Grand Touring in Modern Britain

The MGB GT that is to be my GT project car

It really should not come as any surprise to find out that I love driving. The first clue is that I have a blog about my project to try and Grand Tour in the 21st. The second, if you know me, is my love of motorsport and Formula 1 in particular. Another clue is that when I owned a motorbike I used to get on it and try and put on a seat belt, when I remembered I did not have one I used to feel an emptyness inside, a car shaped emptyness. Indeed since I started driving at the age of 17 years old, the legal age to start driving in the UK, I was not without a car for more than a couple of months for the next 15 years. I only gave up owning a car when I moved to London to be a mature student. I lived over the road from my College and whilst not living in central London I did live in an area that was in Zone 2 (for those who know the London transport zoning system for those who do not check out this downloadable PDF of the zones with tube stations). this meant that everywhere I wanted or indeed needed to go was serviced by numerous buses, trains and tubes travelling 24 hours a day for minimal fares. Added to this was the high cost of running a car and the problem with lack of parking in central London and don’t get me started on congestion (well, actually without the congestion this would be a short entry so DO get me started but not for a paragraph or two). Anyway, I lived without a car for a number of years but kept my eye in by driving my parents car when I visited them, which was quite often. When I was younger I used to drive to think about things (now I find cheaper ways to think such as sitting down in my flat). I used to drive up and down a road called the spur road by locals, this road was about seven miles long but ended in a round-a-bout at each end and was half a mile from my home. I could therefore get to it very quickly, then drive up and down it at will and still get home within 10-15 minutes when I had enough. Oh and it was a dual carriageway with a 70 mph speed limit so I could bomb up and down it at speed, which helped. When I lived in the Midlands I had no such luxury but the M1 motorway was not far out of town and on one occasion I drove from Rugby to Birmingham and back just to have a good think.

Anyway, this leads me on to the theme of this post, driving in London. Before I moved to London I used to be involved with a computer sales company and one particular installation site was in the heart of London. I went with one of our technical guys to install a network (I was mainly on hand to liaise with the customer and on occasion translate the requests of the techie guy into English for the customer. We drove up and shared the duties as it was going to be a long drive. I took us to the outskirts of London and he, as a Londoner with years of experience driving in the city before moving to the coast, drove the London leg. He gave me my first instruction on driving in London; first, do not be timid, the timid will be bullied by the majority of drivers in London whether they be buses, cabbies (taxi drivers for those outside the UK), delivery people not to mention the other private car drivers. the second was do not drive a car that you care about in central London because someone will hit you (see the first instruction for potentially why). As a side note I had a friend as university who came from Rome and he said in italy you tell where you were by the driving style, those in the north obeyed the rules in the main, in the middle including Rome drivers took things like traffic lights as advice rather than something to be obeyed and in the south if you slowed down at a junction or traffic lights or because someone was trying to cross the road be prepared to hear a cacophony of horns and be hit by the car behind. I presume all London drivers have driven in southern Italy at some point. One final fact to remember is that London traffic moves at an average of 10mph and has since 1900 no matter what the government of the day try to do about it, a steady 10nph is the average.
The up shot of all that aggression and congestion is that I avoid driving into London even now, it is often faster to travel by public transport and more convenient. To give you a couple of examples I love going to gigs and when I used to live in the midlands I would drive to Wembley for concerts. However, this meant that at the end of the concert it would be an hour or two before I had managed to get out onto the open road. Indeed the best tactic was to either get a very late meal in the surrounding burger bars and kebab stalls or sit in the car, smoke furiously and listen to music (normally the band we had just seen) discussing the gig until the car park had cleared. Now I live in London I always go by public transport and even with the new Wembley stadium holding 80,000 people I can still be home in about an hour (okay you have nothing to compare this against but trust me this is fast). The other example I can give is any driving trip i make breaks down normally into two or three segments. My sister and her family live in the New Forest to the south west of London. They are about 120 miles away from where I live at most. When I visit them I always drive and the journey is made up of the following three elements:
1. Getting from my flat to the M25 orbital motorway surrounding Greater London, a distance of about nine miles, which takes around an hour as long as there is no unusual problems.
2. Driving on the M25, a distance of about 15 miles, which takes around 20 minutes depending on traffic volume.
3. The rest of the journey, which is mostly on the M3 motorway and takes an hour and a bit (you can do the math on the miles covered and remember the speed limit on the motorway is 70 mph and I always stick to the speed limit).

