staff. My dad had warned me before I went. I was now van driving for a living.
Anyway, this one day I’m driving along in the van and my boss rings me. “Mark there's a guy here who wants a word with you about your car”. “Ok stick him on” I said.
The guy comes on and says “Hi there, I used to own a black RS Turbo with that reg on it. It was stolen from me and put through a shop window in North Shields during a ram-raid. It burst into flames and there was nothing left. The last time I seen it it was a burnt out shell on it’s way to the scrapyard on a low-loader. That car outside can not be the car it says it is”.
Ouch! Not good.
After me explaining that I had bought it in good faith after saving up and also HPI’ing it (of which it was clear!) he agreed not to say anything to anyone, despite casually mentioning that some of his mates were in the Police force.
So anyway, I can’t say I was surprised then, when a few weeks later I pulled up outside the pub to have a game of pool and a pint, only to see a police van pull up behind me.
Policeman says “Do you know the history of this car?” I say “Erm, no”. He says “Well it’s on our list to be seized”.
Oh dear. After a chat he said “You seem like a decent lad and it’s registered to you so I’ll let you drive it home if you present it at your local station next week to inspected”. “Ok” says I.
The day came and my dad, reluctant to get involved, took it round as I was working. He received a phone call from the inspector after a few hours. He said “Well we don’t think this car is what it says it is, but at the same time we can’t say what it is or was, so you can have it back”. Wow! How lucky.
I promptly put it up for sale but being honest I was telling any prospective buyers what had happened. Needless to say it didn’t sell. So I ended up swapping it for the car below.
Rover 216GTI
The least GTi-like GTi I’ve ever been in. My mate worked at a garage and convinced the salesman to do a swap. On the day I got the call from my mate to say “bring it down” I was meant to be going on my first foreign holiday to Tenerife with my girlfriend and her parents. You know, the posh one with the amethyst ring.
I dashed down to the dealers though, to strike while the iron was hot and did the swap. Now at this point I could have headed home and made it to my girlfriends with time to spare, but wait! I have bigger problems. This Rover of mine has no stereo. That just won’t do. So me and my mate set about fitting the stereo from the RS. All went well until I tried to start the car. It span over but wouldn’t fire up. I ended up ringing my old man and he said “There’s a fuel cut-off switch behind the stereo”. He was right. Flicked the switch and it started. What a strange place for a cut off switch.
So I got home, ditched the new sports mobile and arrived at my lasses half an hour late. No harm done and an endearing way to start the holiday with the in-laws.
Well after the sun, sea and not much sex, due to sharing the same apartment as her parents I returned home and enjoyed the Rover. Well I say enjoyed, it was more a case of tolerating it and being grateful to see the back of the RS.
The Rover had the Honda motor which wasn’t bad but it lacked anything particularly special. It also had some strange badly carpeted door cards. Now I don’t mean acoustic cloth carpeted door cards. I mean Homes Under The Hammer rental flat style, brown carpeted door cards. What on earth had happened to those was anyones guess.
So I needed a change, but where could I go from this lull. What would make me feel like the hip-happening young man I really was?
Another XR3i convertible of course.
This was a nice thing I bought locally. A bit livelier than the first one but still no ball of fire. I lowered it a bit more and removed the silly number plates.
It leaked just like the other one but hey it was a convertible. That’s all that mattered. Actually it wasn’t. Speed mattered, so I quickly got bored again.
I decided to get rid after a couple of months, mainly as we’d had a lot of rain and the interior was starting to smell a tad foisty.
The final thing came when I dropped my girlfriends parents (yes the same ones) off at a local pub for a night out.
As her dad got out of the passenger seat he said “Hey! That seat’s wet!”. Me “Hmm, yes. It does that sometimes”. He had a big dark patch on the arse of his jeans. He told me the next day, him and my girlfriends mum had to go round in tandem all night with her following him to hide his wet patch.
So what could I get after the convertible? Something totally different that I hadn’t had? Of course not.
