I dunno about you, but as I get older and cars start getting newer, I dream more and more about the cars I USED to have.
The old cars. The cars you could fix with a fag paper and gaffer tape. Cars that you didn’t need a computing degree to work on.
For example…
The car I wish I still had the MOST is my 1984 Toyota Celica-Supra.
2.8 litre straight six, KITT looking beast with popup headlamps.
Very retro. And rare as rocking horse poop these days.
Another: my 1986 2.3 5 cylinder Audi 90 Coupe.
Sadly not a Quattro, but no less fun when blasting around the curvy switchbacks of East Hertfordshire. And the sound of that 5 pot banging away under the bonnet is to die for.
One more: my 1993 V8 Land Rover Discovery in shiny metallic red.
(which burbled even better than the 5 pot Audi)
I miss that car and, if I still had it, it’d be my daily driver.
It was converted to LPG out in Poland to make it less draining on the pocket And, in the engineer’s own words… “that’s biggest LPG tank I’ve ever fitted to a car”.
160 litres of highly explosive liquid gas, right at the back of the car, just waiting to go boom in an accident (I paraphrase his words. but, still).
Had a lot of fun in that car. A lot of, sometimes nervous, fun.
Blasted many green lanes in the South East of England.
But also blasted a load of lanes and tracks out in Poland.
(If you’ve never been to Poland for some off-roading then I suggest getting yourself out there as there’s some amazing countryside over there – and some pretty remote areas, too)
It had the chops of a Land Rover off road but you could comfortably charge through Germany – legally – at 100mph without so much as an asthmatic wheeze.
Except, it had a typical Land Rover ‘undocumented feature’ as you find in most old Landys.
And I was reminded of that just recently when poking around a friend of a friend’s Mercedes ML 4×4.
It started with… “I was driving along and the ‘need more coolant’ warning light came on”.
And ended with “…and the dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree”.
After listening to the guy talking about the symptoms it was pretty obvious it was another ‘red Disco’ fault.
He’d charged the battery – several times as the bugger kept going flat.
Popped it onto a diagnostic machine to sniff out any errors (there were none).
And even taken it to a garage for a little deeper probing.
All of which ended in ‘no bueno’.
Bit like my red Disco…
It had an electrical fault that caused a misfire when the engine was hot. It also meant starting the engine when warm was not a 5 second job.
It’d turn over, and over, and over, and so on. Much to the annoyance of my old neighbour and their kids when I popped out at 2am Xmas morning to pick the other half up from her pub job.
“Dad, has Santa got a Land Rover now?”
Not-so-weirdly, it all kicked off just after I bought the car. The headlamps would flash randomly. The engine would die (usually in the most inconvenient place – front of a traffic light queue, for example). And at one point it even seemed to ‘pop’ the coil?! (only time I’ve ever seen that kinda weirdness)
Thing is… it was never sorted.
I lost count of the number of times I’d started poking around to see if I could discover what the fault was. Yet always ended up scratching my head.
And it wasn’t just me, either. Dick had his nose under the bonnet on many occasions, trying to sort out this elusive fault.
I can tell you it made me feel not so bad because he couldn’t sniff it out either 😀
End result? The car was binned in the end and moseyed on up to that big scrapyard in the sky (another regret now time’s moved on).
Why am I telling you this?
For no other reason than to say that sometimes you can’t fix a problem on your old Landy.
Not everything is ‘fixed in 5’ or with half pound of gaffer tape.
Sometimes it’s not even ‘fixed in months’.
Sometimes you just gotta call it a day, move on, and get shot of the car. Or suck it up, and accept it’s got an ‘undocumented feature’ and live with it.
Something I think matey with the ML Merc’s going to have to wise-up to and get on-board with before he ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere, at 3 am, as he’s trying to get to work.
(personally I think he should bin the Merc and grab himself and old Landy. An old Series, or maybe a classic Rangie. But I’m also biased 🙂
For more photos of the red Disco, as she’s wading Strata Florida in Wales, go here: https://oldlandysrule.com/red-v8-discovery-wading-strata-florida-in-wales/
Old Landys Rule!
Cheers, Phil.