New venue for Lancashire classic car New Year show

A NEW YEAR treat for classic car fans in Lancashire has been relocated to a new venue.

Traditionally the January 1 show for owners of older cars took place at Briars Hall in Lathom, but it’s now going to take place from 10.30am onwards at the Corner House pub in nearby Wrightington.

The pub’s other monthly meetings for classic car owners have been suspended for the winter until 6 March next year.

You love the NEC Classic Motor Show - here are some other great classic car shows you won't want to miss

LAST weekend I joined 68,000 of you in getting up at the crack of dawn so they can join a traffic jam just outside Birmingham. It was worth it – the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show is one of those automotive pilgrimages everyone should do at least once.

Even petrolheads I know who think anything south of Crewe is ‘a bit far’ will happily head down the M6 to see 3000 classic cars – whether it’s an Austin Maestro van or an Aston Martin Vanquish that floats your boat, chances are you’ll have found it in Birmingham’s halls of automotive dreams.

It’s also the place where you can see Mike Brewer and Edd China finish a three-day resto miraculously close to kicking-out time on the final day and where just about every spare part imaginable will be at the bottom of a box on an autojumble stand.

It’s great fun – but it’s also where most petrolheads’ idea of a weekend outing stops.

The NEC show is great despite having to visit Birmingham on a dreary weekend. Auto Retro, on the other hand, is an excuse to persuade the other half to catch some winter sun in Barcelona – and it’s only a budget flight away from Liverpool or Manchester. If you’re staying overnight Barcelona’s hotels cost roughly the same as Birmingham’s – and whichever way you cut it, you’re more likely to persuade your other half with Gaudi’s basilica than the Bullring shopping centre.

It’s the same story with Germany. I love the Silverstone Classic, but book your plane tickets now on the cheap and you could just easily go to the Nürburgring in the height of summer for the AVD Oldtimer Grand Prix. Forget the language barrier – it’s worth going just to see all those BMW M1s and Porsche 911s going to war on the world’s scariest race track.

Then there’s the Irish National Classic Car Show in Dublin next March – a whole day of motoring fun and an evening of knocking back pints of Guiness, less than an hour from John Lennon airport – or the AutoMotoRetro show in the shadow of the old Fiat factory in Turin. Then there’s the behemoth that is the Essen show next April – if you think your feet get a bit tired after a day after tramping around the NEC then you’ll have no idea just how enormous Europe’s biggest classic car show is. You could spend weeks wandering around in there!

The NEC is great and as a show it belongs to 'us' - the classic car nuts. But just remember there are so many other shows just waiting to be discovered, and they’re only a cheap flight away.

Adios, amigo. See you in Barcelona!

Read more about the Lancaster Insurance Classic Motor Show in today's issue of Classic Car Weekly

Why I love the unloved Allegro

THERE are plenty of great cars I don’t particularly like. Yet it takes a different sort of topsy-turvy logic altogether to like what’s widely regarded as Britain’s worst car.

If you’re the sort of armchair car critic who’s had their idea of what constitutes a rubbish car cemented through a lifetime of Jeremy Clarkson DVDs then you might as well click away now. If on the other hand you’re prepared to give even motoring’s worst offenders a fair trial, then you’ll be shocked by the verdict.

I’ve just spent the past three days hoofing about in an Austin Allegro – and I really enjoyed it.

It’s fashionable to give the poor old Allegro a kicking. In the past couple of years the tabloids have picked up on at least three surveys naming and shaming it as Britain’s worst car, in 2012 a Tory peer likened a poorly thought-out Government policy to one and Jeremy Clarkson could only think of the Morris Marina when looking for cars he hated more. In fact, I nearly joined them when a 1.1-litre Series 3 Allegro left me stranded on the M11 a couple of months ago.

So I wasn’t expecting much when a colleague chucked me the keys to his pride and joy – a V-registered Allegro 1.3 in a fantastically Seventies shade of brown with beige seats. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting to fire faithfully into life every time I tried to start it. Surely British Leyland relics from the decade that brought you the three day week and Terry and June aren’t supposed to do that?

