COMMENT
3 1 JULY 2019 AUTOCAR.CO.UK 21
FRIDAY
Sadness and joy at the last-ever Employees’ Car
Day t o b e he ld at For d’s g i ga nt ic HQ i n Wa rle y,
Essex, soon to be turned into fl ats or fl attened
for rebuilding. To mark this momentous move,
and also to commemorate the Capri’s 50th
anniversary, more than 100 Capri owners were
invited to a morning gathering – and allowed to
park on the front lawn, as never before.
By far the biggest deal for me was meeting
Capri owner Tim Cox, who owns a 1978 3.0S Mk3
that featured on the Autocar cover of 4 March
that year. The car’s superb, partly because of
Tim’s sympathetic ownership, and partly because
after we drove it all those years ago the car was
stolen, used in a major crime (possibly a bank job)
and spent its next 21 years in a police compound!
SATURDAY
More old cars: swapped my Jag XE for a
beguiling, borrowed, bog-standard Vauxhall
Victor 101 to take to the Festival of the
Unexceptional (aka Concours d’Ordinaire) held
in Herts. It turned into a truly carefree motoring
day, not just for the concours itself, won by a
superb Morris Marina estate, but for the vast
array of fascinating cars brought by enthusiasts,
which yielded such gems as a Nissan Cherry
Europe and an Alfa Romeo Arna. This pair,
you may not care to remember, were the twin
off-shoots of an ill-fated co-operative deal that
combined Alfasud mechanicals with Nissan
Cherry bodies: a truly bizarre plan.
In a posse of barmy friends from industry and
hack-dom I spent hours combing the car park
spotting cars you never see, except here. These
`
It was used in a major crime
(possibly a bank job)
a
MY WEEK IN CARS
A l way s ex p e c te d fo r m e r Re n a u l t d e s i g n b o s s Pa tr i c k
le Quement to write a book, and here
it is: ‘Design: Between the Lines’
(Merrell, £35), with 50 essays from a
50-year career. Opening observation:
“I felt compelled to shape the change
rather than just change the shape...”
AND ANOTHER THING...
address: The Hall, Bradford-on-Avon. These
days his legacy is managed by The Alex Moulton
Charitable Trust, which is planning a couple
of events next month to mark the Mini’s 60th
anniversary. A talk called ‘Moulton and the Mini’
will be delivered by Peter Barker on 16 August,
followed next evening by a screening of
‘The Italian Job’. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Muc h mor e at mou lt ont r u s t .or g.
THURSDAY
Must be times like this that industrialists hate the
media. Despite being the UK’s most ambitious
and dynamic car industry leader, with a non-
stop list of product-creation achievements to
show for his four-and-a-half years at the helm of
Aston Martin, CEO Dr Andy Palmer is getting a
serious roasting in the fi nancial pages over the
latest decline of AML’s share price, now under £8
against a fl otation price nine months ago of £19.
The experts were always sceptical, it must besaid. And even I (from the height of my lack of
fi nancial knowledge) imagined that the main
reason for the fl oat was that the company’s
Italian and Kuwaiti owners simply saw late
2018 as a better time to get their investment
back – while retaining 75% of the company –
than 2019 or 2020 were going to be. I’m prone to
sentimentality at times like these, but I do hope
these fi nancial bumps won’t affect potential
buyers’ view of Aston as a builder of exciting and
ever-better cars. That can’t be in doubt.
Tim Cox and his 1978
Capri. It’s got a record
as long as your arm...
GET IN TOUCH
[email protected]^ @StvCr
days, a Talbot Horizon can make even the Ferrari
250 short wheelbase look common.
TUESDAY
Fun at Crewe, where a group of 60-odd Autocar
subscribers attended their very own reveal for the
EXP 100 GT concept, an event kindly staged for
their benefi t by Bentley. Our ambition has always
been for Autocar to be the centre of a community,
not just a magazine and website. There will be
mor e of t h i s: k e e p y ou r e y e s p e e le d.
WEDNESDAY
One of the delights of knowing the late Mini
suspension pioneer, Dr Alex Moulton, was
making visits – with interesting test cars – to his
wonderful old family house in west Wiltshire.
Always reckoned he had the world’s coolest
Vauxhall Victor 101,
unexceptional?
Not in 2019, surely