The Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show is back and so are we!
Starting HANDLE
James Walshe mourns the loss of the new car sales brochure
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I absolutely love the new Audi eTron GT. It’s a huge, obscenely fast, beautifully svelte electric thing with muscular Quattro-esque flanks. I like it so much, I tried to order a brochure. However, it seems car makers have twigged how pricey it is to send sales material to time-wasters like me. Brochures are evidently online only now. I have tonnes of sales material from the Fifties through to the early Noughties. From flaky Seventies Vauxhall price lists and Eighties Ford upholstery charts to pleasingly thick, glossy hardback Mercedes booklets from the Nineties, I hoard a vast array of brochures plucked from showrooms and motor shows. I was one of those kids you’d see each year at the NEC or Earl’s Court – acluster of bags in hand, weighed down with press material, booklets and price lists and an assortment of Proton paper hats. I’d grab anything and everything that was free.
These days, it takes up an immense amount of space in my house… but it has turned out to be essential research material. Everything you read in the PC guides each month – from tech specs to trim levels – is knowledge gained from a monthly thumb through those brochures. They are at the heart of our promise to you – to provide accurate, top-quality journalism.
Personally, I never ever tire of putting the kettle on and immersing myself in a world of classy (and sometimes bizarre) period photography and nonsensical, charmingly immodest text. Brochure-hunting is one of the things I most look forward to at Beaulieu Autojumble and the forthcoming Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show. So, if you see a grown man at the NEC frantically rummaging through Tupperware boxes like a ravenous pig, then you’ll know exactly who it is.
XCP cleaner & degreaser From £5.95
Cleaning and degreasing is a major part of almost any job on your classic, whether that’s an engine or suspension rebuild or simply detailing an engine bay. Traditional solvent-based degreasers cut through grime well but can harm paintwork as well as the environment. This new offering from XCP is water-based, biodegradable and claims to be safe on metals, plastics, paints and coatings making it perfect for a great variety of jobs on your classic. Supplied in a one litre pump spray bottle, it can also be ordered in an ecologically friendly five litre pouch, priced at £15, to top up once you start to run low.
TRIED AND TRUSTED
This water-based cleaner might be eco-friendly but it cuts through oil and grime just as well as solvent-based cleaners.
It’s that time of year again.
