The only car I regret selling | Thank Frankel it's Friday

The worst case of this I ever had was a Porsche 993 Carrera RS which I had used for Nurburgring track days and so on until my first child appeared which rather put such activities on hold for a while. And I can remember going to drive it one lovely spring morning and for a minute not being unable to understand why the clock was precisely one hour out. 

The answer was it was still registering British Summer Time from the previous year. It had to go. And while I now bitterly regret selling it, that has nothing to do with the car itself and everything to do with the fact that history recalls I sold at the absolute bottom of the market for such things. That decision cost me literally hundreds of thousands of pounds.

For years the only car I really regretted no longer owning for no reason other than I’d loved owning it so much was a late Mk1 1.8-litre VW Golf GTI.

I had it before I became a motoring journalist and it was my daily driver. Before then and because I’d briefly worked in the city, I’d owned a couple of profoundly stupid cars – a Caterham and a Lotus Esprit – and some proper old nails in the form of a succession of rusty 2CVs. Excepting my mother’s MG Metro which I wrote off almost as soon as I’d inherited it, the Golf was my first proper daily driver.

I went everywhere in it. And then I started to modify in what, in retrospect, seemed to have been remarkably grown-up ways. It was broadly held that such cars needed more grip, so the solution at the time for many was to fit a 205-section tyre, the fattest that would (just about) fit onto the 5.5-inch wheel. But they looked awful, made the steering even heavier and made the handling quite unprogressive. I also wondered if you might be able to roll them clean off the rim.

So I first went from a standard 175/70 tyre whose make I can’t remember, to a 185/60 Michelin MXV, which worked quite well, sharpening things up a bit without ruining the ride or steering. I then tried to address the terrible brake feel those cars had with some Italtune discs with Tarox pads. This was only partially successful as much of the problem was that the master cylinder was not moved for right-hand drive cars, meaning a clumsy linkage was required which caused the dead pedal. But at least the car stopped now.

So then came a set of Bilstein struts which improved both the ride and handling, but not without revealing the limitations of my still new MXVs. Which meant they had to go too, replaced by a set of Yokohama HFRs.

Now someone out there will correct me, but I think the HFR was the first of the road legal track day tyres. At first, I was quite disappointed with them, until I realised that the harder you drove, the better they got. Once warm grip levels were simply amazing, at least for an early 1980s hot hatch.

But now the chassis and brakes were sorted, it felt somewhat under powered, so I needed to free up a few more horses under the bonnet. And again, common sense appears to have broken out because all I was looking at were manifolds, the air filter and exhausts, reasoning that if you eased the flow of gases both into and out of the engine, greater efficiency and therefore more power would result.

And I was standing in my flat discussing this very point with a mate on the telephone when there was a loud bang outside, followed by the sound of a car alarm I thought I’d recognised.

A drunk had driven the wrong way down a side street, exited into the main road, clipped some poor innocent coming down said road, spinning their Cavalier into my Golf which, for good measure was then shunted into the BMW 7-series behind which I had parked.

And that was the end of that. I still miss that Golf and often wonder why. And I expect it’s because I never got tired or bored of it so sold it, but was indeed still finding new ways to enjoy it when its life was so suddenly, violently and unexpectedly terminated. I’d like to have another, but I don’t know what I’d do with it, and I’m not making that mistake again.