Sir Ian Botham’s Worst Car

He might smile now by England’s greatest cricketer was less than happy when he had to rely on a Datsun 180 SSS Fastback.

 

“I’ve had plenty of pretty rum jalopies when I was a kid. Most of them were rusty, slow and just plain unreliable. But by far the worst of them all was a really horrible Datsun. This wasn’t an ordinary saloon like a Sunny, but a 180 SSS fastback. Twenty years ago it was still regarded as a stylish coupe’ and that may be why I bought it, but now I have my doubts. The colour scheme wasn’t up to very much, with custard yellow paint work and a black vinyl roof.

“Apart from looking terrible its reputation for reliability was equallt terrible. Everything that could go wrong with that car, did. I don’t where to start, or stop with the catalogue of mechanical failures except to say that if you name a part I probably paid to have it replaced. Cylinder head, suspension, brakes, steering, electrics, starter, alternator and radiator. I won’t go on. In fact, I seem to remember that the radiator was probably the most common cause of upsets, springing a leak and then boiling over and getting me into even more trouble. That trouble usually involved being broken down somewhere on the A1. I lost count of the number of times that my father-in-law came out and rescued me from the roadside. It made me miss appointments, meals, although luckily not cricket matches. In total I owned that car for three months and I got no more than four days strife free motoring out of it. In fact if it did start first time in the morning and then ran for any length of time, I would be in a state of extreme shock. It got to the point where if someone had offered me a fiver to take that Datsun away, I’d have pulled their arm off. It cost me a fortune to run, without actually running anywhere at all. When it did work it was surprisingly quick and comfortable; otherwise it was most stationary and a complete pain.

“I don’t know what happened to that Datsun and I don’t actually care. With any

luck it has been reconstituted into a slightly more useful like a can of baked beans.”

 

Uri Geller’s Peugeot 404

Serial spoon bender Uri Geller’s Pug which was not just

    “It was the first big money that I earned from my paranormal work and I decided to invest that in a brand new car. I’d had a couple of used cars previously but needed a reliable vehicle which how I came to own a Peugeot 404. I believed the advertising. At that time, which was around 1970 the Peugeot was being sold as a luxury car which was also very strong. That was precisely what I needed because I had a long journey to and from Jerusalem every day. However, the first time I used the Peugeot I found out just how bad it was.

    “I could not believe how it struggled up the hills. People on bicycles would be overtaking me. The Peugeot got progressively slower and slower and just before I thought it would come to a halt, it  finally reached the brow of the hill. After that it would pick up speed on the way down. It was awful. I had it checked out by several garages, but they could not find any problem with it. I put up with it for about a year and then got rid of it. I thougt no more about that 404 until a few years ago.

    “I was in Brazil in 1994 and every day I jog. I was with my son Daniel and we were in a suburb of Rio de Janiero when I saw the front of an old Peugeot poking out from a garage. I remember saying to my son that I had a car like that more than twenty years ago. As I got closer though I became convinced that it actually was my old 404. We finally went over and looked through the window. On the dashboard I spotted a sticker which said F N Handguns which was the make of gun I owned when I lived in Israel. So it was definitely my car.

    “If I had come across my old worst car in Cyprus, that would not have been much of a surprise. So how on earth it had ended up on the other side of the world I will never understand.

Andy McNab’s Renault 5

Bestselling author and special forces hero McNab may indeed look just like Sean Bean, but the last thing you’d want to do is sell him a dodgy French car surely?

 

The first Renault 5 I had was brilliant. An 1100cc version it had a vinyl sunroof, was terminally rusty and there was a bungee rope holding the front wing on but it was a brilliant little run around. I thought by going to a Renault dealer and getting a loan I’d have the pick of a very good crop of little cars. As it was, the used white Renault 5 I chose was a disaster.

It was the exhaust that went first, it fell off, but the dealer said that the warranty never covered it, so I had to pay out for that. Next the starter motor was knackered and the only way to get it working, which meant persuading the brushes inside to spin around was to hit it with a hammer and a rod of steel. Alternatively I would just sit in the thing, if I couldn’t be bothered to get out and just rock it from side to side and that would get it going too. Within a year serious rust started appearing just about everywhere. On top of all that the electrics on the car were a right drama. I bought a Renault 5 workshop manual but that only meant I made things 10 times worse. I took the dashboard to pieces and ended up leaving it hanging open, the ignition switch dangled at the end of some wires, like it had been hot wired, but oddly I must have done something right. The mess I left behind actually made it work.

