Innehållsförteckning för December 2024 från Classics World

What people expect from a family car has changed considerably over the years. Once upon a time, anything with wheels was exciting and every trip out an adventure. As car ownership became more widespread and people gained more disposable income, the cars became bigger, better and ever more indispensable. They also tended to become more international, with platform sharing and badge engineering the norm. As you will see in some of the other categories, we are not averse to the odd bit of international cooperation and one or two of our choices rely rather heavily in this overseas input, but for the family cars we have stuck with the era in which British cars were designed and built in Britain. Not out of Jingoism or misplaced national pride, but simply…

The Avenger has the distinction of being the last car designed by the Rootes Group. The company required a competitor to the Ford Escort and the Vauxhall Viva, something to bridge the gap between the Imp and their Arrow-series range of medium-sized saloons. The projected launch date was the 1969 London Motor Show, but events delayed it to 18th February 1970. By then the Rootes name was in its last days, as Chrysler had taken a majority share in the firm in 1967. On 30th June 1970, Rootes became Chrysler UK. The Avenger offered potential buyers conventional RWD engineering, a choice of 1250 or 1500 power, and rather pleasing Coke Bottle styling. Autocar found the Super version to be a good, sensible family car with a lot to be said…

PART 5 Having made extensive repairs to the front of the Marina last issue, this time around our focus moves a little further back. We had always known that we’d need new rear arch repair panels, but were not initially quite so sure on the state of the sills. Fortunately by this point any thoughts of making localised paint repairs, or even going for only a partial respray, had long since gone up in sanding dust, so we could clean back both panels to see what the metal was like underneath. The result was that we were happy with the offside sill, but the one on the nearside was a bit crusty in places. So as well as rear arches at £73 each, we also bought a LH outer sill…

The Triumph Herald appeared in 1959 and lasted until 1971. From that basic design came the sixcylinder 1596cc Vitesse 6 and the four-cylinder 1147cc Spitfire 4 in 1962. The Vitesse would mature into the Vitesse 2-Litre and the Spitfire would be joined by a six-cylinder fastback version called the GT6, both in 1966. The Vitesse had gone by 1971 like the Herald, but the GT6 continued until 1973 and the Spitfire would soldier on until 1980, when the Standard-Triumph factory at Canley was closed. The Herald became a common sight on the UK's roads during the 1960s and 1970s, but it was a car which easily might never have been. In the mid to late 1950s, the Triumph name was used only for the TR2 and TR3 sports cars. Triumph…

Charterhouse Held at the Haynes Motor Museum in Sparkford, Somerset, the Charterhouse summer classic car auction attracted a variety of lots, with the cars spanning more than a century and the oldest being a 1905 De Dion Bouton. 2001 Mercedes-Benz SLK 320 - £520 No, it’s not a typo. The hammer really did fall at just £520 (plus auction fees) for this lady-owner metallic blue Merc with twotone leather interior. That’s because, having not been used since 2020, it failed to start and was therefore entered into the sale without reserve as a non-runner. The vendor suspected it was a computer issue, so someone into car electronics with the right diagnostic kit must have been laughing themselves silly when they put down the winning bid and walked away with a…

FUTURE Classic READERS’ CARS The XR3i has always been in the shadows of the serious performance Escorts such as the RS2000 and Cosworth. However, it was intended to be a cheaper alternative to those high-performance and often expensive-to-insure models, so surely it should have been a success? For some of the various marks it certainly was, but not all of them. The XR3 badge first appeared on the Mk3 Escort in 1980, when it was powered by a carburettor-fed CVH engine. It was only when fuel injection was introduced in late 1982 that the title was changed to the XR3i. Available initially only as a three-door hatchback, a cabriolet XR3i joined the fleet in 1986 when the Mk3 Escort was replaced by the Mk4 (a facelift exercise). Sales of both…

This 2007 BMW 335i Coupé was purchased from the eBay sales. Priced at £6000, some would say that is a lot of money for car approaching its 17th birthday. However, these cars are becoming collectable, especially those like this with the 3.0-litre twin-turbo petrol engine. And besides, we only paid £5800 after a haggle! BMW’s E90 3-series arrived here in 2005. On offer from the start was the E90 saloon and E91 estate, to be followed in 2006 by the E92 Coupé, before in 2007 the E93 Convertible arrived to complete the line-up. The 335i N54 engine model became available in late 2006 – our car was registered new on 1st September, 2007 at Sytner Stevenage BMW. Just over 300bhp was available, with 400Nm of torque from 1300rpm. Ours isn’t…

