Restoration

The National Trust is obliged to preserve houses and gardens. It can’t just let them decay. Its dilemma was touched on in a TV documentary about Sissinghurst, when a resident descendant of the donor family woke up one morning, to find the trust replacing a crumbling, antique stone statue with a modern copy.

It’s the same with cars such as Ian Brown's TR3 (right). Triumph TR2s were like first love. Their handling was not very good, but I didn’t know any better in 1955 when I went to the British Grand prix at Aintree in one. A treasured girl friend had another. One of my first published features was a competition history of the TR2 up to about 1956. I knew TR2s, so a chance to drive a restored one was too good to miss. What a disapppointment. It felt good at first. Lovely to drive an open car with your elbow overhanging the low door. What clear round instruments. Great to hear the exhaust crackle at 2,400rpm. I liked the crisp gearshift and roomy cockpit. What a practical car it was, with a decent boot.

TR2s are eminently restorable with a separate chassis and simple body parts and the owner had paid a lot for it. I hadn’t the heart to tell him the steering was terrible. TR2 cam and lever was never great but this was just stiff. It had no feedback at all. The Motor road test of a TR3 in 1956 thought it, “satisfactorily sporting”, which in road test language probably meant no more than “all right”. At two and a third turns lock to lock it was, not surprisingly, “heavy at parking speeds”.

There is a sharp division over restored classics. Some people like patina. Seats sat in by generations of drivers. Paint and chrome dulled and weathered. Exhausts that smoke because the cylinder bores are worn. These enthusiats try not to renew anything. Remaking decaying bodywork is anathema. Like the new Sissinghurst statue it’s no longer original.

I don’t agree. I like originality but not at the expense of practicality. When I drive a classic I want it to feel and behave as it did when new. The best restorations are done using period materials, techniques and workmanship. I’ll allow some liberties in the interests of research. When I did my MGB I took the best features of various ages – chrome wire wheels, chrome grille, leather upholstery but modern paint colour, and equipped it with a Rover 2litre twin-cam 4-valve engine with fuel injection, and a 5-speed gearbox. (TR3A right, at Goodwood)

That restored TR2 was joyless. It looked good but that was the end of it. In that case I’d have gone with the patina, saggy seats, draughty hood, opaque sidescreens…
Bit of both (below) my MGB had a new bodywhell. My A30 behind was all original.

Fair cop

“The Council of the London Borough of Ealing believes that a penalty charge is payable for an alleged traffic contravention…” It was quite right. I knew when I stopped on that box junction that I shouldn’t. I had driven round the block after spotting number one daughter crossing the road. I was afraid she would dart into Lidl’s and disappear. I expected the white van to clear the junction but it didn’t. I dislike snooping cameras but you couldn’t argue with this one. It had video if I tried to argue, and I suspect the Council wouldn’t be impressed with catching number one daughter. I should have been paying more attention. I won’t do it again.

Fireworks welcome

Skoda set off pyrotechnics for the launch of the Rapid. It wasn’t the fifth of November, it was the sixth, but who was counting? Ellenborough Park is, “Huge, part new, part restored,” according to Fiona Duncan of The Daily Telegraph, “a mass of scrubbed-up Cotswold stone bristling with turrets, arches and towers, dates from 1500.” It was home to the Earl of Ellenborough, and then a girls’ school before becoming, “a hotel progressively more tired, until bought by investors in 2008. Millions of pounds later it reopened with new wings, 62 bedrooms, a rather exposed outdoor pool, a lovely, intimate spa and a path to Cheltenham Racecourse. There is surely nowhere else an owner or trainer would prefer to stay. There have been some very clever moves in reinventing Ellenborough Park as a luxury hotel. The owners could easily have entrusted a tricksy interior designer with the job; they could have cut corners and made every room the same; or they could have gone to the metallic wallpaper and velvet devoré fabric shop, as so many similar hotels do when they want to introduce a contemporary look. Instead, they turned to Nina Campbell.”

There’s no devoré fabric in a Skoda Rapid, and Nina Campbell probably would not have done an interior that reflected so much in a windscreen. But this is a good car with, like so many these days, costly extras. It was all very well portraying it at a cost-conscious £12,900 but even a middle-of-the-road 1.2 SE is £14,650. By the time you add “packs” of this and that it is £17,320. Still, it’s well-detailed, on sale next week and slots in below Octavia. Skoda has determined what prices the market will stand and the market now values top-line cars as thoroughly satisfactory. Encouraged, it is making the hugely successful Octavia and Superb premium, with the Rapid occupying middle ground underneath.

Rapid is only slightly smaller with much the same room inside, a hatchback that places it firmly in the family market. The styling is crisper than Octavia and a bald man from Skoda told us, at some length it has to be said, about the jewel-like quality of the tail lights and how much luggage you could get in the boot. He needn’t have bothered. The proportions are decent and the detailing excellent, down to an ice-scraper concealed in the fuel flap and a windscreen clip for, I suppose, showing you have paid-and-displayed.

There are four petrol and one diesel Rapids, three trim options and all drive well with reservations about those with low-profile tyres. I drove a 1.2 SE in the morning and a 1.6 diesel Elegance in the afternoon, with what felt like solid rubber on 16in “Dione” wheels instead of the SE’s 17in 6J “Camelots”. I cannot understand why a good PR team allows Marketing to put silly tyres on otherwise competent road cars. Most drivers will never feel the extra point zero something extra cornering power on low profiles and they will certainly feel the nobbly bumps and the pull on cambers. Big wheels and thin tyres may look a little racier but who, in this instance, is kidding whom?