Nor was I expecting it to go and steer in a genuinely entertaining way. I know from the 1.1-litre car I borrowed a few months ago that to drive they feel a bit like a Mini that ate all the pies, but this 1.3-litre car had just enough extra oomph to overcome the podge. I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but the right Allegro is a fun car to drive!

What’s more, it has room for five, the interior’s light and airy because its window pillars are so much thinner than today’s hatchbacks, and if you look hard enough you can still pick decent ones up for under a grand. Just about the only downsides are the lack of a hatchback – bizarrely, the logic was that giving it one would harm sales of the Austin Maxi – and looks that I think are cute and distinctive but most people hate.

So the world’s worst car is actually not all that bad. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!

We build replicas of sports cars - why not hot hatches?

NOSTALGIA’S a funny thing. I doubt the ‘good old days’ really are as marvellous as their supporters make out, but bringing bygone eras back to life is big business.

You already know you can go out and buy a Volkswagen Beetle, a Fiat 500 and a MINI – all of which are a heck of a lot easier to live with than their 1965 equivalents – but you’d be surprised at how many people make a living out of giving you an even more hardcore hit of nostalgia.

That’s why Triumph will sell you a Bonneville that to casual motorcycle fans looks and feels almost exactly like something that lapped the TT circuit half a century ago, managing directors hitch up Airstream caravans to the back of their Range Rover Sports and tickets to the Goodwood Revival sell out in half a femtosecond. Even the politicians are it – Jeremy Corbyn reckons 60% of us would rather railways were state-owned, like they were in the good old days.

Naturally, there are plenty of car companies who’ll sell you a slice of the sort of nostalgia where it’s got to feel as well as look the part. You’d think Morgan would have this niche pretty much to itself – there are caves with primitive paintings of the Plus 4 etched onto their walls – but there are also companies who will sell you replicas of Jaguar XK120s and importers you can source you a brand new Lada Niva straight from Russia – 18 years after it officially disappeared from the nation’s showrooms.

Yet I reckon the specialists are missing a trick. There are lots of companies who are fulfilling the pent-up nostalgia of people who want a classic British sports car that happens to be brand new – take the Caterham Seven – but what about the thousands of us who spent their youth pulling hot hatches out of hedges?

In the past few weeks I’ve driven the Ford Fiesta and the Volkswagen Golf in the lithe MkI guises their late 1970s creators intended, and they handle and steer so much more crisply than their modern day equivalents. Today’s hot hatches are brilliant, but even a modern day Fiesta ST doesn’t have the flyweight fun factor of the old XR2.

If you can buy what’s effectively a showroom fresh Jaguar XK120 or a brand new Lotus Seven, why can’t you get a brand new Fiesta XR2 or Clio Williams? The teenagers who grew up with Sam Fox rather than Diana Dors are going to want their nostalgia hit soon enough – and it’s hot hatches, not sports cars, they grew up with.

Kit car builders of Britain – consider the gauntlet laid down!

Ormskirk MotorFest - how hard can it be judging a concours?

SIMON Cowell has it easy on The X Factor. At least he gets some easy dud entrants to kick out of the proceedings on his annual – and inevitable – pop juggernaut as it thunders towards the Christmas number one.

I reckon I got assigned a far trickier task at this year's Ormskirk MotorFest. One that involved making some even tougher choices, even if it didn’t involve breaking the dreams of any teenage girls desperate to be the next Pixie Lott.

At this year's event I got given the task of judging the classic cars entered into the event’s new Concours D’Elegance – a sort of automotive Crufts for people who pamper and polish their pride and joy rather than using it for late night jaunts to the nearest 24-hour supermarket for some scones and a bottle of washing up liquid.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only showgoer who spotted the irony – someone who owns a slightly shabby MGB and this year entered the MotorFest in a Range Rover that still needs a bit of bodywork attention was being asked to judge cars on their tidiness.

Happily, my co-judge was motorsport historian (and MotorFest commentator) Neville Hay. You’d like Neville – not only has he got a wicked sense of humour and is never short of an anecdote, but he’s probably forgotten more about old cars than I’ve learned. Yet the task was still unenviable. If every car in a field is in wonderful condition and has been doted on by its owner for years on end, how on earth do you go about picking a winner?

