Plastic classics

A vintage boat doesn't win the same admiration as an elderly car - but it should!

- Dave Selby

Describing the Sailfish 18 as the Reliant Robin of the seas is likely to cause offence, as I found to my cost when a posse of Reliant Robins set off to Maldon in mass protest.

Fortunately, there’s an off-camber bend in the way into town and all three of the three-wheelers that’d made it that far ended up on their backs in a ditch with their rear wheels spinning frantically like upended cockroaches. But that got me thinking.

The Robin and its forbear, the grandiosely titled Reliant Regal – which really should have been called the Reliant Legal, as a loophole in our laws meant you could drive it on a motorcycle licence and tax it as a motorcycle and sidecar – are acknowledged as classics. Why then isn’t the Sailfish 18?

When I drove up to a county fair a few years ago in my 1989 Volvo 240 estate a parking marshal even let me in for free and ushered me to the classic car display area, where I parked alongside an Austin All-Aggro authentically displayed in its natural setting – on the back of an RAC recovery truck.