NUC556L first entered the Pearce family when my older brother, Mark, realised his Spitfire, Toby, was going to need major work. He had considered a GT6 when he bought Toby and after driving my Vitesse a few times he wanted the extra grunt. So he asked me to look out for a Mk2 Vitesse or a Mk2 or early Mk3 GT6. He was insistent that it should have the Rotoflex rear suspension.

The one I found him, for sale within walking distance of his home, was advertised as having a recently rebuilt engine and good bodywork. It looked tidy enough, and ran reasonably well. The overdrive was faulty but the vendor was sure that was merely electrical.

The overdrive problem was not just the switch, as had been claimed. Mark reported some very peculiar symptoms, which I couldn't quite place. Then one day the whole family were due to travel to Bournemouth, and Mum's metro was too small for the five of us. Mark and I therefore travelled in the GT6 to give me a chance to diagnose the problem. The first clue was the "machine gun" rattle coming from the right hand side of the gearbox. The second was the tendency, on motorway exit slip roads, for the engine revs to drop from 4000rpm to idle then suddenly jump back up accompanied by a chirp as the rear wheels partially locked up for a moment. The cause, found very quickly once we looked, was a piece of bare wire. The operating switch of the D-type overdrive connects a relay coil to ground through the inhibitor. The bare wire was between the switch and the relay, and it was rattling against the gearbox casing. This caused the relay to chatter, which in turn caused the hydraulic solenoid to chatter, which supplied enough oil pressure to move the overdrive out of direct drive, but not enough to put it in overdrive. All the torque of the engine was being transmitted through the unidirectional slip clutch which was meant to work only during the changeover. On overrun, it was in free slip mode until the engine (and gearbox) speed dropped too low for the overdrive hydraulic pump to do anything.

Within two years, and well before we'd made much progress on Toby, the GT6 was in need of significant work to get an MOT. Both sills were rusty enough to fail, and the offside front wheel arch was disintegrating completely, as was the front edge of the bonnet. The repaired overdrive electrical circuit had shown up a slipping problem when hot (normally a result of low overdrive oil pressure) which I had not been able to fix, even after stripping and rebuilding the unit when the gearbox was repaired (it had lost second gear). Andrew and I did the MOT work on the GT6, plus a couple of other bits, in exchange for Toby the Spitfire becoming mine. But it took a while, and by the time we had finished Mark had decided he needed to sell it. I tried advertising it in various magazines, but had no takers. A few people looked at it but were obviously wasting my time and theirs - they were looking for a near concours car when I'd clearly advertised it as condition 2 and priced it accordingly. So after a while (during which time I had been driving it occasionally) I decided to buy it myself.

Over the next year or so I became aware of a number of developing problems. The engine made some fairly unpleasant rumbling noises under load, which I figured was probably the big end bearings. So much for the rebuild it had supposedly had. The front edge of the roof was bulging, suggesting that some nasty rot had been hidden under filler. The windscreen frame was equally questionable in places. The bonnet hinges moved every time it was opened, because the front of the chassis was rather corroded. So in 1993 I decided to sort it out. The bonnet came off, the engine came out, and the windscreen was removed so we could do the roof. New hinge boxes got welded to the chassis front rail after we'd repaired that with bits of Dexion. That stuff is about twice the thickness of the original chassis, so it's a pretty solid job. We also used Dexion to build a reference frame for the hinge boxes, so we knew they'd be lined up right. The roof edge was every bit as rotten as I suspected, and the windscreen frame was dire too. At the time, GT6 windscreen frames were not available and even the Spitfire ones were phenomenally expensive and questionable. So we actually ended up rebuilding the whole thing from bits of scrap Herald roof. Amazingly, with a bit of lead loading and filler, it looks quite decent, and it's still intact twelve years down the line.

The engine rebuild was quite scary. When I took the sump off, I discovered a large number of small bits of metal, of various sizes, but fairly obviously all fragments of the same shape. They were originally cylindrical, about a quarter inch long and the same outer diameter, with an eight inch or so centre bore. Then I took the timing cover off and realised what they were. The timing chain consists of a number of links joined by pins, with hardened shells around them to engage with the gears. Most of these shells had shattered and many had been sucked into the oil pump. A few of the smaller fragments were still embedded into the rotor of the pump. Some had even made it to the big end bearings.

The crankshaft turned out to have already been reground to 40 thou, which is as far as it's safe to take a GT6 crank. Luckily I was able to buy a brand new crankshaft, still in its Leyland box and wrapped in wax paper. Along with new timing gears and chain, a new oil pump, deglazed bores, reground valves, new Vandervell bearings throughout, and a really good thorough clean out, the engine went back together. I fitted an oil pressure gauge to make sure it was right. After seeing the state it was in, I wasn't going to take any chances.

With everything back together and a fresh MOT acquired, I took it for a proper run to see how it did. Wow! Not only did it pull much more eagerly than ever before, but the oil pressure was huge. In fact, a bit too huge - at 3000RPM cold it indicated nearly 100PSI. It still does so after an oil change, even twelve years on.

By 1994 I had joined Club Triumph and discovered about the Round Britain Reliability Run. The GT6 still had a dodgy overdrive, which I'd been putting off fixing because the only way to do it would be a new gearbox. It also had a weak rear spring and tired Rotoflexes. The Round Britain seemed like the perfect excuse to force myself to sort these out. So when a nice young lady friend agreed to be my co-driver, the GT6 got several weekends and some whole weeks of serious attention. An uprated gearbox with J-type overdrive went in, the rear suspension all came off and got stripped, cleaned, shotblasted, painted and reassembled. The rear wheel arches were in poor state around the shocker mountings, so they got rebuilt. Meanwhile a Spax adjustable conversion kit moved the shockers off them to the chassis. When the Round Britain came round, the GT6 performed faultlessly.

I used the GT6 quite a lot over the next few years. It had a few mishaps, like the time I overcooked it on the way home from a Club meeting and drove it through a hedge. And with maintenance problems on my other cars it got driven every day on my 30 mile commute through the winter of 1997/98. That rather did for it — much of the body had suffered from age and most of the repair work it had received was cheap rather than good. By April 1998 it was desperately in need of a serious rebuild.