We both agreed a mission statement - in the same way a Crufts prizewinner that doesn’t get to go out digging holes and chasing sticks isn’t really on, we wanted to avoid the show queens that get trailered to events and give the prize to a nice car owned by someone who enjoys it in the real world.

Even then, we ended up picking nits to separate the truly brilliant cars from the merely great ones, docking points off for the sort of scuffs most motorists don’t give a stuff about. In the end a single point split the winner from the car that came second – it really was that close.

It really ought to have been a bit like a primary school sports day where everybody won a prize, but in the end we gave it to Graham Postlethwaite’s virtually immaculate Rover P5B Coupé. Even in a contest packed with prizeworthy motors it was a deserving winner.

The cheque should land on my doormat by Friday. Only joking…

Read more about the Ormskirk MotorFest in this week's issue of Classic Car Weekly - published 9 September 2015.

MG needs to get back to its sports car roots

OPAL FRUITS, Stephen Fry’s tweets and Top of the Pops. It’s funny how you only really start appreciating some things when they’re gone.

In fact, I’d like to add the MGF to that list. It's roughly 20 years since its launch  – and the more I think about it, the more I realise its absence is a fairly significant bit of Britain’s automotive armoury missing.

Okay, so it wasn’t perfect. If I had a pound for every armchair critic who dismisses the ‘F for blown head gaskets I’d have enough to buy a replacement Rover K-Series engine, but much more serious were its poor showings in customer satisfaction surveys when it was new. Oh, and Anthea Turner was a proud owner.

Yet despite Anthea’s best efforts Britain loved the ‘F – in fact, for a brief stint it actually outsold Mazda’s MX-5 – so for more than a decade it acted as the nation’s fun, inoffensive sports car of choice. Just like the MGB did a generation earlier.

Where is the modern equivalent? It’s the middle of summer, there’s a generation of company car drivers given allowances rather than mid-range Mondeos by their fleet managers – and what I suppose would be called the MGG is nowhere to be seen.

MG is alive and well, but it should be hunting on the territory it used to call its own as well as targeting the Hyundai-peddling masses.

I drove an MG3 last year and it was frugal and fun in an old-school, Citroen Saxo-ish sort of way. I suppose – and feel free to raise your eyebrows at this one – it does sort of live up to the legacy left by the old MG Metro. Fair enough, but what I reckon the world really craves is another proper MG, the sort you can pop the roof down and enjoy when the sun’s shining, and hole up in the pub and discuss breakdowns when it isn’t.

The MGF’s old rivals – the Fiat Barchetta, the Toyota MR2, the Alfa Spider and so on – are all gone, leaving the MX-5 as just about the only option left if you want a small, fun, inoffensive sports car.

Now is the time for MG’s Chinese masters to make it happen, but chances are they won’t. Don’t get bored with waiting – chuck a grand at a cheap MGF and remind the world what it’s missing.

It's your last chance to enter this year's Ormskirk MotorFest

THE organisers of this year's Ormskirk MotorFest have hit their target of bringing 350 classic cars and bikes to West Lancashire next month - but that means you'll have to hurry if you want to enter your pride and joy.

Aintree Circuit Club said it had reached its goal for the 30 August event, and will be closing entries tomorrow (25 July). It's free to take part, although entering the event's new Concours D'Elegance contest is £10 per vehicle.

Club chairman Mike Ashcroft said:"We will shortly be closing for Entries as we have now reached 350 vehicles, which is our target for this year.

"Late entries from racing type machinery may be accepted and also for the Concours d’Elegance, which you can enter online too."

Previous entries at the MotorFest, which has taken place in Ormskirk town centre since 2011, have included a BRM P261 Formula One car, a Ferrari Enzo originally owned by Rod Stewart, and the McLaren MP4-12C. The event includes displays in the town centre and Coronation Park, plus parades on the town's one-way system.

If you want to enter go to the event website and fill in the online form with your vehicle details.

Get your entries in for the 2015 Ormskirk MotorFest!