Another RS Turbo.
This time I did it properly. The car was mint having been fully restored. I px’d the cab. It was a private sale. A guy who worked with my mate Ralf.
All was well with this one for a while. Until one day I decided to get it on the rollers, you know, just to check the thing was making proper power. The tuners rang me to say it’s making 150-odd BHP, which is fine.
I took the car home and thought “I have some spare cash left why don’t I have it chipped?”.
My dad, that knowledgeable guy that I had kept ignoring up til now said “Leave it alone. You fiddle with them and they blow up.” “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I.
Oh how I laughed as those words circled around in my head a few weeks later as I was propping up the smouldering bonnet at the side of the road, while my mate Craig (the mate who’d got me the Rover, but I’d forgiven him by now) put out the flames with an extinguisher.
I’d just got it back from the tuners and basically they’d trapped the little air pipe that goes to the ecu to tell it when the car is on boost. Because no air was getting through, the ecu wasn’t adding more fuel so it just went bang.
After a pricey rebuild, it still never ran great, with a massive flat spot just before the boost came in so I decided to get rid.
By now I’d have been 21 and the Jap import thing was getting big. It would have been 1998/9. A local garage specialised in them so I traded the RS in for a rip-off price, as is the way with dealers, and bought this.
Toyota MR2 Turbo.
This car was great. Low slung seats, high transmission tunnel (that isn’t actually the transmission tunnel) and most of all pop-up-headlights. I turned the boost up a bit (nope, I still hadn’t learnt!), fitted some over the top Jap exhaust called a HKS Hyper medallion or something bonkers like that and new Momo wheels.
All was good for a few months but then my mate Ralf said one day “We are 21 and can do our direct access. Do that you can jump on anything”.
Now I’d had field bikes from the age of 7 thanks to my dad who used to race bikes with my uncle, but I’d given up on road bikes at 17 after looking into it and my parents not being keen.
Me and Ralf did our direct access together which was fun. Especially the time he joined onto the A1 with his lefthand indicator on instead of right. I thought the instructor was going to have a seizure. “We all just heard “INDICATOR! INDICATOR!” through our headsets.
We both passed anyway but I stuck with the MR2 for a little while. Ralf already had his bike before he passed. A VFR400 NC30. Like a mini super bike with the single sided swing arm etc. After a couple of months he said he was buying a brand new GSXR750 so I said ok I’ll have the VFR.
So the MR2 went in favour of the VFR and a MK1 Golf convertible. Yep, living the dream again!
Anyway, I’ll have to leave it there for tonight I think. I’ll continue another day if anyone is reading. We are almost up to digital photos too.
I'd just like to add that some of the above purchases were silly, but I was a young lad with a hunger for cars, so despite all the best advice I sometimes made some bad choices. Read on though to see that I actually do eventually realise my dad does in fact know what he's on about and that I should have listened to him a lot sooner.
Due to the pics spanning 20 years the early part of the thread will be pics of polaroid pics, which in some cases aren’t great quality and also make the cars look a little strange.
I’ll probably do things in instalments, mainly due to photo bucket being slower than some of the XR3i Convertibles I’ve owned. I’ll write any little tales I can remember about the cars as I go. Feel free to just look at the pics though.
I’ll just say a quick few words about me (in my defence) as some of my cars and mods could be deemed as chavvy. I wasn’t a chav, I was a good kid, but looking back I did seem to have an infatuation with dodgy aftermarket wheels.
Car obsessed from the minute I knew what cars were, I couldn’t wait to grow up and drive some.
I started working after school at night, as soon as I turned 16. I used to pack Crispy Pancakes at Findus.
I would pass the time of my bus ride to work by reading Fast Car, Max Power (I know, I know) and Performance Ford, etc.
As soon as I turned 17 I began learning to drive.
