The Dark Wob

I once ended up with a 1978 Jaguar XJ-S V12 for the princely sum of £100, with the number plate "5694 VF".

It was generally buggered, although the engine was fine and it did drive.

I sold it for £1000 to a bloke that was planning to put a 2 litre Cortina engine in it...!

I once encountered a Capri with a Jaguar V12 fitted really badly...

I was once stupid enough to trade in a very nice Rover 2200 for a Porsche 928S. The 928 is one of two Porsches that I like, the other being the 356. It was getting on a bit and whilst looking good the paperwork with it showed the usual signs of going from no expense spared to every expense spared. There was also paperwork showing that at one point it had been repossessed by a finance company and it came with a different key for every lock.
I was blind to all this to start with as it looked and sounded great.

It was only after driving it a few miles that I found it wasn't charging. The alternator repair was the beginning of much expense. It blew an oil seal, fortunately at the time I knew someone who fixed it for me, also changing the timing belt at the same time. I was also lucky that there was a Porsche Specialist/breaker not too far away who became a good source of things like relays, window motors and switches, as they started dying. The brakes needed attention early on as the discs had warped. It liked to keep me on my toes, demanding money with menaces every week. I was given some very good tyres for it by a friend who had upgraded the wheels on his. (He also gave me a full exhaust system as he had fitted a sports* system on his).

It wasn't a bad car, it was just I was trying to catch up with a lot of neglect in one go. The biggest downside was that I did not like being seen in it and that it attracted vandals (pinched badges scratches, broken off aerial, etc.). It didn't go down particularly well at work either, being black with tints it was referred to as my drug dealer car. I also had a faceful of abuse from a member of the public; I had to visit them over a work issue, he was not a happy bunny, but I had managed to placate him. It was all going so well until we walked out. "Who parked that there?" "It's ok it's mine" he then had a big rant about how overpaid I must be (It still looked the part even though it was nearly 20 years old) I learned that in future it was best to park around the corner.

After a few months and a lot of money I had got it out of my system, its final bills were for fixing the sunroof and wheel bearing which both gave up the day someone had come to look at it. I think he was half scared of the car as I offered to knock money off, but he offered to pay the asking price if I had them fixed. Funnily I had it fixed for less than I had offered to knock off the price, that never happens to me. I don't think it exists anymore, unless it's gone back on a private plate.

CLINT wrote: ↑Wed Jun 26, 2019 4:52 pm I once encountered a Capri with a Jaguar V12 fitted really badly...

I've seen one mainly under the bonnet of a Viva, a few cylinders may be been in with the driver.

My first job was as a messenger in an advertising agency in 1981, the MD swapped his Stag for an XJ-S just after I started. He was a serous pisshead and on the night of the office Christmas party was so paralytic and making such a nuisance of himself with the female staff, one of the other directors told me to drag him to his car and drive him home to Beaconsfield from Covent Garden.
Obviously he was unaware that I was only a week past my 17th birthday and might not have passed my test...

I doubt you could do 130 through the Euston underpass ( unless on a bike) these days and those short street lamps by Northolt fairly whizz by when you're flat out in an XJ-S. Anyway, I got him home and back to the restaurant in an hour, just in time to give his secretary a lift home to Dulwich , she performed in a Gillian Taylforth manner outside her house too. She admitted it wasn't the first time she'd done it in the Jag and that the Stag was easier- gotta love the pre-AIDS 80's.

I had a succession of what are considered supercars today during the Eighties, when used ones were utterly affordable if you played your cards wisely and the term 'supercar' wasn't even invented yet.
However, the one that sticks in my memory like a painful shard is the one I didn't buy, which is a 1963 330 GT 2+2, next to which on that used car lot was a 1970 Olds 442 W-30 convertible in special order Aegean Aqua Poly, with the white stripe kit and matching interior, so I bought that instead, reasoning the 'rari would be a sea of snot in comparison. Both cars survive and are alive and well today, still in the Munich area. For some odd reason I've always shunned away from Ferraris, but eventually did briefly own a 400 Auto and a Daytona, the latter in an arrestingly beautiful brown. I enjoyed neither of them because they impressively confirmed the prejudices I held against them all along. They were shoddily put together sheds and remarkably unrefined to drive, if you managed to coax them through the warmup phase without fouling the spark plugs in the first place, rendering them utterly useless as daily drivers. But the concept of a non daily driver doesn't really exist in my world, so that was that.

I had a few as daily drivers, an Iso Grifo A/GL Sette Litri, a Maserati Ghibli SS, a DeTomaso Pantera and if you want to count them in a Maserati Quattroporte Tipo AM 107 and a '63 Lagonda Rapide, apart from several Corvettes, culminating in a 1990 ZR-1. Not so daily drivers were one of the 29 factory built Shelby Cobra 427 S/Cs and a D'Ieteren 993 3.8 RSR.

Let me know if you want to read long winded and boring stories about any of these.

Yes - I do.

The nearest I've come to a Ferrari Daytona is in a garage in Leeds that had 3 for sale at £5,000 each in 1974.

I think an annual service would have cost the same as my then salary as a civil servant, a brief blip in a career history that included quite a few of them.

I'd be interested in hearing about how the Ghibli and the Pantera were as daily drivers

I would be interested in tales of breakdowns, fuel economy and general woe.

Okay, let's start at the beginning then...

I did not keep the Daytona long enough to carry out a service and the cost of a service never was a concern for me, since I had the necessary infrastructure back then to carry out my own services, I also did service cars like this for clients. In fact, I did repair and restoration work on sports cars, what 'supercars' were called back then.

The Ghibli was without a doubt the most useable of the lot, everything about it had the vibe of professionalism. I judge this by how the door jambs, door edges, screen surrounds, general fit and finish and other details are executed, you get the idea. It did not have any of this hand built half arsedness whatsoever. It was unbelievably refined and an excellent grand tourer in the truest sense of the expression. I used it extensively to commute between Frankfurt/M and Calabria at the time, often three to four times a Month. I also used it for all kinds of other trips at the drop of a hat, down to the Cote Azure a few times and such stuff. If driven not like my pants were on fire, it returned the usual 20 or so OMGMPG all these kinds of cars return when I drive them. It was a surprisingly tough beast that could shrug off an incredible amount of abuse.

The Pantera does exactly what it says on the tin. SBF power makes it relatively easy to live with oily bits wise.
As a real daily it was rather impractical, though, for various reasons. All round visibility was one of them. It's also not that easy to get in and out of and I never was a slim and agile Adonis. Once inside, it's a bit cramped but not uncomfortable, but in the end I think it's more suitable for persons smaller than I am. It's useless for long trips because you can't take anything with you and the engine within inches of your ears makes it annoyingly noisy after a while. I think its main raison d'etre is to show up with it somewhere not too far from where you live. And forget to pull birds with it, that was hopeless even in the Eighties.