CLASSIC CAR owners have until the end of the month to get their entries in for this year’s Ormskirk MotorFest.

This year’s event takes place on Sunday, August 30 and includes a new Concours D’Elegance competition which rewards owners for cleanly presented cars. The MotorFest takes place in Ormskirk town centre and Coronation Park.

For more information and to get your classic car entered go to the event's website.

Transatlantic 175 set the template for Liverpool car shows

AT LAST. After what feels like an eternity, Liverpool’s had a proper car show we could all enjoy!

I know that Transatlantic 175 – as a celebration of Merseyside’s maritime, rather than motoring, heritage – encompassed a weekend of events focusing on lots of things other than old cars. If you’d wandered down to the waterfront over the weekend, you’d have been greeted with music, vintage fashion and – rather more impressively – the imposing sight of the Queen Mary 2 looming over Liverpool’s waterfront.

But for me (and it seems, a couple of thousand others) the real highlight was seeing 200-odd cars, ranging from Austin Sevens to Aston Martin DB5s, dotted around in front of the Three Graces. Not only was it a wonderful sight to behold, but something long overdue.

For years, it’s been accepted wisdom that car shows are seas of Sunbeam Rapiers and folding chairs held in the grounds of stately homes and on village greens. Events like the ones at Tatton Park, Cholmondeley and – on a smaller scale, last weekend’s Lydiate show – are great are pulling in some very diverse old cars and the band of merry enthusiasts who support them (I should know – I’m one of them).

But big car events held in town and city centres have a different pull altogether – the power to draw huge throngs of car nuts onto the high streets. It’s the sort of thing that’d make Mary Portas don a set of driving goggles and hop into a vintage Bentley – thousands of people who love cars going to look at Astons and Ferraris, and then spending their hard-earned cash in the nearby shops afterwards.

The Manchester Classic Car Show, now in its third year, brings more than 9000 car nuts within a stone’s throw of the Trafford Centre. Bradford’s annual event – held in front of its Grade I-listed city hall – is a bustling event now in its tenth year. That’s before I get to the Regent Street Motor Show and how it conveniently gets thousands of shoppers onto the London thoroughfare just before Christmas. There was only one question I heard all the classic car owners asking at the Pier Head over the weekend. When’s it all happening again?

Transatlantic 175 set a template for something the powers-that-be should have done ages ago. Liverpool is a wonderful venue with a lot of car-making heritage – let’s have more of this sort of thing!

For more pictures from Transatlantic 175 see the 8 July 2015 issue of Classic Car Weekly

In praise of proper, traditional car shows

WE LIVE in troubled times, if the seemingly constant threats of Greek financial meltdown, terrorist attacks and Katie Hopkins turning to Twitter are anything to go by. That’s why I’m glad there’s usually a car show somewhere nearby to escape the mayhem!

Regular readers will already know I’m a bit of a car show junkie – whether it’s a breakfast meet at a pub down the road or a continental juggernaut of a show like the huge indoor shows at Paris or Essen, I’ll happily wear my shoes out wandering around. Car shows are a petrolhead staple and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but the ones I enjoy most of all are the ones are the quintessentially British ones where sea of Triumph Spitfires and MG Midgets is broken only by the burger bars and the fairground rides.

That’s probably why I thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the Riverside Steam and Vintage Rally, a stone’s throw from Tarleton, the other day.

Not only is it all for a good cause – since the event’s inception in 2009, it’s raised more than £200,000 for charities right here in the North West – but it’s also refreshing to look around a show that’s down-to-Earth, free of gimmicks and affordable to enter.

The cars, with the notable exception of a Land Rover Series III formerly owned by Fred Dibnah, aren’t the real stars of the show - that honour goes to all the lovingly maintained steam traction engines and William Hunter’s hugely impressive collection of classic trucks.

However, once you’ve finished looking at all the trucks, buses, tractors and motorcycles the show there are more than enough old cars to keep anyone entertained, and I actually enjoyed the fact there wasn’t a single Lamborghini Miura or Aston Martin DB4 within a ten-mile radius. Nope, it was just yard after yard of nostalgia for the sort of cars you’d have actually seen on the nation’s roads a couple of generations ago – Cortinas, Cambridges, Heralds, and so on. Wonderful!