My dad had been a mechanic all his life usually with his own garage and he was a massive petrol head, so that’s where my love of cars came from. We weren’t well off though and I bought everything I owned by myself just about. I wasn’t spoilt, well not in the monetary way, but as you read on it becomes apparent I maybe was a bit spoilt in a garage services kind of way. Of which I'm very grateful to my old man.
Right to the cars…
This first car was actually my 3rd. It’s a Nova 1.3SR I purchased about 6 months after passing my test. I owned 2 Novas before that. Both silver hatches with ginger interiors. The first was a 1 litre I used to learn to drive in, the second a 1.2 as it was a bit nippier than the 1.0 and had less holes in the doors. The first one had a checked ginger interior, the second had a striped ginger velour interior. Nobody could say I didn’t like to mix things up a bit.
I loved that little Nova. It had a dash with way more gauges than I’d seen before, including an oil pressure gauge. Cool. I used to love polishing its little flarey wheel arches before slapping half a gallon of back to black on its many acres of plastic trim. I had great fun bombing about in this little car using countless gallons of 70p per litre 4 star. Remember that!?
After many brake pads, tyres and a head gasket later, a few months had passed and I had my all important 1 years No claims bonus. Yippee. What could I buy?
Well, this. Cavalier SRi130
I have no pictures of it in one piece. It lasted 2 weeks before I did this to it.
I blame Max Power for this.
No I don’t, I blame only myself obviously and I’m not proud. Let’s just say jumping out of a 70bhp Nova into a 130BHP Cavalier was a bit of a learning curve. I was still a kid basically.The story for anyone who’s interested was this…
Max Power used to do a feature called Cruise Patrol, where they’d visit a cruise somewhere, in a different town each month, usually late at night.
This one month they announced they’d be coming to Sunderland Docks. Now for anyone that doesn’t know, Sunderland Docks in the 90’s was synonymous with car theft, boy racing and general toe-rags. I’d never been there, as I’d heard all about it and it didn’t appeal, plus I lived 25 miles north. But, Max Power were coming, there was going to be a big turn out and everyone I knew was going to be heading down. Who in their right mind could miss such a moments occasion.
So a couple of days before I casually mentioned to my parents that I was off to a cruise in Sunderland on Friday night. “Oh no you’re not, It’s full of toe-rags, boy racers and there’ll be an accident”. “Yeah, yeah It’ll be fine says I”, but they said no. Now I was 18 and my own person, but I did live under their roof, so had to respect their wishes right?
So imagine their surprise when I rang them from South Tyneside Hospital at 2am on the night of the cruise to say I’d crashed the car. I had told them I was just stopping at a mates house that night. Uh-oh, much grovelling required after that.
Basically I was following a line of cars but had dropped back a bit. Un be-known to me there was a small roundabout ahead. I couldn’t see it due to roadworks which for some reason meant all the street lights were out. So I put my foot down to catch the taillights of the car up the road. Of course he’d been over the roundabout hadn’t he. I barely had time to brake when it came into view and we smashed onto it, hitting the lamppost in the middle and turning onto our side. We (me and 3 mates) had to climb out of the sunroof.
We were mostly ok just bashed and cut etc. Just then all the cars came back and people were saying “Torch it mate, torch it”. I think it was hard for them to grasp the idea that I was in fact the owner, not a car thief.
Ah, Sunderland.The council billed me £1525 (I’ll never forget that figure) for a new lamp, etc. Me and my dad went to a solicitor but she said “Well even if you were only doing the speed limit, that is still to fast on an un-lit road you don’t know”. Great. So my good old dad sent a letter to the council saying “If your lampposts were lit up, my son wouldn’t have crashed” and we enclosed a bill for for my written off car, of about the same value. We received a response saying it was in the hands of their legal department, but we never heard from them again. I thought about pushing for a claim for my car but my dad said “Don’t push your luck son”. He was probably right.
I never did sneak off again, or go to Sunderland for a drive.
