- Another one bites the dust.

Junction 8 and the nine day Nissan.

From tragedy to tragedy.

So there we were, one fine day in June driving along London’s favourite car park, the M25, light drizzle but as it’s England it’s only really of note if it were not precipitating at all. Things were going well, traffic was extremely sparse, the Mrs was happy (I was taking her to view a potential new horse) and my 500-quid mini hadn't broken down that particular day. The serenity was not to last long.

Junction 8, a long slip road with lights at the end, usually chocked-full of furious commuters, but on this occasion it was clear aside from two stationary articulated lorries at the lights. A clear motorway can fool one's sense of speed and as such I was cruising along, feeling calm, within fifteen miles an hour of the speed limit (I'll let you guess which side of the limit), in-as-much as a 998cc mini CAN cruise at that speed. Then I pressed the middle pedal! No resistance except when it hit the carpet. I quickly reached for the handbrake, which chose that inopportune moment to break it’s cable, "d'oh". I calmly and delicately informed my passenger of the issue, something along the lines of “Fuuuuccccckkkkk no fucking brakes”. A mini of late 1980s vintage runs on 12inch wheels with a 70mm profile tyre, unfortunately the kerb was designed with proper cars in mind and so is about 70-80mm tall. As anyone who has experienced the lack of suspension in a original 'minster equipped with rubber doughnuts for suspension will be able to guess exactly how comfortable mounting a kerb at 70+ can be. Boom (tyre exploding), Clunk (wheel bending), snap rattle rattle (number plate disintegrates), bang (sump destroyed) and clatter clatter thunk (exhaust removed) as we mount the kerb. The air in the near side front tyre and the oil in the sump had decided it was safer evacuating before the forth coming impact. At that moment we wish we could've done the same. However, no impact came and after what seemed like an eternity we came to a stop level with the front of the lorry I was trying to avoid. Looking behind revealed a progressively deepening mini sized trench, thick with oil, my exhaust at the beginning and a rapidly sinking mini at the end. Even before the grass, leaves and general debris I’d sent flying had finished falling, my fiancée exclaimed in a moment of unusual decisiveness “I'm never getting in another fucking mini ever again”. I thought the brake-servo failure a week-previous would have hardened her to such exciting break downs, but sadly not. (Fortunately on that occasion an extremely well executed hand brake turn prevented us from rear ending her boss in the car park at her workplace. And made me look damn cool...) This left me with a dilemma. Because though I owned four cars at the time, they were ALL, you guessed it, Austin-Rover's smallest and greatest. (And usually rustiest.) Oh, and sorry to anyone who had been hoping to use junction 8 towards Redhill in the rush hour, an hour later that day. It was the Highways Agency's idea to close it, not mine.

Banger-nomics motoring is a lottery, and on this occasion I won, sort of, really sort of. I was working in the motor trade at the time so a phone call to my boss revealed two cars available within my astonishingly generous budget of fifty whole English pounds. After the 17 mile walk to work I was confronted with two vehicles, both nearly as offensive to a petrolhead as reading The Sun is to anyone from Liverpool. The pieces of mechanical detritus in front of me were: A 1988 Nissan Bluebird 2.0 with 198000 taxi-cab-miles and a back seat so sticky it could rival the carpets of many of the best pubs I've been to. It had 13 days MOT and a clutch living on borrowed time. OR: a 1999 Hyundai accent 5-door in washing-machine white. Just under 100k, just over eleven months MOT with no advisories (done by my colleagues) and essentially-perfect mechanical condition were it’s good points. Sadly, everything else about it was it’s bad points. Reluctantly I went for the accent, I can't even bring myself to give it a capital letter despite it being grammatically incorrect such is my abject loathing of the breed. In my head I pictured the Bluebird cleaned up and lowered on a set of mini-lites, retro-cool. But in an unusually sensible moment I had chosen the vehicle based on condition rather than cool. "It’ll only be for a couple of weeks" or so I thought.

Two and a half vile, loathsome, torturous, horrendous, hate-filled years I drove that rancid, bile-inducing, disgusting heap of Hyundai. 1.3 litres with 12 valves and 85bhp. Far from the least powerful car I've owned and yet flooring it was met with the speed a stoner counting change in Amsterdam. Throwing it into bends seemed as much of a surprise to the chassis as it did to anyone watching, that is once you'd turned the wheel fifty thousand times just to get the front to change direction. There was a way to get it round tighter corners quickly. Think of a really really aggressive Scandinavian flick to get the back well and truly out, to help the front round then catch it right on the apex and come out front end smoking. This leads to the only expensive part of Hyundai ownership which was it’s rubber addiction. It averaged 40mpg even though driven extremely hard and despite my constant praying refused to go wrong, except the window mechanism on the driver’s door. An ordinary car and an ordinary person would fix it instead of installing a bit of 2-by-4 (that's 'a bit of wood' for all you metric users out there) to raise and lower said window. In my defence, the part was £52.17 and in my loathing of this hateful, wheeled household-appliance I refused to spend £2.17 more to repair it than I did to buy the whole car. Eventually I sold it for five times what I paid for it. I had taken it up to 215 thousand miles, embarrassed boy racers, towed a Mk5 golf, delivered millions of pizzas (probably), commuted 34 miles a day, smoked away countless budget tyres, thrashed it as hard as I possibly could every bloody day in the vain hope it would just bloody die . The bloke I sold it to was still daily-driving that hopeless, dreary little toaster of transportation 8 years later! I must admit, I have a grudging respect for that particular Accent.

Like I say Banger-nomics is a lottery. For instance a five hundred pound Micra had so much rust the AA refused to tow it when it died in clouds of steam, after only nine days and one hard drive. ..

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