[ THE INSIDERS ]
I once bought a Ferrari for Sierra money, which shows how long ago that was. Surely it wouldn’t be much more difficult to look after than my Fiesta…
How many times have you read an article in a car magazine with a catchy title like ‘Own a Ferrari for Mondeo money’, only to quickly come to your senses and get back to checking out the monthly payments on a sensible hybrid blandobox?
But imagine if you did in a moment of foolishness actually buy something so illustrious but at the same time irrational and ridiculous. What would it really be like?
At least I can claim youth as my excuse, fresh out of college and just into my first job at Ford Design. I had to have a Ferrari Dino, the car that was both my bedroom poster car and what made me such a fan of The Persuaders TV series. And yes, in pre-Mondeo times, 1984, it was pretty much the exact same price as a top-of-the-line Ford Sierra.
This endeavour was all the more foolish since my mechanical aptitude was questionable at best. I had managed to get a summer job at a local Ferrari specialist, but was quickly back to tea-making duties after I fitted brake pads on a Boxer back to front.
My plan was to run it on a shoestring; it was only an old, cheap car after all, and I was sure it wouldn’t be any more difficult to keep than my Fiesta. It did require a bit of sorting out, having been previously fitted with a distributor from a Ford Granada, but a secondhand original didn’t break the bank.
‘Iain knows how to look after a sensitive parent and immediately said I had a lovely example’
I persevered with a miserly spend, calling upon friends and local garages to fix it, but in all honesty it never broke. Seven years into my ownership, it was looking a bit tatty so I asked a local bodyshop to look at smartening it up.
The owner, Viv, took it apart and back to the metal overnight and then decided it looked a bit difficult, so it sat dormant at the back of his workshop. When I went back for one of my monthly check-ins, I found Viv and the Dino both badly beaten up by another very unhappy customer. Said Dino left rapidly on a trailer with 11 large crates of parts.
However, through the years I’ve also met some very lovely genuine mechanics who have treated my car with the tenderness it deserves. Ken was recommended to me after a friend took their Polo for an MoT test. Ken noticed some wilting tomato plants in the VW’s boot so not only watered them but took a few in payment for the job. He then worked on my car with his old friend and fellow spanner, Ian. Both were puzzled by the Italian electrics so I suggested they looked on the web. Turns out neither had ever been on the internet and I provided their first introduction. And Mark, who’s looked after the car for the last 20 years, will always prefer to repair and refurbish parts like a patient watchsmith.
My Dino has once been to a well-known, highbrow specialist for a checkover, too. They proceeded to give me a questionable list of what they considered was wrong with the car and charge me £900 for the privilege. What some of these experts fail to appreciate is that if you’ve had a car like this for more than 40 years, doing this is worse than insulting your children!
More recently, I was lucky to meet Iain Tyrrell as a fellow concours judge and he offered to fine-tune my car. Iain definitely knows how to look after a sensitive parent and immediately said I had a lovely example, but then took me quietly aside to tell me that perhaps in all the time I’ve had the car it’s never actually run perhaps as well as it should. Never mind, it’s still a much better buy than that Sierra.
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