After eighteen months of hitting this Renault with a hammer and living with an interior which looked as though a bomb had hit it, I had to get rid of the thing. I decided that I would get much more money for it by winding the mileage back. I used a Black & Decker power drill but made a hash of it because none of the numbers lined up. Luckily a local Citroen garage was doing a £500 part exchange deal against a Citroen BX. They didn’t even want to see my old Renault I just drove it onto the forecourt, took the keys to the BX and drove away. They probably threw the Renault in a bin, but the really ironic thing was I still had another year and a half of finance to pay off. So that Renault 5 didn’t go away for quite some time.

Tony Robinson’s Commercials

 

        “It was 1966 and I was at drama school in London. During the holidays I took a job with a ships vittlers based in Stepney East London. I had to drive out to the ships which docked in the port to find out what they wanted in terms of supplies, then go and get it. Although I’d passed my test, I didn’t own a car, so the Austin A35 van they supplied was my first regular taste of motoring and what a bad start it was.

    “This little van had two major problems. On the one hand it would jump out of gear. The gear stick would actually fly into neutral like a bullet from a gun, so it could lurch up and down the road in a very undignified fashion. On the other hand the van would engage a gear then never let go of it. Now I could drive along for a bit in second, or third, but after a while an incline, or traffic lights would mean that the van would come to a spluttering halt. So I had two stark choices when that happened, either phone up the office and some burly cockney would come and take the rise out of me for days after, or get out and push. Now my physique has been described by journalists as ant like. Aged 17, it was only developing ant like. Middle aged women weighed down with shopping would stop and ask if I needed a hand.

    “My other horrendous experience involved another commercial vehicle. By this time I had left drama school and was doing the romantic J.B. Priestly bit touring the country performing Molieries Tartuffe, packed into a Bedford coach. After a week the driver literally walked out on the company. They offered me an extra £1 a week to drive it. And for some reason, greed probably, I said yes. It was a huge long wheelbase thing which I had to operate on tip toes, double declutching like a ballet dancer with my nose pressed up against the windscreen. The brakes though were ferocious a light touch would bring it screeching to a halt.

    “After three months, which included checking the fuel level with a broom handle, I was relieved to get home in one piece. Then I got straight into my Triumph Herald, but as I approached the first set of lights, I thought I was in the Bedford, braked too late and smashed into the car in front.”

Dale Winton’s Opel Monza

He’s perma tanned and fixated by walls, but Dale is one of us, a car nut.

 

    I’m absolutely crazy about a cars. I love them so much my dream television presenting job would have to be Top Gear. My favourite kind of car has always been coupe’s and the bigger the better. The ones that have always done it for me are the American Caddies, Chevys and Lincolns to name just a few. They are all great and just hiring them if I’m over there on holiday gives me a huge buzz. Back in the late ‘70s though I owned a yellow Vauxhall Cavalier coupe’. I  even fitted black vinyl to the rear half of the roof so that it would look a lot more American. I decided to trade up and went to a garage in Nottingham where I found two European models a Vauxhall Senator and Opel Monza which had the sort of proportions that I had the sort of proportions I was after.

    I drove the Senator which was a comfortable four door saloon, but I couldn’t help being drawn towards the Opel Monza, purely because it was a great big coupe’. For some reason the salesman kept directing me back to the Senator. I think he knew all to well what a pig of a car that Monza was. Well, he couldn’t have been a very good salesman, because I still went for what is so far and by a mile, my worst car.

    It looked OK. The colour was a dark metallic grey and the specification included electric everything because it was the top of the range 3.0 litre model. As I drove it away from the forecourt I realised that there was a lot wrong with this car. Looking I realised that there was a lot wrong with this car. Looking at the dashboard I could clearly see a huge two inch gap one side of the steering column. I realised that this Monza must have been stuck back together after a very big accident. My worst fears were confirmed every time I accelerated because there was a nasty grinding noise of metal on metal which must have been the limited slip differential self destructing. It went back to the garage dozens and dozens of times. The electrics were a nightmare, the dashboard was always flashing at me and it was always breaking down. In fact the roof had been damaged by the ‘For Sale’ sign, so it must have been on sale for ages until a sucker like me came along. After a few days I would have cheerfully set it alight. I suppose I was seduced by the beauty of the Monza.

Stewart Lee’s Morris Marina Coupe

He’s the 41st Best Stand Up Ever (We think he’s easily Number 1) but Stewart was sad to see his first comedy vehicle go...

 

 “I bought my Grandad’s 1970 tan coloured Morris Marina Coupe’ for £50 in 1989 and it managed to become both the best and worst car I have ever owned. What I loved was the little details which made so very different from much more boring modern cars. First of all it had continental wing mirrors, which were fashionable when the car was new. If you remember them, they were fixed to the front end of the wing, right out of sight of the driver and there was no way that you could actually adjust them. Brilliantly useless. My grandfather had also fitted wonderful leopard skin seat covers which really set this marina apart, especially as the leopard also covered the steering wheel. It also smelt used, which I found quite reassuring, there was nothing antiseptic about it, this was a motor which had lived. Finally it was also the car I can remember being driven around in as a young child, so there was a very strong emotional attachment too.