SO LONG, & THANKS FOR ALL THE CHEESE In his final Classic Tails, Andrew remembers the Mini's one and only serious update. The Mini's one and only serious update was the Clubman, launched in September 1969. Much has been said about it, not always complimentary either, but I like them. Styled by Roy Haynes of Marina and Mk2 Cortina fame, the Clubman was in many ways a false start. BLMC hadn’t realised just what they had with the Mini, but if money had been more plentiful there's no doubt that it would have been replaced by something Metro like ten years earlier. The Clubman was completely retooled from the bulkhead forwards to give it that cheerful look. Other advantages included vastly better under bonnet accessibility. In good old BLMC fashion,…

NOT JUST ANY CAR WWW.CARCOVERS.INFO ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW NOT JUST ANY COVER CLASSIC CAR VALUES STABILISE? Hagerty Price Guide UK Editor John Mayhead reports on signs that the auction market may have finally reached a new level after a post-COVID spike followed by a fall. The last few years have been interesting times for the classic car market. After COVID came a surge in buyers looking for the car they’d always promised themselves, and Hagerty’s six UK indices, each of which tracks a different sector of the market, all showed a spike in values as demand outstripped supply and sellers pushed up asking prices. For a while, buyers were willing to pay them. But just as memories of the lockdown started to fade and the working-from-home revolution turned…

We are kicking this feature off with sports cars, not least because that is a genre in which Britain has always done particularly well. In fact, so successful has Britain been in this category that we have had to leave out plenty of sports cars which have a valid claim for inclusion. So there is no room for various candidates from the likes of TVR, Morgan, Sunbeam or Jaguar, and only one each from the extensive back catalogues of MG and Triumph. We have got around this to some extent by including a few of the runners up in other categories, but it has still been very hard work whittling things down to just five entries. We don’t for one minute imagine that everybody will agree with our choices, not…

To be perfectly honest, we are not overly keen on the word ‘iconic.’ Partly that is because it tends to be overused in much the same was as the word ‘celebrity’ is overused these days, hollowing it of meaning. Having said that, there are some vehicles which just seem to shout ‘Great Britain’ from every angle. Glancing through our choices, you may well ask where the Mini is, the RollsRoyce, the Austin Seven. Fair point on the Austin Seven, but we have limited our choices to the post-war era (and the 1950s-1980s in particular) to keep things more manageable, and some of the others have been placed in other categories. Still, this is probably the category which will generate the most controversy, not least because the actual definition of iconic…

Australia rejoices in many delights – sunburnt land, easy living, year-round barbecues on the back patio. But for the classic car owner it offers something more – a climate that goes a long way to banishing one of the biggest headaches. We are, of course, talking about rust. And when the lack of precipitation teams up with a loving owner, we get a 528 E12 BMW that gives some credence to the secondhand car salesman’s bold claim: 'As good as the day it left the showroom.' And to put that into context, remember that James Heaney’s BMW will soon celebrate its 50th birthday. For a car that was built way-back in 1975, it really does do credit to the maker’s glossy brochures that accompanied the launch. The E12 was always…

PART 12 Progress has been a little stop/start on the Fiat this month, not through any lack of willingness on our part, but because it seemed to throw up one puzzle after another. And since I have never worked on a Fiat 500 before, each time something did not look right, I had to take my time to figure out where the problem lay and how to go about correcting it. Take the king pins, for example. Back in the day, a new king pin kit would most likely have come with a selection of different thickness spacer washers so that you could find the correct one to fit which would take out any vertical free play between the stub axle and the upright housing. Unfortunately, the modern kits come…

MARQUES & MODELS SAAB 92-96 In 1945, Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget evolved the prototype X9248, its first motor car project. The idea was a product to serve as a profit-making venture when the aeroplane market was awash with WW2-surplus aircraft. DKWs had previously been successful in Sweden’s small vehicle sector, but were no longer available. Philipsons Automobil AB, the country’s largest car distributor, told Svenska Aeroplan they would order 8000 vehicles over three years and provided a sizeable down payment; 1.8 million kronor is one quoted figure. The Saab Board of Directors approved the project in July 1945, with Sixten Sason responsible for the styling and Gunnar Ljungström overseeing the engineering. The Citroën Traction Avant is said to have inspired Ljungström when he devised the monocoque bodywork and the Saab would…

FUTURE Classics FORGOTTEN HERO Intriguing – perhaps that’s the best word to describe the Volvo 480. It’s a threedoor hatch so it looks like a coupé, but its long rear side windows suggest estate. Oh, and then there’s those bizarre and frankly out of place popup headlights. Whatever way you look at it, bearing an obvious similarity with the classic P1800ES, the 480 is definitely a curiosity – and for that reason, a car which warrants being on the radar of future classic hunters. The model’s roots can be traced back to Volvo’s acquisition of DAF in the 1970s. That’s the reason why it was built at DAF’s old factory at Born in the Netherlands. (The factory now makes MINIs and assorted other BMWs.) The 480 took six years to…

