Category: Features

When I advertised my Porsche 968CS for sale a month or so ago, I did it expecting that I’d still have another good 6 months or so with the car. Having watched 968’s and other Porsches online for so long, I knew that most of them hang around for a very long time. There’s a 968 on carsales right now that was advertised before I bought mine, more than a year ago!

I thought I’d have more time with the car, but it was not to be. This morning, I sold the 968 to a wonderful bloke from New South Wales who has 40 years racing experience in various classes. The 968 won’t have a hard life in Mike’s care, but I’m sure he’s going to enjoy it to the fullest.

This is my final photo, taken minutes before Mike began the long drive home.

Why sell the 968?

I got a few questions from friends about selling this car. Why would I do it? There are a few reasons.

First – and it’s one of life’s big ironies – is that we’re planning to build a big garage at the front of our house. Selling the 968 to add some funds to the kitty is my way of showing Mrs Swade (and myself) that I’m serious about the project. So yes, I sold the 968 in order to build a house for cars like the 968 that will come in the future!

Second, some of the funds will go towards of the restoration of the car that I brought home today….

My Lancia Fulvia.

It was pure serendipity that I managed to sell my ‘old’ car on the same day that I planned to bring the ‘new’ one home. It’s pure stupidity that my old one is much newer than my new one. And the old one runs. The old one has a boot lid that closes. The old one doesn’t have any rust. And the old one has keys (yes, I bought a Lancia that doesn’t have any keys).

Today was a busy day. I had a couple of hours with Mike, showing him the 968 and taking care of the paperwork this morning, before picking up a car trailer with my stepson Geoff and heading off to pick up our ‘new’ cars.

After a bit of messing about – and a big dollop of help from some friends who have done this sort of thing before – Geoff and I managed to get our new vehicles home.

The Fulvia has inched its way into my heart already. I absolutely love it, even if all I can do is sit in it. In fact, in the event it’s deemed to be a totally (maniacally) unviable proposition, it may well hang around as some sort of super-sculture in our garden. It really is that pretty.

I’ll start tooling around with it tomorrow afternoon. My first job is to try to get the boot lid closed as the hinges seem to be frozen with the lid raised around 5 inches.

Geoff’s Fiat X1/9

My Fulvia and Geoff’s Fiat were purchased from a deceased estate. They are, in essence, a pair of real-life barn finds, covered in dust and even some hay (seriously!). The deceased was a wealthy man who bought all sorts of fun cars that took his fancy. They were often left sitting when they fell out of favour. Given that he had so many interesting cars, the vast majority of them have very low mileage. You can only drive them one at a time, right?

Where my Lancia is quite derelict and in need of a complete restoration, the Fiat X1/9 that Geoff bought is in superb, original condition and shouldn’t need too much work to re-commission. It’s an early model with small bumpers and the 1300 engine and it’s done only 45,000kms – and yes, we have some records to support this 🙂

My apologies for the dark, garage shots, but have a look…..

Getting the car into our garage at home was quite a challenge. It hasn’t been run for around 10 years and we weren’t going to fire it up today, so we had to roll it down my drive using my Subaru Brumby as a top-side anchor to stop it crashing through the back of the garage. The car was hampered by stuck brakes, too, so while we had to stop it from rolling down the hill with the Brumby, we also had friends pushing it down the hill to actually get it to move. It was quite a production!

In fact, the Brumby turned out to be quite a star today. We didn’t use it to tow the car trailer but we did use it as an agile little tow vehicle once we got the cars home and it did a wonderful job. Again.

Conclusion

24 hours ago my automotive world was completely different to how it is today. It’s amazing what a difference a day can make.

I’m really sad to have sold the Porsche so early in its sale campaign. I really came to love that car and my respect for the Porsche brand and their pursuit of excellence is through the roof. I plan to add a 928 to the family in due course, sooner rather than later.

But…. to balance that sadness is a fair bit of excitement.

I’m really, really excited about Geoff’s Fiat. I think he got an absolute ripper of a car and it’s going to be fun messing around with him in the garage on that one.

I’m also really excited to have my very own Fulvia and some money to get the restoration underway. There’s SO much to be done with this car but as long as it proves to be a viable candidate for restoration, it’s going to be a barrel of fun. I can’t wait to get it started.

If your day was even half as good as mine was today then you must have a smile from ear to ear 🙂

Youtube doesn’t really do time limits. Not unreasonable ones, at least.

So it’s a bit of a worry when the official Formula E Youtube channel puts up a highlights video of the first ever Formula E race and the highlights from the actual race go for just 30 seconds.

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That’s a 2:30 video and the highlights go between 0:30 and 1:00. The rest of it is discussion of what was a spectacular crash at the end of the race. I watched a little bit of the start and it doesn’t surprise me that there wasn’t much to see. The warm-up lap took more than 5 minutes. i don’t think the pace is really quick enough to provide much in the way of highlights at the moment.