    “The Marina may have been slow, but it was brilliant at getting me to poorly paid, or mostly unpaid stand up gigs all around the country. I have lost count of the number of times I spent sleeping in it at a motorway services. On one occasion, I parked at a deserted end of a car park and was then woken at 3 am by an illegal rave which had suddenly kicked off with a couple of sound system and my Marina in the middle of it all.

    “Did I mention that it was an automatic? Well the gearbox had long since given up behaving in a conventional manner. So I had to juggle the brake and accelerator to persuade it to work. On the whole it was very good at getting me to where I wanted to go, but then it would suddenly expire. That happened after a gig in Edinburgh. It got me there, but had to be towed back home. I sold it for scrap and managed to get back what I paid for it. Before it went though I prised off all the badges that said Marina and Coupe’ and put them in a box which I’ve still got. I regret getting rid of it, but couldn’t afford a new engine. If I owned it now, I reckon it would look really cool and eccentric, whereas back when I was a penniless stand up, it just looked pathetic and a bit sad.”

In a World Cup Special the late and great Kenneth Wolstenholme tells us all about his experience with a Wolseley Hornet and for a moment there he really did think it was all over.

 

During the war I was a pilot in the RAF and I reckoned I could afford to buy a car. The opportunity to buy the Wolseley came up and I asked one of the flight mechanics if they wouldn’t mind giving it a once over. That was quite naughty of me really, because it was illegal of me to ask the chap and it was just as wrong for him to do it. We both could have got court marshalled. Anyway, no one knew what we were up to and he gave it a clean bill of health so I bought the car.

    I was due some leave and it seemed like a good opportunity to see how my new car performed. So I set off from my Bomber Command base in Cambridge to drive to Manchester. Everything seemed to be going quite well until I took a sharp left hand bend. Suddenly there was lurch to the right and the rear of the car dropped then started to slide around wildly as I was overtaken by my rear offside wheel. I watched in horror as it bounced down the road and into a garden whilst the car ended up in a ditch. I was terrified that the wheel could have killed someone. All that got damaged was my pride and the bodywork on the Wolsley, although I could have happily killed that mechanic.

    ‘Hope you don’t fly your aircraft like that’, said one of the villagers as he came to help. If you wore an RAF uniform during the war people were only too pleased to be of assistance. The wheel was quickly retrieved from the garden and I was on my way again. And they say flying is dangerous. Not surprisingly, the whole experience put me off second hand cars for good.

Dave Gorman’s Vauxhall Nova

Googlewhack, a Documentary Comedian and his worst car was...

 

H698 GHF as I often said to an AA patrolman. That Vauxhall Nova was my first and worst car and I was well and truly stitched up by a car dealer. I desperately needed a car to get me to gigs and at the time I thought I was doing all the right things. I did the essential previous owner checks. I took the dealer’s word for it that he had the previous keeper’s number. I rang it and the lady on the end of the line confirmed what a brilliant car and lovely little runner that Nova was. Afterwards I suspected that she was probably his wife and probably did this phone routine about twenty five times a week. What I remember is that the dealer never opened the passenger door, or the bonnet, only later did I find out why.

Not surprisingly that Nova turned out to be terminally temperamental. It always refused to start in the winter and the engine would often cut out without any warning. Not a good idea when that was the outside lane of a motorway at 70 miles per hour. Very dangerous. Even so, if you left it for twenty minutes it sometimes decided that starting was a good idea. I eventually found out how bad that Nova was when the police stopped me for speeding. The policeman ran a check on it and found that it had been very badly written off a few years previously. I should have spotted all the signs because there were no badges the passenger door wouldn’t open and nether would the bonnet. When I did manage to open it I noticed there was lots of extra red paint all over the engine parts. It seems that the whole front end was replaced which explained why the front door wouldn’t open, or the bonnet. In fact that bonnet led to me being stranded in Wales when I couldn’t open it for several hours, then could not get it to shut.

Although it was the big advantage was that no one would ever want to steal the Nova I needed a car that I could rely on to get me to and from gigs. I’ve got no ability to fix an unreliable car so decided to get rid of it. There was no way I could sell it to a private buyer with a clear conscious so I went to my local Vauxhall dealer. The salesman never even opened the bonnet, or passenger door and paid me book price against a brand new Corsa, I nearly pulled his arm off.