Several years ago, during lunch on the Three Castles Welsh Rally, I was rather taken aback at one reader’s observation that my then daily driver, a Porsche 912, was clearly nothing but trouble. Once I had got over the initial shock though, I delved deeper and eventually saw the chap’s point.
Before then, I had never really considered how the Our Classics pages of C&SC can come across and it didn’t take a lot to make me realise that to the reader, it can often appear as if we own and run the most troublesome and unreliable bunch of classics that we could possibly have bought!
“Last issue you had to rebuild the suspension, the issue before you had that ignition trouble, before that you rebuilt the engine, then there was the one when the brakes seized on…” and so the list went on.
What I had to point out was that, by default, the content of Our Classics revolves around work we have done to the cars – after all, there is little mileage in writing about what hasn’t happened.
The upshot of all this is that it is entirely possible that the reader gets a skewed impression of the cars we own, so perhaps it is time to redress the balance?
To put things into perspective, my dearly beloved (and not forgotten) Porsche 912 covered a vast mileage, several European jaunts and braved the seasons with aplomb.
