LETTER
LETTER OF THE MONTH
The March issue brought back memories of a Rover SD1 (‘I knew it was rotten as a pear. It was scrap’) and Opel Monza (Everyman Executive).
During the Eighties my friend Brian had a Monza 3.0E with a fiv-espeed manual and limited-slip differential, which was mainly fitted to the automatics. It was a metallic brown that still looked dirty after spending a whole day washing and Simonizing! I bought it because Brian had his eye on a twin-plenum SD1 Vitesse.
At the time, some school buddies and I were keen on skiing – and we had the offer of a flat in Schladming in Austria for two weeks. Somewhere in Germany after quite a few petrol stops, Brian spotted on the map that the next section of the autobahn had a long straight. Soon after we set off from the lunchtime stop my passenger in the Monza dropped off to sleep while Brian accelerated quickly until the SD1 was a dot on the horizon – but not for long. I caught him up, the speedo reading just over 150mph. When we pulled in to top up the tanks, Brian was miffed at being caught up by his old car; my passenger was miffed that he had missed it all.
The Monza did suffer from snobbery; how can a GM car be better than a BMW or Mercedes? Well, it was. The only annoying thing was central locking that didn’t operate the rear hatch. If you dropped someone off and they had things in the back, you had to switch off and open the hatch with the key.
It was one of the best cars I've owned; superbly comfortable and ideal to travel many miles, even off the motorway – and the limited-slip differential kept the tail under control out of wet roundabouts.
A coachbuilding family
The 1935 Rolls-Royce 20/25 sports saloon by HJ Mulliner (Barn Finds, February 2023) brought back many memories.
My father was a coachbuilder at HJ Mulliner at Chiswick after the war and I started in 1951 as an apprentice panel beater, returning after national service in 1959 to find that they were short of work. In the meantime I worked at Crailville Coachworks in Southall restoring Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, AC Cobras and Panthers. When I returned to HJ Mulliner in 1974, it had amalgamated with Park Ward and was based at 473 High Road, Willesden, London NW10.
My father was still working there so we were in the same building for a year. My g