It’s this sort of thoroughly old school approach to car shows I never get bored of, and why I hope Riverside keeps on raising the charity cash like this for years to come. The good news if you love these old cars is that the show season’s just kicking off and there’s plenty more of this sort of thing on the way – keep an eye out for the Hundred End, Lydiate, and Tatton Park shows for more of this unashamed nostalgia.

See you there!

Read a full review of the Riverside Steam and Vintage Rally in tomorrow's issue of Classic Car Weekly

Why Britain needs a scrappage scheme rethink

SO THERE’S an election coming up. Among the things I’ll be asking candidates who come a-knocking to pledge their support for is turning the M6 into Britain’s first derestricted, German autobahn-style stretch of motorway and minimum speed limits for Nissan Micra owners.

Joking aside, there is a potentially hot potato anyone with even the vaguest interest in cars should be smearing with butter and getting their teeth into – the prospect of a scrappage scheme being reintroduced.

I’ve spoken to all the political parties about the idea of a cash-for-clunkers programme being reintroduced – essentially, a rerun of the controversial 2009 scheme aimed at boosting new car sales by sending older motors to the crusher. While none of them have openly advocated it, some fairly influential figures, including Boris Johnson and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, have. Nissan has already been piloting its own scheme in Ireland. With the last one sending a third of a million cars to the scrapheap for good, a new one would represent a fairly seismic shift in the nation’s motoring landscape.

I’ve spent plenty of time asking what the implications would be for classic cars caught up in the scheme. Last time around 572 MGs and 45 Jaguar XJSs were taken off the roads, found guilty without trial of being unwanted old bangers.

However, there’s a more practical problem with scrappage. The real villains – at least if you believe Boris Johnson’s rhetoric – are diesel cars more than a decade old, because every time one clackers into life on a cold morning there’s a butterfly effect that eventually leads to a polar bear keeling over. But scrappage doesn’t do nearly enough about these cars.

My Peugeot 306 diesel would have been eligible for the last scrappage scheme, but it survived because the prospect of a £2000 discount on a new car either wasn’t tempting or affordable enough. If I wanted to do a like-for-like upgrade and help the environment by canning the old warhorse and plonking my posterior in an entry-level 308 diesel, even with the two grand knocked it’d still be £14,495 I don’t have.

It’s a nice idea, but the people who drive all those 15-year-old Merc E300Ds and battered old Land Rover Discovery TDis tend not be interested in shelling out thousands of pounds on a new car, so they’ll carry on chugging about and suffocating nearby squirrels.

What whoever introduces at the next scrappage scheme needs is a dose of old fashioned, hang-on-a-minute common sense. There needs to be some Treasury magic to make scrapping a Rover 25 diesel in favour of a brand new car make monetary sense.

More importantly, there needs to be way we can all say scrapping a perfectly good Austin A35 or Jaguar XJ-S in favour of a discounted Kio Rio is absolute madness.

Entries now open for 2015 Ormskirk MotorFest

A NEW concours d’elegance event bringing together the finest cars from across the North West will be one of big draws of this year’s Ormskirk MotorFest.

Entries are now open for classic car and sports car owners keen to take part in the August 30 event, which brings together static displays and parades around the town’s one-way system.

Find out more about how to apply on the event's website.

Classic cars sought for Liverpool heritage festival

ENTRIES are now open for the classic car cavalcade and motoring-themed display at Liverpool’s Transatlantic 175 festival on July 5.

While the parade through the city centre is limited to 175 vehicles, the accompanying Vintage On The Docks display will be open to classic owners across Sefton and West Lancashire. Classic cars which tie in with the event's transatlantic theme - particularly US icons - are particularly sought after by the show organisers.

Go to the event's website to find out how to get your application in.

Why the Transatlantic 175 classic car cavalcade will be a celebration of Scouse motoring

HERE’S a pub quiz question to test your motoring knowledge. What does the Range Rover Evoque have in common with the Triumph TR7, the BAC Mono and the Ford Anglia?

