Shitefest take three

Back to the field of dreams

By now you should be familiar with our friends Chris and Claire and their field of dreams, location of this year's Shitefest. Having been a bit disappointed with the turnout at the first post-Shitefest get-together and with more vehicles in need of tinkering, they decided to open up the field once more to visiting Autoshite members while the weather was still good, so off we went again, this time in the Maxi with its huge boot filled with tools. Other guests were James (another local chap), Richard from Surrey and Hugh from Hampshire on Saturday, and on Sunday Anthony returned along with new face Julian from Stoke-on-Trent, so people were prepared to travel long distances to attend and were hopefully rewarded with an enjoyable weekend.

Tinkering in progress. Maxi makes an excellent mobile workshop.

Unsung heroes: Matra Rancho

Walk down any street in the UK nowadays and there is one type of car you're pretty much guaranteed to see: the crossover, combining the chunky looks of an off-roader with conventional two-wheel-drive underpinnings and exemplified by the best-selling Nissan Qashqai. You may think crossovers are a 21st century phenomenon, yet there is a car that could lay claim to pioneering this market sector way back in the late seventies, long before the term 'crossover' had even been invented. I'm talking about the Talbot Matra Rancho, a vehicle derided in its day for having the looks of a 4x4 without the off-road ability but arguably just too far ahead of its time, which had it appeared thirty years later could have been a great success.

The first crossover, thirty years before its time?

A fortnight of Maxi-ing

Today marks exactly two weeks since the Maxi arrived in its new home, so this is a good time for a quick progress update. My dad has spent almost all of his spare time since then on the car so a lot of little jobs have been done and it is continually getting better, not that it was at all bad to start with. The postman, himself a classic car enthusiast who took a keen interest in our new purchase, has been kept busy with regular deliveries of Maxi parts, which have so far proved surprisingly easy to obtain as many are shared with the Mini. It has now done more than the previous owner's entire annual mileage in just ten days and is in fine fettle mechanically, so confidence is growing with each journey and it is proving itself to have been an excellent purchase, despite breaking the golden rule of never buying a car in the rain!

The first show, three days after collection

It's a Maxi adventure

As you'll probably know from previous posts, we've been looking to buy a classic car, preferably but not necessarily an Austin Maxi, and had narrowly missed out on a fine example a couple of weeks ago. Since then we've been keeping an eye on various car sales websites, but nothing available locally on eBay jumped out at us and the good stuff all seemed to be overpriced and/or hundreds of miles away. Thus disappointed, just on the off-chance we decided to check the Maxi Owners' Club website again in case anything new had been listed. The reward was a car advertised that very morning, which quickly became the latest addition to the Rusty Old Rubbish fleet and means the Maxi urges have been satisfied and we now have a British Leyland car in the garage again after selling the Triumph Dolomite several years ago.

Second time lucky. There's a BL car on the drive once more.