So I kept my NCD but had no car, hence I had to start again. Armed with £400 borrowed from my parents, I bought a Mk4 Escort off a mate. It was Burgundy with RS kit, wheels and Ford Motorsport written in white. No pics thankfully. It wasn’t even the CVH motor, it had the old OHV engine. I was promptly named “Pushrod puff” or “Motor-smoke” by my mates as it was a bit smokey and wheezy.
A month or two passed and I was able to buy something half decent again. What did I buy?
Well given my massive success with the last Cav, I bought another.
This one lasted a couple of months before I ran a cow over.
The farmers fence had collapsed so he was liable. I took the car to a local high end bodyshop. They quoted £1000 to repair it. Amazingly, as the car wasn’t worth much more, they agreed to repair it. Even more amazingly they sent a cheque directly to me. My dads mate then fixed the car for £100. Result.
So what did I buy with the £900 change? Well, what any 90’s 18 year old petrol head would, of course. A big amp and the biggest sub that would fit in my boot.
I also bought my girlfriend an Amethyst ring. Real Amethyst! None of this diamond malarkey. Oh I knew how to roll back then! One last thing, I obviously had to complete a claims form for the farmers insurance company. this involved before and after sketches of the incident. The first was a view from above of the cow about to clatter into the side of my wing with a comment from me saying “Cow runs out of trees into my car”. The 2nd was the view from above of the damaged car and the cow running off. The caption said “Cow runs off unhurt apart from slight limp”. This amused a few people even though I was just giving an accurate description of the event. I kept a copy for a few years though.
A couple of months passed and I was missing the fun factor of a hatchback. I decided I needed another and only one type would do. A 205GTi 1.9.
As it happens when I was buying the 2nd Cav, the sellers mate turned up in a 1.9GTi. We got chatting and he worked at the body shop mentioned above. He’d stripped the car and repainted it in it’s original gloss black. it was like glass. Stunning. It even had the optional rear wing and reflective rear strip on tailgate. So after a few weeks of pestering him he agreed to sell it to me.
Now before I bought the car the lad brought it round to my dads garage for inspection. My dad said “The clutch is worn son and they’re a pig to do”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I. “Well I’m not touching it when it goes.” says dad.
I bought it anyway and a few weeks later a clutch spring fell out of the clutch and wedged between the pressure plate and the flywheel. Que an argument with my dad after he said “I told you so”, which ended in me saying “Fine I’ll ring Mr Clutch”. I rang them to be told “Nah we don’t touch those mate, they’re a pig to do, try the main dealer”. So once I’d rang the main dealer and come around after fainting, much grovelling was in order and my old man took pity on me and did the clutch. Phew!
Apart from the clutch going though it was flippin’ awesome. I gave it hell every time I drive it too. I don’t know how it survived.
So by now I was still 18 and had left the heady heights of crispy pancake packing behind. I was now working as a glamorous assistant at my local Ford dealer parts counter.
Now one day, me and some mates were sitting down at our usual haunt, at the seafront near Whitley Bay, when a lad we knew from the next town drove past, but he wasn’t in his dodgy Nova with Cav Sri engine in. He was now in a dodgy Escort convertible, but this thing looked cool in the summer sun and to top it off his rear passengers weren’t sitting on the rear seats, oh no, they were sitting on the rear shelf with their feet on the rear seats. Cooool! Who wouldn’t be convinced that this was the best way to travel ever. It was like Miami Vice but in real life and I thought “Wait a minute! That could be me!”
So I bought this.
XR3I Convertible. My dad had said before I bought it “They are flat as a pancake, as they weigh a ton and the roof always leaks, avoid them”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I.
Now this thing was flat with a capital F. It couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding but I enjoyed the roof down cruising. It wasn’t so fun when it rained and both front corners of the roof leaked, resulting in the driver getting a wet right leg and the passenger a wet left leg.
I must admit too that it probably looked better when I got it than after I’d fitted the black hood and clear indicators. You live and learn. Well, I do further on anyway.
So after a month or two I was really missing the speed of the 205. Round about then a workmate at the Ford dealers took me for a spin in his tuned S2 RS Turbo. It was a real mint thing. Immaculate, pampered and bloody quick. I was converted and needed Boost in my life!
