Stress free wedding – a ‘how to’ guide:
- Don’t hire a vintage motor simply for your wedding day and photographs. Instead buy a 1960s 2-seater sports car.
- Choose a left hand drive euro-import so parts are really hard to come by in the UK.
- Drive it the length of the country (say from Aberdeen to London) for said wedding.
- Plan an additional 500 miles of rural French roads for the honeymoon – pay £200 for European breakdown cover.
- For maximum thrill, plan for winter months, between November and February.
This story could be said to have started over 20 years ago when a father bought a son a Vauxhall Viva HB coupe as a project. Over subsequent years, the Nairn branch of the Highland Viva Collection grew and shrunk, but this particular project was transported to Aberdeen when garage space became available, and there it languished for a number of years.
Plans were made that this car would be ‘recommissioned’ as the wedding car and several guises were suggested as options to fill the currently vacant engine bay. Would it become a V8 monster, a hybrid of 70s British suburban sobriety and unwieldy V8 muscle. Would it receive a fuel efficient diesel engine and long range fuel tank making long distance European road trips possible without selling a kidney. Would it mature in to the thinking man’s rear wheel drive engine conversion and accept an MX-5 engine.
One Saturday evening, a young couple, merely 6 months away from their wedding day, were poking larger and larger holes in to the corroded sills when the delicate symphony of scattering rust was interrupted by the suggestion to peruse eBay for a more realistic option to act as their wedding vehicle.
“What’s that Opel thing you like?” exclaimed I.
A quick search produced the only 3 Opel GT’s for sale in the UK and a swift offer of £6,000 was made for what looked like a clean example (also the cheapest by some margin) which was later discovered to be phatter-than-your-average on account of a wide arch kit, no doubt as a replacement for arches as rusted as those we had been poking holes in merely minutes before. A counter-offer, some bartering and messaging later, the listed price of £7000 was reduced to £6600 and we were looking at a trip to just outside Bedford to buy a 1969 Opel GT sight unseen with the plan of driving it back up the country over a number of days to the frozen north.
Such was our optimism that we completed the transaction for the necessary insurance in a service station car park some 50 miles north of our destination. This was a dream car, and with only a few for sale, and minimal time to find a good example, we were almost more committed to it than we were to each other.
The history of the car was mottled. The car had a modern, depending on your decade of birth, 2.0 zetec engine from a Ford Mondeo – sacrilege as far as we were concerned and probably as troubling for both Ford & Opel/Vauxhall fans alike. A Euro import, it appeared that a Lenk body kit had been added likely as a solution to chronic rust but the finish was excellent. We considered ourselves lucky to have found one with wide arches as that was the look we much preferred despite the fact that it’s a purists nightmare. The Ford engine had apparently been bought for a kit car project by the previous owner but he (I presume it was a he) had abandoned both and performed an amalgamation in order to sell the Opel on.
The interior had been completed with similar care. eBay special bucket seats graced the interior. The fan heater which had been installed didn’t work. Metal kick-board made up the rear of the car for luggage. The only ‘original’ dial handed over with the car turned out not to be an original after all and the speedo was soon exposed as merely decorative. The wing mirrors sat below the door line which meant the passenger side was completely out of view; this is not helpful in a left hand drive car… It was love at first sight.
We had quite the car collection by this point, but it was nothing to rival the collection of the current owner, totalling 25 classic cars across a number of locations. He claimed to be a farrier but I still don’t believe that this wasn’t a code word for something else.
Driving the Opel home fell to my husband. Rain set in one hour south of the Peak District for our first overnight stop and it soon became apparent that this thing let in more water than the Costa Concordia. You may have suspected the Webasto sunroof as the culprit, as would any sane individual, but the situation was much more grave than this. Water was pouring in from behind the dash in to both passenger and driver footwells. Helpfully it was worse on the passenger side, right around the area of the fuse box. When we arrived at the hotel in rain of El Niño proportions, all that could be done was to leave it in the car park and hope that we didn’t come back to rock pool formations in the footwells, or, given that we were within hooning distance of Sheffield, that it didn’t get nicked. Both seriously doubting the sanity of the other at agreeing to this ludicrous plan in the first place, we headed off inside to catch some well earned rest and hopefully allow my husband to stave off the onset of tinnitus.
“Buy a classic car,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
The next day we planned to stop in at Halfords to buy a very necessary car cover, partly for security reasons, but mostly to prevent being drowned upon entering following heavy rain. As you can imagine, this was not without mishap. Apparently the fuel gauge required calibration, and quarter of a tank was not a quarter of a tank. In fact a quarter of a tank on an incline was actually empty, and the car coughed and spluttered itself to a standstill on a lonely back road in the Peak District. Hitchhiking seemed unlikely in this situation and my husband decided to head down the hill to a handily placed petrol station a couple of miles away. I decided this was as good a time as any for a photoshoot. “Buy a classic car,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said.
The next overnight location was the Lake District for the pre-planned leg of the ‘holiday’ during which we were set to check out proposed honeymoon locations. This was accomplished in the Opel, and we drove down the tiny country lanes becoming accustomed to the car’s many quirks and emotionally preparing ourselves for the onset of more. An overwhelming stench of fuel in the cabin meant we couldn’t remain stationary with the engine running for too long for fear of becoming high, though this might have staved off the stress induced depression of having bought a complete heap on the spur of the moment. When we were not stationary, the ratio-ception (in-joke) of both the diff and gear box ratios meant that you could hit 40mph before you needed to change out of first. This made for lively gear selection at the 30-50mph max that you can achieve in this area of the country, making one extremely glad to be changing gear with your right, and therefore stronger, arm. Driving the car with two people present made the journey slightly less stressful as the passenger was able to yell, over the din of the engine, exhaust and overworked fuel pump, what on earth was happening in the offside wing mirror and exactly how much extra space was available before crossing the white lines in the middle of the road, this being typically measured in inches rather than feet. Truly a relaxing experience.
However, there were small mercy’s and the long ratio proved handy for the motorway leg of our journey home. This proved to be the only upside. Wind whistled through the cabin at speeds over 50mph stripping any warmth from the atmosphere. My husband arrived at every rest break a cold and broken man. It was always held in the back of our minds that we would be replicating this very journey in only 6 months time in order to head south for our wedding and we had chosen the end of October as our date. In order not to arrive utterly miserable, deaf and hoarse, it was clear that some minor improvements were required…
So there lies Chapter 1 of this epic tale
… to be continued
M
Turbochatter 