The Skoda Rapid SE had, the bald man assured us, lots of costly equipment like an anti-misfuel insert (a narrow neck on the filler) electric windows in front and a leatherette gaiter on the handbrake, manual air conditioning and tinted glass. But the metallic paint was an extra £495, Driving Pack (cruise control and parking sensors) at $600, Protection Pck (boot lining) £150, Sat-nav £550, Summer Pack (Climatronic dual zone air conditioning and tinted rear windows) £500 and Style Pack (smarter alloys) £375.

I didn’t risk the rather exposed outdoor pool but I did manage a portrait by Sarah-Louise, the fastest-drawing artist I’ve ever seen. Note to daughters – I’ll trim those eyebrows.

Renault does not get much out of motor racing.

It has been winning grands prix since 1906 and its engines were 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 13th and 16th in Abu Dhabi. (Right: Vettel, heroic third place) In 35 years it has won more F1 titles than anybody (nine drivers’, ten constructors’) and is the leading manufacturer of single seaters, although the Formula 1 operation is based firmly at Enstone in heart of England. Renault has a longer pedigree than Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz or Honda yet glory somehow eludes it. When a Lotus-Ford won a grand prix Ford gained a halo. When a Lotus-Renault scores the first win for a Lotus in 25 years scarcely anybody notices the engine. Everybody knew Jim Clark’s Lotus 49 had FORD on the cam covers when he won the Dutch Grand Prix in 1967. Nobody knows Kimi Raikkonen had a Renault RS27 V8, so there will be no footfall in Renault dealers’ showrooms to follow. Astonishingly the team changed its name to Lotus only last year. It started as Toleman, then Benetton with Ford and BMW engines. It had Renault engines from 1995, was officially Renault’s own from 2002 and made Fernando Alonso the youngest world champion in 2005. Then Renault lost heart. It sold the shares to Genii Capital in 2011, which gave it the Lotus identity, and with Raikkonen back has been looking good all season. Accordingly when Renault says it is going to build sports cars with Caterham it hardly causes a stir.

Their agreement apparently, “Reflects a similar passion and expertise in sports and competition cars. The future vehicles will be distinctive, differentiated, and carry the respective DNA of Alpine and Caterham Cars, the automotive division of Caterham Group. They will be built at the Alpine plant in Dieppe, Normandy, in France.” It is a passion that hasn’t produced any Alpines since the 1990s but now Caterham will have 50% of Automobiles Alpine Renault, currently all held by Renault. The Société des Automobiles Alpine Caterham will be created in January and its Dieppe plant will survive. It is all thanks not so much to passion for sports and competition cars, as a subsidy from the French government and the Région Haute Normandie.

Rest and be Thankful

This 1753 military road corkscrewing up Glen Croe is hastily being remade to take traffic when the "new" A83 of the 1940s is closed by landslips. Since 2007 the gently graded modern highway (top left of picture), gateway to the west Highlands, has been blocked five times by thousands of tons of soggy peat and rock, causing 60-mile diversions. Over £16million has been spent already, and the old speed hill-climb course is being brought back into use as a stop-gap. Rest and be Thankful was a British Hill-Climb Championship course in the 1950s on which Raymond Mays competed with his black ERA and Jim Clark drove his Triumph TR2. In disrepair it was used as a rally special stage into the 1960s. In the RSAC Scottish Rally my co-driver Graham Birrell set a thoroughly competitive time in our works-loaned Ford Cortina GT. picture: Ricard Harvey Wikipedia

Red tape and the DVLA

The AA is over-excited about plans to stop the check for insurance when you apply for a tax disc. “Absurd” the AA calls it and on the face of it, so it looks, until you take the trouble to read what the DVLA says. I don’t much care for consultation documents by government departments that have obviously made up their mind what they’re going to do, but I decided to go through all 3579 words. There is, as you would expect, a lot of wasted verbiage like para 2, “The DVLA handles more than 200 million interactions each year and constantly reviews the processes that support these transactions to find more effective ways of working. The proposal to remove the insurance check when taxing a vehicle supports this aim in providing improvements to customer experience and delivering sustainable, long-term savings in line with the Government’s commitment to digital services and information sharing.” Pure window-dressing, but the DVLA has a point. “…the check at the point of taxing only ensured that there was a valid insurance policy in place on the day that the tax disc came into force. There was nothing in place to stop the applicant cancelling their insurance the next day and driving until their tax expired without valid insurance, albeit with the risk of Police enforcement proceedings.” There is now an electronic check of all insured vehicles in the UK (Motor Insurance Database (MID)) when an application for a tax disc is made through the DVLA’s Electronic Vehicle Licensing (EVL) system, which I guess most people use nowadays. Before an application is processed online, there is a check of the MID to confirm a valid policy is in place. There is also now Continuous Insurance Enforcement (CIE), which targets evaders and allows DVLA to identify uninsured drivers in ways not possible hitherto. Instead of spotting uninsured vehicles on the road, CIE discovers offenders by comparing the DVLA record of vehicle keepers with the MID. The AA claims the change will, “… send out the wrong message and undo much the work carried out by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau, the Government and the insurance industry.” The DVLA says it would save £1.2million a year and cut out red tape. It is probably right. The AA is still living in a dark age when real people went along to a real motor taxation office with a real insurance certificate and Gave Their Word.