The answer – should you wish to try this one on your petrolhead pals – is they’ve all been bolted together just down the road in Liverpool. As were the Jaguar X-Type, the Land Rover Freelander, the Ford Escort and the Triumph Toledo for that matter.

We’ve been mass-producing motors on Merseyside since the 1960s, and yet these great industrial achievements have gone uncelebrated for decades. That’s why I was delighted to learn the other day that one of the star draws of Liverpool’s Transatlantic 175 festival in July is a cavalcade through the city centre of 175 classic cars and motorbikes, accompanied by a static display of motoring’s greatest hits on the Albert Dock. I can’t wait to see how this one pans out, because Merseyside’s been overdue a really big car event for decades.

The event’s organisers told me they’re looking for cars from across the North West which are either British or American and have “great stories to tell” –prototypes, one-offs, early models, that sort of thing – for the 5 July parade through the centre. While it’s still early days and applications have only just opened for the event, I reckon it’s got the potential to be a real hit because there are so many wonderful cars being enjoyed by car nuts across the North West.

Wouldn’t it be great to see one of the first Ford Anglias ever to roll off the Halewood production line take part in that parade, followed by a couple of the Formula One cars which fans of the Ormskirk MotorFest will be familiar with? You could stretch it out beyond Liverpool’s borders too; I’d love to see a Southport-crafted Vulcan, one of the Lotus Europas lovingly built in Banks or one of Ellesmere Port’s earliest Vauxhall Vivas winding their way past Liverpool’s landmarks.

That’s before I get onto the land speed record set in Southport by Sir Henry Segrave or the fact that Aintree is about so much more than horse racing – it’s where Sir Stirling Moss became the first Englishman to win a British Grand Prix! The North West has a wonderful motoring heritage and the Transatlantic 175 festival is the perfect occasion to share that with the world.

I’m really looking forward to hearing the noise of those 175 cars and bikes starting up as they get ready for the parade. See you there!

The Classic Car Show is no Top Gear, but that doesn't stop me liking it

TOP GEAR is back on form. It seems that no matter how much the tabloids knock its presenters for offending everyone from here to Argentina, the show keeps gorging itself on spinach and coming back even stronger.

Even though it’s been years since it’s done a properly down-to-Earth, sensible set of wheels you really can’t fault it for entertaining motoring telly. I laughed like a drain when Richard Hammond’s ambulance used a pressurised gas cannon to fire a patient through the window of a makeshift hospital, and the race across St Petersburg between a Renault Twizy, a bike, a hovercraft and a Stig was genuinely exciting stuff.

But Top Gear keeping on the edge of your sofa in an occasionally offensively entertaining way is nothing new. All anyone has wanted to ask me this week is what I think of The Classic Car Show.

Chances are – if the petrolhead consensus I’ve been following is anything to go by – you’ll have reached one of two conclusions having watched the opening episode. Either you’ll have been switched off entirely by its unashamedly upmarket, glossy take on the world of old cars and vowed never to watch it again. Or you’ve already committed to watching all 13 episodes because a) it’s motoring telly and you’d rather watch it than Emmerdale, and more importantly b) because it has its moments of brilliance. I’m in the latter camp.

There have been things about The Classic Car Show that made my mind melt slightly – there will, for instance, be a special place reserved at the back of my mind alongside Katie Hopkins and failed 2006 rom-com You, Me and Dupree for the vapid awfulness of the piece which asked Tinie Tempah for his opinion on the Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing. Quentin Willson, however, tackled the Mustang’s 50th anniversary with genuine clout and authority, and the pieces on the £5000 classic cars – TR7, XJ-S and so on – have been packed with warmth and nostalgia.

In fact, I actually admire The Classic Car Show for daring to do something different. Unless you want Top Gear or a show about two blokes buying an old car, restoring it and flogging it on – and after the success of Wheeler Dealers, they’re ten a penny – there hasn’t really been much for people into cars to choose from.

Regular readers will know I've pleaded with TV’s powers that be for a proper, magazine-format show about cars which is filled with fun and facts in roughly equal measure – the sort of thing Top Gear and Driven used to do when they had to make reviewing the Vauxhall Vectra look interesting. This isn't it, but I like it because it's a fresh take on a subject car nuts love.