Now I have driven a variety of cars over the years but as my dad worked in the car industry the majority of them were new or very recent models. the oldest car I had driven until yesterday was a 20 year old Golf GTi, which had power assisted nothing. However for the past year I have been driving my parents old car, which as they were both old age pensioners had power assisted everything. I found when I had been driving the Golf that if I switched over to their car that I would emergency stop everywhere, turn very sharply (far more sharply than I needed to) and almost put my foot through the floor when I stepped on the clutch pedal. This explains my concerns at picking up my Grand Touring project car yesterday. I had found my dream car, which it turned out was a 40 year old, Mk II MGB GT in British Racing Green with chrome bumpers, wire wheels and not much else. You can read a separate entry on this beautiful car next week but for now the basics you need to know are that there is nothing power-assisted on the car, indeed it does not even have windscreen washer (although it does have wipers), a radio or a cigarette lighter (the latter means that I am now carrying a ludicrous number of batteries around with me to power all my gizmos, not the least of which is my GPS. Just to add to my trepidation the weather had turned positively messianic with black clouds and torrential rain, which meant that my main fear about getting used to the breaking distance compared to my parents modern car would be exacerbated by the amount of water on the road. I decided when I picked the car up to drive around the local streets. It was an intriguing area of north west London with only one road in and out of the area but with a network of streets full of houses. I had checked it out on a few maps beforehand and thought this would be a great plan, the streets would not be busy as the only traffic would be residents arriving home or leaving. Just before I hoped in the car Nigel, one of the co-owners of the MG garage I bought my beloved from, said don’t forget reverse is hard left and down, which was handy as the original gear knob had been replaced with an MG badged one that did not display the the gear set-up. I lurched off down the road as I got used to the power of the engine, the length of the clutch and the atrocious conditions. I drove around for a few minutes, occasionally getting into third gear but due to the winding streets mostly in first and second. Finally I decided to try reversing, found a cul-de-sac and drew to a halt. At that precise moment a police van pulled up and a few officers emerged, eyeing me suspiciously. I had no choice but to carry on with my plan as if I drove forward I would plough into a bollard. It was then that I found out the simple instruction “hard left and down” actually hid the reality of trying to thread the gear stick through the eye of a needle as that was where reverse turned out to be; each time I located a gear and opened the throttle a little the car would edge forward, inching closer to that bollard watched with fascination by the police. Sweat ran down my back, the car steamed up despite the asthmatic blower and open window. I tried being rough with the gear stick and being gentle, I tried wiggling, I tried being precise. Finally after about five minutes but frankly what felt like an hour I found reverse and gratefully drove off, leaving a group of bemused police behind and felt confident enough to hit the open road and start driving home sure and safe in the knowledge that I would not need to find reverse again until I got the car back to the garage where I would be keeping it.

How was the journey I hear you ask, well it started with a very unusual junction, basically held at a traffic light coming from 10 o’clock was a stream of cars crossing in front of me before turning right down the road beside me. On the other side of the traffic lights was a dog-leg to the right with enough room for one car and another junction this one feeding into two lanes of traffic themselves only about four car lengths from another junction and another set of traffic lights at which point I had to take a dog-leg left and after another 100 feet hit another junction controlled by traffic lights. Needless to say the lights were always against me, the traffic was heavy and the rain wet (well the last is normally the case but you get the idea). This set the tone for the journey as a whole. The traffic was very heavy, not only were there the usual obstacles of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings but also more than the usual number of road works closing down lanes or indeed entire roads. On a side note why do pedestrians insist on pushing the button on a crossing even when the traffic is not moving and they can happily walk across, skip across or even waltz over the crossing? The car had some petrol in it but not only did I not know how thirsty the car would be (and indeed I will not for a number of journeys yet until I get a feel for that aspect of the little beauty) but Nigel had said he was not sure how accurate the fuel gauge so I should pop into a petrol station to make sure I had enough fuel for the trip home. After 15 minutes of crawling through the rain I decided to find a petrol station, the fuel gauge wobbling around a bit too much to make me happy there was enough fuel left. I click on my GPS screen to bring up the options, navigated to local points of interest, found a petrol station not too far away and then went to select it as a check point on my current trip. My GPS device had decided that what I really wanted to do was go home and at some point later on come back to this part of London to fill up as it asked me what day I wanted to travel and what time! After a few minutes of cursing, looking to the heavens and complaining about my bad luck I managed to convince the unit to take me there now. However, given this was going to be a journey to test my reserves the whole street that the petrol station was in was being dug up to have the Victorian sewers replaced, I managed to find a way in and as the main exit was closed an alternative way out that took me down a street with quite the most horrendous speed bumps in it that I have ever seen. Needless to say the MG is a beautifully low slung car with 40 year old suspension. My bottom took a pounding for about a mile. After an hour and a quarter I finally managed to cross the Thames and head into south London. Distance covered 10 miles. Thankfully the second 10 miles were less eventful and slightly quicker so I pulled into my garage after just another hour.

A couple of years ago I broke my left ankle badly and I now have a few pins and some assorted metal work in there to keep everything together. Obviously another concern I had was how would my ankle hold out having to work constantly on the clutch pedal. One of my hobbies is hiking through the English countryside so I knew my ankle was quite strong but that journey was a great test. Thankfully it came through with flying colours, no swelling, no aching, which considering the fact I spent most of the journey changing up or down between first and second. I have to say it was actually great fun to drive the car even in such ghastly weather. To feel that lovely engine growl into life when I could put my foot down was marvellous. There were even a couple of stretches near home where I could really get some air into its lungs and get up into fourth, which was an absolute joy.
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