Now I didn’t have “mint” money, so what did I buy to emulate this stunning car I had been taken out in?
This of course-
A rather rough S2 RS Turbo with only 13 former keepers, yes only 13. This was 1997 and the car was 1988 so thats a mere one and a half owners a year. What could possibly go wrong?
My dad went to view it with me and said “Son it’s a dog. You can still smell the paint it’s so fresh. There is something not right about that car”. “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine”, says I. Besides I didn’t have the money for a minter.
Well by this time I’d been made redundant from Ford as they were quiet. The place was like a revolving door for staff. My dad had warned me before I went. I was now van driving for a living.
Anyway, this one day I’m driving along in the van and my boss rings me. “Mark there's a guy here who wants a word with you about your car”. “Ok stick him on” I said.
The guy comes on and says “Hi there, I used to own a black RS Turbo with that reg on it. It was stolen from me and put through a shop window in North Shields during a ram-raid. It burst into flames and there was nothing left. The last time I seen it it was a burnt out shell on it’s way to the scrapyard on a low-loader. That car outside can not be the car it says it is”.
Ouch! Not good.
After me explaining that I had bought it in good faith after saving up and also HPI’ing it (of which it was clear!) he agreed not to say anything to anyone, despite casually mentioning that some of his mates were in the Police force.
So anyway, I can’t say I was surprised then, when a few weeks later I pulled up outside the pub to have a game of pool and a pint, only to see a police van pull up behind me.
Policeman says “Do you know the history of this car?” I say “Erm, no”. He says “Well it’s on our list to be seized”.
Oh dear. After a chat he said “You seem like a decent lad and it’s registered to you so I’ll let you drive it home if you present it at your local station next week to inspected”. “Ok” says I.
The day came and my dad, reluctant to get involved, took it round as I was working. He received a phone call from the inspector after a few hours. He said “Well we don’t think this car is what it says it is, but at the same time we can’t say what it is or was, so you can have it back”. Wow! How lucky.
I promptly put it up for sale but being honest I was telling any prospective buyers what had happened. Needless to say it didn’t sell. So I ended up swapping it for the car below.
Rover 216GTI
The least GTi-like GTi I’ve ever been in. My mate worked at a garage and convinced the salesman to do a swap. On the day I got the call from my mate to say “bring it down” I was meant to be going on my first foreign holiday to Tenerife with my girlfriend and her parents. You know, the posh one with the amethyst ring.
I dashed down to the dealers though, to strike while the iron was hot and did the swap. Now at this point I could have headed home and made it to my girlfriends with time to spare, but wait! I have bigger problems. This Rover of mine has no stereo. That just won’t do. So me and my mate set about fitting the stereo from the RS. All went well until I tried to start the car. It span over but wouldn’t fire up. I ended up ringing my old man and he said “There’s a fuel cut-off switch behind the stereo”. He was right. Flicked the switch and it started. What a strange place for a cut off switch.
So I got home, ditched the new sports mobile and arrived at my lasses half an hour late. No harm done and an endearing way to start the holiday with the in-laws.
Well after the sun, sea and not much sex, due to sharing the same apartment as her parents I returned home and enjoyed the Rover. Well I say enjoyed, it was more a case of tolerating it and being grateful to see the back of the RS.
The Rover had the Honda motor which wasn’t bad but it lacked anything particularly special. It also had some strange badly carpeted door cards. Now I don’t mean acoustic cloth carpeted door cards. I mean Homes Under The Hammer rental flat style, brown carpeted door cards. What on earth had happened to those was anyones guess.
So I needed a change, but where could I go from this lull. What would make me feel like the hip-happening young man I really was?
Another XR3i convertible of course.
This was a nice thing I bought locally. A bit livelier than the first one but still no ball of fire. I lowered it a bit more and removed the silly number plates.
