BNM 266T
1978 Ford Fiesta 1.1L
Bought: June 2002 for £102, (1)20,500 miles
Sold: September 2002 for £75, (1)23,500 miles
Bizarrely enough (like the Audi) I bid for this car on eBay. It started at £40 but ended up at £102 after a short bidding war. Still, at the time it didn't seem like a bad price for a car with 8 months MOT and 2 months tax. So off I went to Oxford to get it. The previous owner was from an isolated village somewhere in the Midlands and had been given the car free by some old boy that had owned it from new. The interior and under the bonnet was mint, but there was no service history and old Ford mileometers only have five digits, so I'll never know if the mileage was genuine. The rust was genuine enough though, but the guy had e-mailed me several pictures from all around the car, so I knew what to expect. Not so my dad who I cajoled into giving me a lift to Oxford - he spent the whole time there sitting in his car, looking at the Fiesta and laughing hysterically.
Bloody hell, old Fiestas are basic. And they seem to be made out of old baked bean cans - there were holes in the wings and the bottoms of the doors that you could put your hand through. How it ever got the last MOT was beyond me, so as a result I made sure I didn't crash it. This was more difficult than it sounds given that the brakes were crap and I spent most of my time on the motorway. That's another thing - never get into the outside lane in an old Fiesta. You can't overtake anything because by the time you're up to 85 there's nothing left. If I had crashed it, there probably wouldn't have been anything left of either me or the car - it made something like a Citroen Saxo feel as indestructible as an S-Class Merc. Economical though, 'cos I never got less than 40mpg. That was on LRP mind, as it wouldn't even move if I put unleaded in.
For some strange reason (because I hadn't seen a Fiesta this old for about 10 years) I decided it was an important part of our nation's heritage and decided to try to remove the rust. Lots of fibreglass, chicken wire, filler and paint followed. All I'll say about the end result is that Ray Charles could have probably done better, but the little thing looked a bit less rough than when I started, so job done (the picture above makes it look a hell of a lot better than it actually was, incidentally, as it doesn't show the faded-beyond-redemption paint on the bonnet, or the really ropey finish on the newly-resprayed panel under the front bumper). I was off to Guernsey and the car wouldn't fit in the removal van so I sold it to my mate Tim for £75 (to replace his Nissan Pulsar GTI-R - irony?), and it still had 6 months MOT left. Funnily enough, it failed the next MOT and went to the scrapyard, but he still managed to get £10 from the scrapman for it. Must have been for the chrome, which was still mint. I think he owes me a beer.