Adolescent classic

Vivid, block colours on cars are perennially inflicted upon us by most car makers. The Italians seem particularly at ease with dousing anything from their outlandish Lamborghini Murcielago, to their chic Fiat 500 with paints described as ‘Fluorescent Green’ or ‘Tropicalia Yellow.’ In Great Britain, such gregarious displays of colour are now mainly confined to cars like the Ford Focus ST (btw how would Ford badge an ST Diesel variant?) which of course is available in, among other questionable colours, ‘Electric Orange’. Irresponsible use of colour peaked; it seems for us British, during the 1970’s. British Leyland were splashing all kinds of nonsense across our motor cars and seemingly no hue was spared the spray booth; giving us mimosa yellow, blaze orange and even cosmic blue. But whatever happened to the vinyl covered roof? No dubious paint option of the era was ever complete without a resplendent piece of mottled vinyl to cap it off. Examples of this practice include Triumph’s Dolomite Sprint and Jaguar’s XJ Coupes. I’ve never thought of vinyl as an engineering or even cosmetic necessity on the exterior of a car, since the vinyl is stuck to a roof that is already doing quite a good job of covering the top side of the vehicle. However, I’ve read that Jaguar used it on their XJ Coupe’s to cover rough weld markings, but that sounds rather suspect to me. More likely they thought it looked stylish, but as with any fashion device, perspective can be a harsh critic and I imagine people now either love or loath their vinyl roofs, but it still doesn’t explain their permanent extinction...or does it?

Style over substance, vinyl roofs and garish colours leads me straight into my next car, of which I was a passive occupant for nearly a decade. A 1981 Morris Ital. It looked as though it had been dipped in cheap custard, before having a black bin liner steam transferred to its upper portions. Friends, relatives and sometimes complete strangers would often remark on our whereabouts weeks after the event, so conspicuous was our ride. And it wasn’t just the looks (if anyone has a photo of one in yellow with vinyl roof I would love to see it), it also had a droning engine / exhaust note that was quite unlike anything else I’ve ever heard, possibly because even by 1984, the technology was so outdated, there was nothing left on the roads to compare it to.

The most memorable event in our Ital, was a collision with one of those shiny milk lorries on our way to Pevensey Bay in 1985. Approaching a Give Way junction that admittedly looked like a roundabout, my dad mistakenly thought it was his right of way. He was wrong. Ignoring the oncoming tanker and continuing on, the Morris Ital suffered the indignity of being rammed in the front passenger door at some speed. I remember the tubby milkman jumping from his cab with remarkable deftness and being very nice to us all in the aftermath. The Ital took the punishment like the tank it was and only needed a new front door and a bit of paint. It didn’t even stop us from continuing our journey to the campsite and apart from being a little shook up and a few tears out of my younger brother, we were all fine.

My parents had chosen a school virtually outside our catchment area, so the 4.5 miles to ‘middle school’ were undertaken in the Ital, I don’t think there were any direct busses, suffice to say that none of my class mates had ever heard of the village I was from. Mum with two other mums with children spilt the school run. We had the worst car by some margin (the other two cars were a mark 2 XR2 and a Mazda 626). It didn’t help that one of the other kids we drove to school with thought he knew everything worth knowing about cars, as his dad was involved in some form of motor sport and always drove around in a brand new Vauxhall Senator. This lad was constantly telling us how shit our car was and how his dad could perform high speed handbrake turns; this claim seemed particularly enviable at the time. By the late 1980’s I would exit the school gates cringing at the sight of the Ital and wishing that at the very least, it could have been painted in something less yellow, which is so typical of an adolescents ungratefulness isn’t it. My Dads cars have always been worse than my mums and his two car purchases during the late eighties didn’t help matters. They were (in order) a mark 1 Vauxhall Cavalier, which had the most pristine bodywork but died of terminal engine failure in a matter of months and its replacement, a Datsun cherry estate, which lasted a couple more years. The Datsun had the most amazingly sweet engine, but the bodywork of a Lada bathed in acid. Its colour? Yellow, but only where it wasn’t brown and flaky from the rust. It failed its MOT test when the tester could put his hand through one of the holes in the bodywork. To this day that car is my dads personal favourite.

Briefly back to the Ital then, a car which holds many happy memories that doesn’t include why or exactly when we got rid of it. Perhaps I have blocked it out as a painful recollection. Or maybe it’s because the memory of the day we got our next car is emblazoned. Our Nissan Primera ushered our family into the truly modern age of motoring, the car and its magnificence I will explain in a later blog. In comparison to the Ital it felt like taking a ride in an alien spaceship and it comes as little surprise that the Morris Ital was voted the second worst British car ever in a poll in 2008. Some cars are ahead of their time and some cars are just behind it.