skinny monkeys dads cars

this is the current car, although he is looking to sell it as it is not so practical in the winter. i am trying to disuade him as it's much fun to drive (it is me in the piccy!).

the car is a caterham / westfield hybrid. it has caterham front end and the suspension and i think front part of the chassis is caterham. the rear is westfield, and has twin wishbone suspension (like the front). in between, the chassis joining them is one-off, made to caterham outside dimensions but stronger. the engine is a fiat / lancia twin cam 2-litre with two big weber carbs, with no choke (hence not great for winter). as it was originally intended for hillclimbs, the engine is offset to the nearside a little, and sits at an angle along the car. as a result, the passenger footwell is about a foot long, which makes long journeys a little uncomfortable.

this nissan 300zx was the car before the caterham. my dad didn't much like to drive it as he was paranoid about the turbos exploding. it was a 3 litre twin turbo, but as the car weighed like 2 tons, it is slower than the caterham by a far bit. however, tricked out with loads of japanese electronics including pitch and dive control, and four wheel steering, it was very comfy, an excellent tourer, just too big and thirsty. i of course was never allowed to drive it, but it's an auto, so i didn't miss out on much.

the car before the 300zx, in all it's former glory before i got my grubby little hands on it and crunched it, before it continued to get knackered by other means. lots of fun to drive, cool exhaust note (only one little back box) and steering that actually wanted to turn into corners. not like most cars these days, which understeer like crazy. but anyway, i spun it into a tree on some wet leaves and plastic tyres, so the front had to be replaced with a fibreglass one-piece, then some people rammed it into a wall in a car park, which crunched the rear and broke off the exhaust and manifold. so that was replaced with lcb and 'performance exhaust' but it wasn't performance, it just farted a lot. then through blown head gaskets and broken valves, it never got running properly again. and i accidentally reversed out the garage with the door open. also, the steering developed a nasty habit of zero correlation between input and output and it happily wondered all over the road. for shame. that was a wicked little car. it's a really cool thing to be driving one of these with the roof down in the dark, on a warm summers night.

the porsche 911e was his first fun car i can remember. it started off in a pretty bad state as can be seen by the picture where it is orange, of all colours. then it got sorted to a pretty decent spec, and was a wicked car. looked cool, sounded better, went so well. i was only young when he had this so i never got to drive it, but i would have really liked to. a pretty serious car, even had a dogleg first gearbox. unfortunately, so much was spent on the restoration, that when the torsion tube, or something in the rear suspension went that would require a major operation (welding a tube outside a tube, without welding the inner one), he was forced to sell it. i have no idea where it is now, i guess it was sold maybe 6-8 years back, if you see it out on the roads, registration GGW 614J, it would be really cool if you could let me know!