Vampires Without Coffins

The late 1980s and early 1990s were what I call my Road & Track years.

- Eli Solomon

I’d eagerly await my copy in the mailbox, happy in the knowledge that I would have another of Peter Egan’s Side Glances to devour, deep in the knowledge that Peter knew what I was going through as I grappled with one restoration after another. Those were the Italian car years of my misspent youth, self-inflicted punishment of putting together a Lancia Montecarlo followed by a basket case of a Lamborghini, a car so underdeveloped that I could almost see Sant’Agata Bolognese’s legendary test driver Valentino Balboni shrugging his shoulders when confronted with the antics of the company’s baby bull, the Urraco.

Those were the years where parking a project car in the family driveway (sloping) would be met with banshee wails and threats of self-immolation from occupants of the house. An aerial survey of my parents’ front lawn will reveal skeletal remains of two ladder frame chassis – that of a Triumph Spitfire Mk2 and an Austin A40 Special, a race car built at Borneo Motors’ Austin facility in Singapore in 1953 for its then sales manager. 500 years down the road, archaeologists will rewrite history and claim that they’d discovered a sophisticated twin-chassis classic predating Colin Chapman’s Lotus 88.

My local contemporaries will understand the situation of a lack of garage space when working with old cars. We didn’t have the luxury of working space, or for that matter, access to proper tools, hoists and…knowledge.