WEDNESDAY
Here’s a reason for getting your garage doors open earlier: it’s suddenly September, as I boringly observe to the Steering Committee at this time of year, and the evening light is ebbing.
I zipped across the Cotswolds in my Alpine A110 to an evening drop-in at the Cotswold Motor Hub, a nearby classic car dealership, and by the time my friend Jeremy and I had chatted, downed a coffee, inspected his mate Mike’s Sunbeam Tiger and clocked the other motors, we had reached the departure time of 9.30pm and it was dark. Not that we need to get too depressed: the holiday traffic has gone, there’s been a lot of successful summer road repair near us and the light still lasts until 8pm. But this month, there’s driving to be done.
The Hub was busier than ever, perhaps for the reasons above. As usual, I saw a dream car, something I’ve wanted but never owned, although they were common in the Australian outback when I was a kid. It was a Chevrolet 3100 pick-up, entirely unmolested as far as I could tell, still with standard wheels, tyres and even hubcaps. Most today have been slammed, candy-appled or artificially distressed, but this one seemed to have lived an honest life since about 1953. I ached with envy, although I’m pretty sure my Alpine did the better job of getting me home on narrow country roads in the dark.
THURSDAY
You know how we bang on about the importance of heritage to car brands? Well, Hyundai strongly agrees, if an offbeat ad in our sister organ Classic & Sports Car is anything to go by. It tells the story of a vanished car, the Pony Coupé Concept, made in 1974 to inspire future Hyundais but later lost. As we know, car makers can be ruthless about scrapping concepts, especially when a new design boss arrives. Anyway, Hyundai’s bigwigs recently asked Giorgetto Giugiaro to recreate the Pony Coupé, not to put it in production or even to influence future models but simply to show the extent of the firm’s ambition half a century ago.
FRIDAY
I was delighted to get a note from Simon Lambert, Caterham’s chief technical officer, reacting to a remark I’d made on X (formerly Twitter) about a recent Jeep Wrangler SWB test car. I’d said I hadn’t had as much simple fun in a car since I’d sold my last Caterham. Lambert wanted to say how he got the connection: his household has run a Rubicon (“SWB,
