The best car stories on the net

Ricci.Wright

John Ficarra is a true automobile historian and a great story teller.

(20207) The loophole Porsche racecar Ferrari couldn't touch! - YouTube

Nanuq907

Here's one of my all time favorites.

Love is a Land-Rover     by Matthew Parris

In Africa they sell cars differently. That was my experience as a student, selling a Land Rover from a campsite in Nairobi. Four friends and I had driven from England. We needed money to fly home. So, after washing and polishing Stanley, we put him up for sale. Then we waited by our tents.

But our sales pitch failed. The truck had been pampered, we were suggesting; Stanley had hardly seen a pothole. It would have been unwise, surely, to mention the accident in northern Cameroon? We had left the road and jumped a gully while I was on the roof. Launched, rocket-like through the air, I had landed (to the amazement of tribeswomen labouring in the fields) by a tree, dislocating both my shoulders (relocated by swinging from a branch). Otherwise no damage. The women sang. Stanley and occupants seemed unhurt, though all received a hell of a wallop and my companions' heads left four neat dents in the roof. The dents we beat out in Nairobi. Stanley was presented as "pristine". Pristine? But our inquirers asked "What can this thing do?"

African truck-hunters would cluck as we emphasised Stanley's cosseted history. "But has it been tried? Where have you driven it? How steep will it climb? How strong is it?" So we learnt the techniques of African persuasion. "This vehicle has been everywhere," we would say. "It has been driven across the whole of Europe, crossed the sea in a boat to Morocco, and traversed the Algerian Sahara. Neither the intense heat, nor the deep sand, nor the great rocks in the road could stop it. Tamanrasset was easily reached. The Hogar mountains in southern Algeria were surmounted without difficulty. Many times we were stuck in the soft sand, but always this truck triumphed. Niger, where roads hardly exist, was no problem. Nigeria - the heat and dust were incredible - was crossed in two days." Eyes would grow wide as we recounted the thrills and spills. "In Cameroon this car survived a terrible accident! We left the road, flew across a gully - all four wheels in the air -" (this was true) "and hit the ground so hard all the windows fell out (this was partly true). "In the Central African Republic the mud was knee-deep. No problem. In Zaire the roads were like rivers. Monkeys climbed on to the roof, and, once, a snake . . ." (this was not true) " . . . and in Rwanda we gave a lift to 12 people, all crammed in and on the rooftop. In Tanzania we passed among lions: there is nothing this Land-Rover has not seen. We drove it up the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. "And now - look! Strong, tested, ready. Such endurance!"

We stopped short of pointing out that even the original, excellent engine oil, which had brought us all the way from England, came, unchanged, with the vehicle. As the tale of abuse and endurance unfolded, prospective buyers, seized with a desire to own this paragon themselves, would up their offers. Sadly, none could afford our price. We had to sell Stanley to the white manager of the Coca-Cola bottling plant, who spotted (as we had not) that the chassis was cracked. He had it welded. His was the more scientific approach, but is the African attitude not preferable?

Born there, I must have soaked it in myself, for now I have my own Land-Rover, a lady of a certain age. Although it makes no sense, I cannot bear to part with her. With every scrape she surmounts, I prize her more. Registered in Sleaford, Lincolnshire, in 1959, she is an early Series II (headlamps close together but overhead valve and the "new" body design which more or less survives to this day). I bought her after the 1979 general election. A battered old truck is classless, excellent for MPs: as acceptable on council estates as up gravel drives. Mine is a petrol-engined long wheelbase "cab & canopy", dark green, registration NTL 703. There are no seatbelts, moss is growing in the windows, the dashboard has rusted through, but she just keeps going. She has accompanied me twice to the Sahara (once across the atrocious tracks of the Tassili N'Ajer mountains), many times to Europe, once (with loudspeakers) through a general election, and innumerable times down the M1. She has pulled caravans and horse-boxes, transported straw for my llamas and flagstones for my drive. In bad winters in Derbyshire she has come to the rescue.