Here’s the full final lap, which includes the crash you just saw.

Yes, what you’re about to see is racing. And no, there’s no speed limit. That’s as fast as they go.

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It’s easy to sit here and throw rotten tomatoes at this fledgling motor sport. I’m excited by the idea of electric vehicle racing but as you can see from the video, the reality isn’t living up to the expectation at all right now. They need more speed, more noise and ….. more excitement.

Perhaps they should take Sniff Petrol’s advice.

The danger here is that they might have started Formula E too early. People might see what’s being offered right now and lose interest in it forever. It could set the sport back a decade just as it’s finding its feet.

Did you watch it?

Were you excited by what you saw (as opposed to being excited about the idea of electric car racing)?

What could they do to make it better?

And yes, as a Saab person, the presence of Mahindra racing was noted….

UPDATED with more pics, thanks to a friend who’s also visited the collection.

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Happy days!

As the headline suggests, I’ve just transferred payment for the purchase of a Lancia Fulvia! I’ve been wanting one of these cars in the worst possible way, for a few years now.

Fittingly, I’ve ended up with one in the worst possible condition 🙂

This is first photo I saw of the car. I now have a few more below.

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The story….

This Lancia Fulvia was part of a local collection that’s being sold after the owner’s death. There were quite a few interesting cars in the collection, actually. My stepson, Geoff, bought the Fiat X19 parked next to the Fulvia in this photo. We’ll re-commission that one over the next few weeks/months so he can have some fun with it. I nearly threw myself at a Honda S800 convertible (and the Honda S600 Coupe next to it) but I could never walk past the Fulvia.

The good parts:

• It’s a genuine Series 1 1.3 Fulvia Rallye, which means it has the aluminium doors, bonnet and boot. It’s the last Lancia before Fiat got involved with the company so it’s quite desirable from that point of view.
• It’s a local car! I’ve been looking all over Australia. I’ve even had two Fulvias checked out overseas in the last year or so. To finally find one less that 30 minutes from home is just amazing.
• It was cheap (in Fulvia terms), which brings us to “the bad parts”….

The bad parts:

It might simply look dusty in the photo, but this Fulvia needs complete restoration. The engine is seized, for starters. There’s rust in the sills, though thankfully the subframe appears to be solid. It’s painted red but the original colour was dark blue. The interior needs restoration, too.

There’s not a part of this car that doesn’t need fixing or fettling.

So while I’ve got my Fulvia, it’ll be some time before I get to drive it. The first step will be slowly pulling it apart to see just how bad the damage is, before paying some skilled men to fix the structural bits for me. I intend to use Lancia’s superior engineering to my benefit by learning how to pull apart and rebuild a well designed engine.

We pick the Fulvia and the X19 up in just over a week from now. More photos and stories will be posted in due course.

It might be a mess, but it’s my mess and I couldn’t be happier.

More pics. Click to enlarge:

Incorrect Lancia Beta badge here…..

This pic actually makes the interior look decent. It needs plenty, trust me.

That engine’s not going to push this car anywhere…..

You’ve heard the story, right? A guy buys an old farm. On the old farm there’s an old shed that hasn’t been opened in 30 years. Somehow the family selling the farm just forgot about it (!!). Inside the shed are a bunch of dust-covered, but otherwise perfectly preserved classic cars that were worth pennies when they were locked away, but are now worth a fortune.

Barn find!!!!

Above: NOT the barn find in this story

Well, I went and saw my first ‘barn find’ on the weekend. It wasn’t a forgotten collection sold absent-mindedly by a family. It was a group of cars collected by a Hobart local who passed away a few years ago, which is now being sold bit-by-bit by the family.

Specifically, I went to look at a Series 1 Lancia Fulvia – exciting enough merely because it’s one that I don’t have to transport from interstate! Or overseas (which I’ve seriously considered).

But here’s the thing I learned about barn finds over the weekend:

The unspoken excitement of the barn find is preservation. You subconsciously think “Wow. A perfectly preserved Fulvia! All I need to do is change the fluids, slot in a battery and I’m in a fully functional automotive time machine!”

Well, not quite.

Barn finds, by their very nature, are cars that have sat for ages…. and ages…. and ages. Even if such a car is relatively new, that can create problems. When the car is 30 or 40 years old, it can mean things like rust and a seized engine, both of which are sadly present in this Fulvia.

In fact, of the dozen or so cars I saw in the ‘barn’ on the weekend, there were only a handful that looked like they’d need minimal work to get moving again, providing all the internal are OK. The cars I saw ranged from the 1940’s (I think) through to the 1980’s and it was the younger cars that looked the most likely to get going the quickest.