It leaked just like the other one but hey it was a convertible. That’s all that mattered. Actually it wasn’t. Speed mattered, so I quickly got bored again.
I decided to get rid after a couple of months, mainly as we’d had a lot of rain and the interior was starting to smell a tad foisty.
The final thing came when I dropped my girlfriends parents (yes the same ones) off at a local pub for a night out.
As her dad got out of the passenger seat he said “Hey! That seat’s wet!”. Me “Hmm, yes. It does that sometimes”. He had a big dark patch on the arse of his jeans. He told me the next day, him and my girlfriends mum had to go round in tandem all night with her following him to hide his wet patch.
So what could I get after the convertible? Something totally different that I hadn’t had? Of course not.
Another RS Turbo.
This time I did it properly. The car was mint having been fully restored. I px’d the cab. It was a private sale. A guy who worked with my mate Ralf.
All was well with this one for a while. Until one day I decided to get it on the rollers, you know, just to check the thing was making proper power. The tuners rang me to say it’s making 150-odd BHP, which is fine.
I took the car home and thought “I have some spare cash left why don’t I have it chipped?”.
My dad, that knowledgeable guy that I had kept ignoring up til now said “Leave it alone. You fiddle with them and they blow up.” “Yeah yeah, it’ll be fine” says I.
Oh how I laughed as those words circled around in my head a few weeks later as I was propping up the smouldering bonnet at the side of the road, while my mate Craig (the mate who’d got me the Rover, but I’d forgiven him by now) put out the flames with an extinguisher.
I’d just got it back from the tuners and basically they’d trapped the little air pipe that goes to the ecu to tell it when the car is on boost. Because no air was getting through, the ecu wasn’t adding more fuel so it just went bang.
After a pricey rebuild, it still never ran great, with a massive flat spot just before the boost came in so I decided to get rid.
By now I’d have been 21 and the Jap import thing was getting big. It would have been 1998/9. A local garage specialised in them so I traded the RS in for a rip-off price, as is the way with dealers, and bought this.
Toyota MR2 Turbo.
This car was great. Low slung seats, high transmission tunnel (that isn’t actually the transmission tunnel) and most of all pop-up-headlights. I turned the boost up a bit (nope, I still hadn’t learnt!), fitted some over the top Jap exhaust called a HKS Hyper medallion or something bonkers like that and new Momo wheels.
All was good for a few months but then my mate Ralf said one day “We are 21 and can do our direct access. Do that you can jump on anything”.
Now I’d had field bikes from the age of 7 thanks to my dad who used to race bikes with my uncle, but I’d given up on road bikes at 17 after looking into it and my parents not being keen.
Me and Ralf did our direct access together which was fun. Especially the time he joined onto the A1 with his lefthand indicator on instead of right. I thought the instructor was going to have a seizure. “We all just heard “INDICATOR! INDICATOR!” through our headsets.
We both passed anyway but I stuck with the MR2 for a little while. Ralf already had his bike before he passed. A VFR400 NC30. Like a mini super bike with the single sided swing arm etc. After a couple of months he said he was buying a brand new GSXR750 so I said ok I’ll have the VFR.
So the MR2 went in favour of the VFR and a MK1 Golf convertible. Yep, living the dream again!
Anyway, I’ll have to leave it there for tonight I think. I’ll continue another day if anyone is reading. We are almost up to digital photos too.
I'd just like to add that some of the above purchases were silly, but I was a young lad with a hunger for cars, so despite all the best advice I sometimes made some bad choices. Read on though to see that I actually do eventually realise my dad does in fact know what he's on about and that I should have listened to him a lot sooner.
Edited by marky911 on Wednesday 15th March 00:16
Great read mark, good to see you posting again! I think we've said it before but our car histories seem fairly similar, especially as we're both about the same age
Looking forward to the next instalment, I missed out on the first half of the 00's so it'll be interesting to see how you went
Looking forward to the next instalment, I missed out on the first half of the 00's so it'll be interesting to see how you went
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