Petrol Heads 3

West Lancs Mark / RAM Petrol Heads 3 - From Your Roving Reporter

Hello again to Everyone, I’m hoping all the members and their Families are all keeping well and managing to stay away from this terrible virus. Here we go again its just for a bit of fun to try and break the boredom, having said that there is a prize of a bottle of whisky when we eventually have a winner.

This time its British Cars from the 80’s, now they are getting a bit thinner on the ground as I’m sure you are all aware after we handed over our car manufacture along with so many other top class manufacturing establishments to Japan, China, Thailand and most of Europe. We even shut down all the coal mines, thousands of jobs lost along with the villages and towns they lived in and started importing it from Poland.

Enough said included in the guess the car this time are a few none British but are quite recognisable, write your ideas down and when this Lockdown is all over as I have said before you can send them in to me and if we have quite a few sets of correct answers we will put them in a hat and get our PGM to draw one out for the prize. (We may even stretch to a couple of runners up) Come on Join In start guessing.

Here’s a few happenings from the 80’s in the car world:

A familiar site to be seen in the news if you were around from the sixties to the early 80’s was crowds of car workers gathered together all too often to vote for strike action, one of the major players was a man called Derek Robinson who was known as “Red Robbo” from the Transport and General Union, major unrest continued, even when a rise of 3.8 % was offered in November 1980 to the workers at BL, it was rejected yet again. A man named Michael Edwards took over the running of BL which was still the country’s largest car maker with 55 factories with 155,000 workers. One of his first tasks was to tell the workers that 12,500 jobs would have to go along with 100’s of executives. From the offset his plan was to find another manufacturer that built the same number of vehicles as BL, 610,000, guess who, none other than Honda who only started building cars in 1960 and the rest is history. The first car they jointly produced was the Triumph Acclaim which was essentially a re-badged Honda Ballade, was it any good, I have no idea but as for style what can you say, squashed frog comes to mind. What about Datsun, you couldn’t leave them out in the rain, I once saw a full car in a skip behind another car dealers, but it didn’t take Japan long to copy then improve whilst our own car industry became history:

End of the line the last MGB Roadster which as it happened was for export to Japan in Oct 1980.

Jaguars mainstay during was these crucial years from 1968 to 1986 was the XJ6.

The Lea Francis mark was revived with a 3.4 Jaguar engine and was priced at £20,000.

August 1980 the last Triumph Spitfire was built at Canley, a total of 314,342 having been produced.

On Oct 4th 1983 Richard Noble in a Rolls Royce powered Thrust 2 takes the land speed record on the Bonneville salt flats USA at 633.46 MPH.

Nov 7th 1984 the Foundation stone is laid at Nissans Sunderland car factory, the first car a kit assembled Bluebird, leaves the plant in July.

Feb 1986 BL builds its 5 Millionth Mini.

Feb 1987 the Government writes off £750 Million debt incurred by BL Truck Div, which in turn allowed them to merge with the Dutch firm DAF.

Sept 1987 Ford acquires 75% of Aston Martin the other 25% was taken up in 1994.

Dec 1989 Jaguar shareholders vote overwhelmingly to approve Fords bid for the company.

Now it’s time for you to get your thinking caps on, the next and last issue will be a hotchpot of vehicles because lets face it how many cars are now built in Britain, I don’t know about you but I can recognise cars from the 50’s to the 80’s instantly, now they for the large part to me they all look the same, do you ever sit back and think of all the vehicles you have owned over the years mine goes something like this: Austin A35 Van, Ford Classic, Hillman Super Minx, Ford Escort Mk1, Ford Escort Sport, Ford Granada 2Ltr, Ford Granada 3Ltr GXL, Ford Escort Sport again, Ford Escort Lotus, Ford Escort Mexico, Ford Escort RS 1600, Ford Escort RS 2000, now it goes a little weird, Citroen DS (impulse purchase), 2 x Volvo Estates, Vauxhall Astra GTE, Lancia Dedra HF Integrale, Lancia Delta Integrale Evolution, BMW 318, 320, 325, 520, Opel Vectra Estate 3.2, at present BMW 1 Series M Sport breathed on by Schnitzer. I’m sure I will have missed some along the way as well as several motorcycles, but I think the list qualifies me as a member of the Petrol Heads Club.

The next edition of Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs will be coming along soon to take you back in time to my younger years and in turn hopefully to stir memories of your own innocent (or not) youth.

First of my Rally Cars

Good Looking Guy

Take Care of Yourselves, Keep in Touch with Your Family, Friends and of course all your brothers in our wonderful Mark Degree and RAM, Pick Up the Telephone Give Them A Call Today.

Here’s looking forward to seeing all my friends at a meeting and as I always say those I have yet to meet.

Austin N Fletcher

PGStwd, Flixton Shepherd Eastwood Mark Lodge. No.1173

Austin express his views in this article which are not neccessarily shared

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