So what of the Fulvia? I went down on Sunday with a deposit in my pocket. I came back having not handed over a cent of it.

The big downside is that the car has been in a minor accident at some point in its life and there’s evidence of this down the right-hand side of the vehicle. The fix involved some new paint, which changed the colour from blue to red. The interior looks tired and some of the brightwork, which is basically irreplaceable, is in bad condition. And then there’s that seized engine. I feel very confident it’s just from the car sitting for 18 years and not from hardcore mechanical failure. In other words, I’m confident it could be freed up. But it would still have to be disassembled and inspected. Hoses, brakes, gearbox…… the list goes on.

The good news (aside from the sheer fact that it’s a Series 1 Fulvia and it’s local) is that the subframe looked solid.

If I had some space to store the car at home I could disassemble at my leisure and prepare it for the body shop. But I don’t, which is endlessly frustrating. I’m looking into the cost of some replacement parts and panelling and I’m also looking for somewhere to store the 968. If those things can come together quickly, I might just have my dream project. If not, it might be (yet another) opportunity lost.

Either way, I learned a valuable lesson on the weekend: have serious respect for those who take on a barn find. It’s not all beer and skittles with these cars. Not at first look, anyway.

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And no, I can’t really talk about the other vehicles stored with the Fulvia. It’s a little bit secret-squirrel and I don’t know how much I can give away. I’m hesitant to even show a photo of the Fulvia here. Sorry.

The video below has been the hot video of the week, racking up nearly 2.5 million views in just 4 days. I reckon nearly 1 million of those views have been from Saab fans 🙂

I first saw it on Tuesday but decided I wouldn’t use it on site. It was nice, but for me, it lacked* the backstory needed to make it a story worth telling. The ‘what’ of receiving and old Saab you’ve always wanted is nice, but I thought it really needed more of the ‘why’. Why did she want this car so much when she was younger?

The other reason I didn’t bother posting it here is that everyone was seeing it anyway (if the number of messages I got in my inbox is anything to go by).

Here’s the video. It’s short. And it’s very nice.

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* the ‘why has since been answered in the young man’s snippet accompanying the video on Youtube:

A lot of people have been asking why her dream car is the Saab ’73 99 EMS. My Mom used to clean houses for a living, and one of the houses she would clean for a few years was a guy who owned a 70’s saab 99. He would throw her the keys and let her move the car all the time and she fell in love with it.

After 6 months of looking, my friend found one on eBay and I reached out to the seller. It wasn’t the same year or colour, but it was close. It was a silver 1974. After talking with him on the phone, I found out he had a lot of collectible Saabs, one of which was the exact make, model, colour and year I was looking for.

It took me another 6 months to get it, but surprising her with it made it all worthwhile.

For those who are watching and aren’t familiar with the project, I’ll explain it here:

2.5 years ago, my mom lost her job and I set off on a challenge to earn enough money to financially retire her. I haven’t been successful yet, but this is a big milestone in helping to improve her life. She hasn’t had a car in a year, and the one before that was falling apart.

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Question: What Car Would You Like Your Kids To Buy For You?

So, imagine your kids are all grown up and they want to do something nice like this for you. What car from your youth would put a smile on your face like the one you saw in the video above?

Consider this your chance to drop a hint like never before 🙂

The rules:

1. It has to be something you really coveted in your youth.

2. It has to be something achievable, which means it’ll be something reasonably humble. Your kid(s) will have to pool some funds together one day and buy this car without putting them in debt for the rest of their lives. No Lamborghinis here (unless your kids are super-rich, in which case, more power to ya)

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My nomination – Ford Escort RS2000

Growing up in suburban Melbourne in the 1980’s, I wasn’t exposed to many of the European cars that I seem to favour today. There were few of them around and they were all in much wealthier zip codes than ours. You were either a Ford family or a Holden family (or you owned one of those new-fangled cars commonly referred to back then as “Jap crap” even if they outlasted most of the locally built stuff).

Most guys loved the big Ford GT Falcons or the Holden Monaros or Toranas that dominated racing at the time, but the Escort RS2000’s were the little hotties of my youth and I wanted one bad. I used to get whiplash whenever I saw one on the street.

I always consider it strange that I loved Fords growing up, and my parents only ever had Fords when I was growing up, and yet I’ve never owned one. An Escort RS2000 would change all that and quite nicely, too. It’s not a hot hatch as much as a mini muscle car and small cars have always held more appeal for me than large cars. One of these would fit the bill perfectly and it might even wipe out the scars memories of the standard Holden Gemini I drove at the time.

And kids, there’s one for sale for under $10,000. Nudge Nudge, wink wink…… 😉

Your turn: What Car Would You Like Your Kids To Buy For You?