wurlycorner wrote:Would the Dolomite in the background of that picture have been brand new at the time?
Probably not when the picture was taken, although the Dolomite was still being produced when I bought the AC.
paul bristol uk wrote:What threw me was the bonnet emblem it looked like a Armstrong Siddeley one. Bugger i hate being wrong!
They are very similar, yes, at least from a distance.
Anyhoo: onwards and upwards.
These days, cheap and cheerful is a (** insert boring box of your choice). Back then, it was a Moggy. They were what you bought when you needed a reliable and cheap stop-gap. And you could hang the tail out at 20mph if you wanted.
There were three Minor saloons over the years, 2 of them shared with a girlfriend. One of them had cut-up and epoxied credit cars hiding holes in the transmission tunnel (not my doing). On another, I fitted a load of hose clips to the prop shaft to balance out a vibration. It was supposed to have been a temporary measure, but it worked so well that I never got round to sorting it properly.
We lived in Kensington. We used to drive everywhere back in the day. Even so, there was a case for a perfect town bike. With one of these, you could go round corners at walking pace without touching the handlebars. Water-cooled, shaft-driven. Weird, but wonderful.
The marvellous AC had to go eventually: I wasn’t up to maintaining the ash frame, let alone the ally skin.
My head overruled my heart, but my heart wasn’t to be denied when replacing the old beast.
I couldn’t afford it.
My bank manager said the new car was too old to fit the rules, so would I sign the loan as a ‘home improvement’?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
No matter that it was the car you’d give to your mistress if you had a 300SL of your own, if this isn’t in the top 10 prettiest cars ever made, I want to know what’s ousted it from the list.
Would you drive your Lude at its top speed for an hour? This car had an indicated max of just over 110, yet I once ran Kensington to the Severn Bridge in an hour and a quarter. Mind you, in those days there were only two sets of traffic lights between our place and Hammersmith flyover and then an uninterrupted run all the way to Aust.
If I still had the car, I’d either be sitting on £80,000 or I’d be trying to do something similar ...
[to be continued]
