At the tail end of the seventies, I joined a Renault dealership in Aldershot as Parts Manager.
One day we had a vehicle come in for work, which i noticed was causing much interest & merriment to all the fitters who were working in the shop that day.
Turns out, this new Renault 15GTL belonged to Hugh Cornwell, lead singer of local group from Guildford, The Stranglers.
It was customary to receive an A4 sheet or letter from the customer, listing any problems with their car but this one we received today was hilarious.
I do remember it was quite a long list and absolutely covered in expletives, e.g. the fucking heater doesn’t work and other such problems that our Hugh had encountered.
I myself have had a Renault 15GTL for a while, so I felt Hugh’s pain.
It was a really good looking vehicle but it had a large body and the 1300 engine supplied was not nearly man enough for the job ( 0-60 took forever )and I don’t recall ever hearing of The Stranglers frontman ever visiting our garage again.
I’d love to know, what he got next though?
Hugh Cornwell drove a Renault 15GTL at the end of the seventies, during the height of The Stranglers success ( this is why he was so angry)
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Allegro Vanden Plas was the obvious choice.
https://classicsworld.co.uk/cars/vanden-plas-1750-road-test/
Reminds me of my Dad’s motor, he had an Austin Maxi 1750HL all through the early seventies. He always said, changing gear was like stirring porridge!
That’s what I always said about my dad’s Hillman Minx when I was learning!
The 1750 Maxi had Overdrive … basically a switch on the gear knob that reduced the engine revs (slightly) allowing a little bit more acceleration and speed (about 10 mph)
Had to drive my employer’s Maxi van back to Rickmansworth from central London once. I know just what your dad meant.
I remember a TV ad for the Maxi, where a happy, fully pyjamad-up couple are seen using the car’s folded down seats as a double bed. Like that would be a comfortable and fun thing to do.
Learnt to drive in one of those. Like a flipping tank. We then went up a gear and had a Maestro…get us!
The Renault 15 was replaced in the range by the Renault Fuego.
This car gave painter and decorator Alan Metcalfe his stage name.
Again, great looking car with much improvement with regards to the engine size.
Quite difficult to get in the rear though, what with the high back front seats.
He was happier with his subsequent purchase, a golden brown Austin Princess. He was moved to write a song about it and journos suggested it was about heroin. Hugh didn’t deny it because it made them appear more edgy. Fact.
The Princess was replaced by the Ambassador. The 1983 Y registration model is the one to go for
@Black-Celebration
Surely an Austin Duchess
I didn’t know there was a Duchess. My father actually bought a brown Wolsey Princess. Until the suspension knackered up, it was quite a comfy car.
The Austin Princess had uprighted hydro-elastic suspension ensuring a smooth ride. It also had seat belt warning indicators, some 5 years before it became law to wear seat belts
@Black-Celebration
Mr C’s roadies are queueing up to join you in pointing out that no such car has ever existed
In the eighties I was tempted to buy a Citroen club. I was warned off by people saying French cars were taxed on engine size so the engines were complicated and hard to work on as they were designed to eke out max power for minimum engine size.
This was the eighties.
I had a Citroen Dyane – the posh person’s 2CV. It was a 6, supposedly with more grunt, although you still had to change down going up gentle inclines on the motorway. It had one of those organ pedal accelerators which regularly used to collapse sideways, the trick being to hook your foot under it and return it to the vertical until the next time. 602cc, 28bhp!
It was one of a succession of clunkers. There was a Mini – one of the first 1000, fact – whose gear lever snapped in half while I was zooming Adam Adamant-style round Hyde Park Corner. There was a Fiat 600 with no third gear – just 2nd and 4th for all practical purposes. The Morris Traveller was a winner though.
I had a Dyane. It was a bit like one of those motorcycle sidecar racing things where you needed a friend throwing themselves energetically around in the back to stop it falling over. It had that gear level that you pulled out of the dashboard and slammed back in again in some random new position, usually reverse by mistake.
As I remember the brake was a circular button on the floor, can the be right? About the size and shape of a Walnut Whip, with roughly the same retardation effect
Don’t remember that…the DS had a brake button, but the way it worked required a degree of mechanical sophistication that a Dyane almost certainly wouldn’t have qualified for.
I first drove a Morris Minor, my dad’s. Its front axle snapped as I drove round a bend. Apparently, it was a common event.
They also went to the other extreme and put a V6 engine in a Renault Clio, which was an absolute monster of a car. As soon as you got behind the wheel, you’d grow horns and drive like a mad devil. 👿
Renault did love a turbo, bolting one to many in the range. With the Renault 5 Gordini Turbo and 5 GT Turbo they were in at the front of the Hot Hatch times.
Peugout preferred the fuel injection route with the 205 GTi – the 1.9 variant was the one to have and always on the ragged edge.
I had a 205 1.9 GTI in 1992/3.
A great car but with no power steering it was a bugger to drive unless you were going fast (50mph and above).
