Tag: Car Blog

Car History 3 – Bread Delivery Service

Previously I had just ruined my second Seat Cordoba, but during the time I had my Seat’s I had a growing fascination with VW and the whole ‘scene’ around it. While I was waiting for recovery of my now hole punched second Cordoba, I went for a walk around a second hand dealership the other side of the street, and what a mistake that was. Sat there was a 1989 Mk2 VW Polo Breadvan and I wanted it. I saw it as the perfect base vehicle to get started in the VW scene and all the crap I could slap on it.

They must have seen me coming and the sparkle in my eye at how many ‘Dub’ related stickers I could now buy, as what I got was a low mileage car that barely ran, was taxed only for disabled drivers and had plenty of loose trim pieces.

Some paperwork later and I was let loose on it, chequerboard roof, stickers on the windows and painted steel wheels, I thought I had the modified on a budget look down. The pièce de résistance was some Austin mini indicators and removal of the front bumper, which I’d like to say was a style choice, but the truth is it had fell off on a country road and preceded to go under the wheels and was now unsalvageable.

It did not last long before I was over the 1.3L carb fed engine and breadvan square looks, plus the unreliability was very frustrating, but it succeeded in lighting a fire for German cars and tweaking them, for better or worse!

Car History 2 – The only way is sort of up

Welcome back to my car history, currently in the story my license is three weeks off the printer and barely dry, my saloon car is now a hatchback and insurance companies everywhere are giving it a big ‘I told you so’ justifying my massive insurance premium.

So as a 17 year old, what was I to do with a fresh license, a big wakeup call on my driving talent and a need for more wheels. I bought another Seat Cordoba, the same colour, trim and took all the ‘boy racer’ parts off my first car and moved them over. There was however, one major change, the engine was bigger. Now a 1.6 and clearly a more refined unit for the sensible driver I was going to be from now on.

The appeal of the Cordoba was a simple one, the name Ibiza or Polo carried the price tag of the ‘starter’ car that the Cordoba didn’t have, probably due to looking like something only the Spaniard who’d been on the Sangrias sine 10am before his evening shift at the factory could love. That and the boot space on this car was huge and perfect for all the things I planned to do. The boot was so big in fact that when I wrote off my first one, and as the lamppost kindly decided to only hit the rear, I was left with a drivable now Ibiza shaped hatchback, as the extended rear had parted company and decided to be one with the surrounding field.

This car was an absolute workhorse, the 1.6L engine racking up the miles. However, it too came to an early end, some three years later, when in a slow moving traffic jam during summer break, my attention may have slightly been elsewhere (read girl minding her own business on pavement) and I proceeded to go into the back of a Mercedes ML at about 5mph. One small scratch on the Merc and my car crumbled like breadsticks and that was that. Onto something not completely different.