Steve Cropley
MONDAY
I shamelessly ducked our Monday office meeting to head 240 miles north in the Audi SQ8 E-tron for a promised visit to the Mathewsons classic car auction business in Pickering, North Yorkshire, made famous since 2019 by the Bangers and Cash TV series. Late last year, I met kingpin Derek Mathewson at a dinner in (of all places) the House of Commons and he turned out to be exactly the relaxed and knowledgeable character he seems on the haunted fishtank. His invitation, plus the prospect of viewing stock for a two-day sale that would put 700 lots under the hammer, was too good to miss. It was also a decent test for the none-too-efficient Audi because we would need to ‘fill up’ twice and in a 500-mile day trip there wouldn’t be much time for hanging about.
Mathewsons’ has to be seen to be believed. It’s extraordinary that so many disparate cars, bikes and people should gather in such an out-of-the-way place. Typically, Derek Mathewson attributes this neither to the TV series nor the homespun appeal of his 54-year-old family business (staffed by 15 people, all family or old friends) but to the market accessibility of the internet. Of course, I saw lots of prospective purchases but didn’t succumb. Derek and staff were as lovable as expected and the Audi did a refined job, only the pitching ride sometimes letting it down. The UK’s motorway charging network threw up only one 20-minute glitch, which we overcame. In all, a grand day out.
WEDNESDAY
Surveying all the well-turned and authoritative praise for the achievements of late master designer Marcello Gandini, I found myself considering a weird proposition: how different my own life would have been without the Lamborghini Countach, one of Gandini’s best-known and most arresting designs. I arrived in muttering rotterdom just as famous Kiwi test driver Bob Wallace was putting finishing touches to the car, and visited the Sant’Agata, Bolognese, factory quite a lot through its 1980s heyday.
I must have driven seven or eight Countachs over the years in Italy and the UK, including a couple on trips back from Italy to deliver stock to the UK distributor. (One of those was impounded at Dover for inadequate paperwork, and I had to get home by train.) I also visited Gandini’s home during the later 1980s, though I only remember three things with clarity: his slightly dusty
AND ANOTHER THING…
The family of the late Sir St