I grew out of it, having fulfilled my 1990s hot hatch dreams, and bought a 3 year old MX-5 to replace it. A classic with the pop up lights and quite rare at the time.
Happy days when cars were probably one of the most important things in my life before the next girlfriend and subsequently my kids!
I’ve had a red Renault 19 – a cheap and cheerful slightly ‘sporty’ thing that took us on a long motoring holiday all the way to Skye and back without a hitch, a white Renault 21 – a fantastic, hugely practical shed of a car with only one minor design flaw – and a swish white Renault Laguna with all the extra sporty bits, paid for by my employed of the time – a pretty classy saloon car with much more modern design features. I have to say that they were all fine motors, of which les francais can be justifiably proud.
The Peugeot 404 was incredibly popular in Africa. Super reliable. The best feature was a particularly sturdy glove box with a metal handle that was perfect for flipping the metal cap on your beers while on the road.
I think HC got a convertible, but again things kept going wrong. ‘Always the sun(roof)!’ he’d shout.
@barry-Blue
Sounds like he needs to get a grip and give the service people time to straighten out the problem
Yep. Shouldn’t take them more than five minutes.
Five minutes to fix the problem two hours of aimless hanging around…
They offered him a temporary replacement, but he was having none of it. No more hire cars for Hugh.
Could never get enough men in back
But he had a nice pick of any ear burning engine you could conceive.
Thought Hugh had specified “No more earlobes”
Did he not, at some point, drive drive his very own tank?
There shouldn’t be any confusion about this. It’s Black and White.
Just levering in another reference to that album, Freddy.
Well, I did have enough time.
Hugh was a bit useless in choosing cars. After the Hillman debacle, for some inexplicable reason he chose another traditional British motor that he found to have a fundamental design flaw with the doors, which kept involuntarily locking. Back at the dealership, he was seen to struggle with the handle, upon which the mechanics would say…………
wait for it……….
……..
“Is he trying to get outta that shit Morris?”
I have never owned a brand new car.
First 3 cars I owned were Fords. A Mk II Cortina rustbucket which died very quickly, a MK II Escort estate that lasted for a good few years and a MK III Escort hatchback. They all were all right to get around in, but pretty boring, the MK III Escort was plagued with electrical faults.
After them I inherited my late dad’s Vauxhall Cavalier hatchback, which used to be my brother’s company car. Decent car but yet again dull. That got written off when someone smashed into the back of me in a queue of traffic near Heathrow. I looked in my mirror as I was sitting in the queue and saw a Vauxhall Astra approaching from afar and just knew he was going to run into me.
After that I had an Astra van with rear seats added, which I found was problematic for insurance renewals. After it died a couple of years later I bought my first Saab.
A “classic” Saab 900 hatchback which served me well for a few years except for the annoyance of the Driver’s door electric window constantly getting stuck closed. A real nuisance at ticket barriers. When the gearbox on that one gave up the ghost* I got a Saab 9-3 which was a lovely car except I’d failed to notice it had a cassette player, not a CD player and you couldn’t fit a non-Saab sound system because it was integrated with the dash electronics system. That got written off after a good few years when an idiot came out of a turning on my right and smashed into the side of it.
I bought another Saab 9-3, a later model ’03 turbo saloon (they’d stopped making hatchbacks) and was never truly happy with it. Lots of niggling faults, one after the other and the turbo was not particularly responsive. Eventually I wrote that one off when I rear-ended a Landrover discovery at a tricky road junction. That was December 2021, peak Covid lockdown.
I bought my present Saab 9-3 turbo convertible ( an older ’02 model, same series as the one before the one I’d just crashed) soon after. This has some faults* but is a really lovely car to drive. Probably the most driveable car I’ve ever owned and surprisingly, it being 22 years old, is ULEZ-compliant for London driving.
* I had a warning things were not right with the gearbox when the gearchange became really stiff, so that I really had to slam it into each gear. Just before it siezed up completely I was up in Bedford working and when I went to put it into first gear, the entire gearstick came adrift and I had to call the AA for a tow home to Watford.
** Soft top is basically knackered. The mechanical metalwork of it is rusted to buggery and the canvas is mildewed and a bit leaky. My mechanic can get it working whenever the warm weather comes along, at a price, but a winter of not using it and it will stop working again.
A few months ago the power steering pipework sprang a leak and had to be renewed.
Just lately the aircon has stopped blowing cool air, so I suppose it’s in need of re-gassing.
Do you ever wonder if there are… you know… other cars?
How are your insurance premiums, @mike_h ?
Last time the premium was somewhere around £350. Don’t have the documents to hand right now.
Next time it’ll be more, as I got a speeding ticket a couple of months ago.
Dull answer, but the bloke who runs the Aural Sculptors (Stranglers) website is a friend of a friend and might actually know the answer.
What was the question again?
Not dull @fentonsteve
Nice n pleazy.
He wasn’t partial to Ford.