Nor was it all rough-stuff: she has visited The Finings, John and Norma Major's Huntingdonshire home (though the detectives had to assist me in a push-start; it complicates the cheery departing wave to a former Prime Minister). Polished, she has collected the Foreign Minister of the Western Sahara's Polisario Front at Heathrow. All this without any serious failure, ever. There have been ailments of course, but she and I got through them. When the starter motor conked out, I started the engine with a crank for months. My lost key has been replaced, too - though for a season I remedied its lack by coupling two wires under the bonnet. One door rusted away; the new one flies open, to the alarm of passengers. Once, 14 of us fitted in for a trip to the pub, Nick climbing over the roof on the way home, hanging over the windscreen, leering at me upside down and denting the roof amusingly. The bumper is twisted where Jon scraped a wall while I was teaching him to drive. The other day a wire behind the dashboard combusted so we stopped in a cloud of smoke and ripped it out. I never did find out what the wire was for. The mileometer hasn't worked since 1981, the speedometer hunts the mark, the interior light is defunct and there never was a heater. Nor is she lockable, though for six years I would leave her unattended all week at Derby station.

Like a person, such a machine only grows stronger with age; like a person, you never think she will die. Unlike a person, a Land Rover is capable of returning affection. But in recent years intimations of mortality have multiplied.

For five years my mechanic has told me that there was a limit to the welding possible on a rusting chassis. Before setting out for Spain this Easter I asked him to look her over. He said it would cost up to £800 to plate, patch and weld this year - and the MoT runs out next month. There comes a time when the bullet must be bit. She is nearly 40. I am nearly 50. I had hoped we could celebrate big birthdays together in the summer. It was not to be. Our spring trip to Spain must be her last. And then the scrapyard. Too bad, but so be it.

Careless, now, about overloading, I could squeeze the last from her. My London flat was being recarpeted, but why throw away the old? There was enough tolerably clean carpet there to cover a floor in Spain, where my family live. She was horribly overloaded as we hit the road to Portsmouth for the ferry to Bilbao. Seven rolls of carpet weigh about half a tonne, sticking out in front like battering rams. Into the back went Easter eggs for eight nephews and nieces, sacks of teabags, Stilton and Marmite, and a massive, redundant touch-screen fax/answerphone desired by a younger brother. With tattered and faded canvas canopy draped over, securing ropes extending like rigging to the front bumper, and the back sunk down with the weight, we made a curious sight lumbering slowly down the A3 . . . to miss the Pride of Bilbao. Damn those 24-hour clocks. Must din it into my head that 20.00 hours is not 10pm.

So to Cherbourg instead - P & O were nice about it - and right across France and over the Pyrenees. From Derbyshire the journey was a thousand miles. Never once did she so much as cough. On our descent from the Pyrenees we freewheeled for about 17 miles - a record for her. Discussing (in her presence) the price I might get for the cherished numberplate, I felt caddish - as though overheard by the terminally ill discussing a posthumous organ-transplant. Unloaded of her carpet, she was so useful in Spain. She accompanied me to the notary, to formalise ownership of l'Avenc, the ruin we've bought. Then I loaded her with 11 cases of Rioja, two trees and gallons of olive oil, and back she came: all the way from Barcelona, rattling merrily overnight across Catalonia, Aragon, the Basque Country, without complaint.

It was a glorious summer evening as we drove up the A3 from Portsmouth, and she was running like a dream - even making the Hogg's Back in fourth gear. I tried to think about the scrapyard but I couldn't. In London a friend asked me to take a basement-full of builders' scrap timber for burning in Derbyshire. I set out up the M1 at midnight, a skip-on-wheels. She never faltered. Safely parked outside my house, weary in the small hours, I gave her a departing pat before going in. This old girl had been everywhere, done everything, never let me down. Could I abandon her now?

"All right," I said. "I'll pay for the welding. Stay with me another year. Good night."