FUTURE Classics BUYING GUIDE Daily driver, surf bus, fun weekend plaything – there are plenty of reasons why people love T4s. And if you like the idea of a ‘classic’ looking VW camper but want some of the mod cons of the newer T5/6, then the attractively angular T4 is a far less expensive but just as cool solution. Built at VW’s factory in Hanover, it was available in SWB or LWB guise and in different roof heights, with the range including a panel van, Eurovan, Kombi, Caravelle, single and double cab pickup and Syncro 4x4. You can obviously buy one that’s been converted into a camper, Westfalia being the name which has the most kudos. A facelift in 1996 introduced a longer, re-shaped nose to accommodate the optional VR6…

You know what they say about big fishes in small ponds? Well the idea of prestige can be a bit like that. A new Trabant might have been stuffed full of prestige to the East German citizen who had risen to the top of the waiting list after ten years of tedious patience. And in the UK today, if you have the most exotic and rare example of a very mundane marque or model, then you can rock up to the annual gathering of the faithful and bask in the glow of their admiration. That is not in any way meant to be disrespectful of these mundane motors, as we have long been vocal champions of the type, and the popularity of events like Hagerty’s Festival of the Unexceptional shows…

Breaking new ground is all well and good, but there is a knack to getting it right. Jowett could have claimed one of these spots with their Javelin, but ultimately we felt that the disastrous consequences for the Bradford firm of putting such an innovative design into production ruled it out. Similarly there were some designs such as the Bond Bug, Enfield 8000 and Marcos 1800 which quite clearly broke new ground and were all great cars in their own rights, but which ultimately failed to have a lasting impact on the world stage. The same could not be said of the five cars we have chosen to fly the groundbreaking flag for Britain. In one way or another, each of these had a lasting impact. Some created whole new…

On the way home, we pulled up for a rest stop. The car park was full of old VWs, and lots of other modified cars. The place had a party atmosphere – people were smiling, music was playing, picnics were being consumed. Exeter Services had never been so jolly. Refreshed, we continued our journey. The A30 was thronged with the same sort of machinery we had seen at the services. Most were in motion, while some sat by the side of the road, plainly awaiting roadside assistance. What unified them was four letters, created in thick tape on the rear screen: RTTS. This was 2005, and I was living in Newquay, Cornwall. I had of course heard of Run To The Sun, but as my personal experience of aircooled VWs…

BUYING GUIDE It’s generally acknowledged that the Porsche 924 was the car which saved Porsche, but despite its success in the marketplace it was a long way from the pure-bred sports machinery that Porsche fans were used to. Although developed by Porsche under contract, it had in fact been originally conceived as a VW/Audi coupé, until VW management cancelled the project and Porsche acquired the rights, the car filling the gap left by the recently axed 914. With a 2-litre VW engine producing 125bhp, the 924 offered GTI-style performance to European buyers, but in emissions-regulated US trim it was good for just 95bhp, which in conjunction with the three-speed automatic was a very long way from 911 Turbos and Le Mans heroics. The 170bhp 924 Turbo improved matters, but also…

Volvo This is Irv Gordon, pictured in 2002 with his 2,000,000 mile 1966 Volvo P1800. Irv went on to clock a total of 3,260,257 miles in the Volvo by the time of his death in November 2018, which is recognised as a world record for the most miles on a one-owner personal car. The Volvo did have two engine rebuilds over the years, but was still the original unit. Irv said of his car: 'It has never broken down, never failed to start and always takes me where I want to go. Ice, snow, blizzards… I’ve been in conditions you wouldn’t believe and the car has always got me through it without any problems.' Peugeot This rather singular looking car is a Peugeot 402 limousine. (Incidentally, I did get confused…

Base your purchase on a lack of rust and originality. Generally, prices start from around £2500 for a relatively tidy example, although their increasing scarcity might mean you’ll have to pay more. We found a real gem when we looked online – a 1994 1.7 ES with just 64,825 miles on the clock at a dealer in Horsham for £4000. Unsurprisingly, Turbos are desirable, as are the special editions, but because they seldom come up for sale, if you find a good one then don’t hesitate to snap it up.…

Vauxhall Astra VXR (2005-2010) If you’re a fan of 1990s hot hatches, you’ll appreciate the appeal of this value-packed Vauxhall. With its brash bodykit, there’s no mistaking the 236bhp Astra VXR for its lesser three-door Mk5 siblings, and once that Borg Warner K04 turbo spins up, it offers scintillating performance with seamless amounts of power available throughout the entire rev range. It first appeared in 2005, and made the headlines three years later when it set the hot-hatch record for circling the infamous Nürburgring in 8mins 35s. The Renaultsport Megane R6.R shaved another 18secs off that time soon after, but that had plastic windows and no rear seats or a passenger airbag! Other than a mid-life revision in 2007 that tweaked the front and rear end styling and added keyless…