The Classic Car Show isn't perfect, but it’s won a slot in my Thursday evenings.

Quentin Willson presents a new TV show you won't want to miss

A NEW TV series for fans of older cars – presented by former Top Gear and Fifth Gear host Quentin Willson – starts on Channel 5 next week.

The 13-part series, called The Classic Car Show, sees Quentin team up with supermodel Jodie Kidd and presenters Alex Riley and Will Best for the one hour shows, featuring buying advice, motorsport and drive stories.

The first episode will be shown at 7pm next Thursday (5 February).

Why I won't be investing in one of the last Land Rover Defenders

MY DAD reckons he’s had a brilliant idea for a bit of automotive investment. Buy one of the very last Land Rover Defenders, stick it in a shed somewhere and make a small fortune after unearthing it in about 20 years’ time. It’s a no-brainer, surely?

Anyone with even the vaguest interest in cars will know Land Rover’s workhorse is a British motoring institution. Despite being treated to new engine once every so often and being given the Defender name in 1990, it’s pretty much unaltered from when it was introduced more than 30 years ago. Whenit finally goes out of production this December it’ll be the end of an era.

There are however a couple of problems with my dad’s cunning scheme, the main one being that Defenders aren’t the cheap, rustic farming runarounds they used to be. Land Rover is seeing out is longest-serving modelwith a trio of special editions, the cheapest of which costs £28,000. The range-topping Autobiograhy version is an eye-watering £62,000, which is a lot of money for a car he’d like to stash away in a shed somewhere.

The other problem, of course, is there’s no guarantee it’d work. Everyone had pretty much the same idea when the Mini went out of production 14 years ago, and the result now is you don’t actually have to look very hard to find X-registered and W-registered Coopers with fewer than 1,000 miles on the clock. As a result, they’re worth barely any more than they were back in 2000.

Then there’s the vexing problem of what you’d actually do with a very old but – showroom fresh – car, because even popping to the shops will ruin the minimal mileage that makes it special. After 20 years of having a Land Rover not moving an inch, all anybody will want to do it is keep it in another shed or put in a museum, which defeats the point of it being a car.

If I were lucky enough to be able to afford one of the very last of the old-school Land Rovers, I’d take it down muddy tracks and use it to pull stranded motorists out of snowdrifts – in other words, using it for what it’s meant for.

Even if there was the remotest prospect of making a couple of quid in the distant future, I’d much rather be out there enjoying this fantastic British institution than hiding it away.

Don't miss out on tomorrow's Mini Fair

MINI fans won't want to miss out on this year's Mini Fair, which gets underway at the Staffordshire County Showground tomorrow (25 January).

Not only are there scores of the Alec Issigonis-designed classics to check out, but one of the event's long-running traditions - the chance to win a Mini in a £1 raffle - is back. This year, show organiser the British Mini Club is giving away a 1988 Mini City, worth £4,500.


The show opens at 9.30am. To find out more, visit the event website.

New classic car show in Preston today

CLASSIC CAR owners in Lancashire might want to head to this new event, which takes place near Preston today.

The 10am-4pm event takes place at the Smiths Arms in Lea Town, and is open to all classic vehicles, and if it's a success more gatherings are on the cards at the pub later this summer.

For more information call John Deuce on 01772 760555.

Don't miss tomorrow's Wirral to Llandudno Mini Run

ONE of my favourite motoring events - the Wirral to Llandudno Mini Run - gets underway tomorrow morning (11 January, 2015).

It's not only a great opportunity to blow off the festive cobwebs, but you get to see scores of classic Minis from right across Wales, the north of England and the Midlands being enjoyed in and around the picturesque resort of Llandudno.

The run takes more than 100 Minis from Bromborough on the Wirral to Rhos-on-Sea, the Great Orme and into Llandudno, but the best place to see them is on Llandudno's promenade from 11am. The display is held on the town's seafront until 3pm.

If you've never been, these pictures from the event in previous years will give you an idea what to expect...

 

For more information have a look at the event's website.