When my brother's Sptifire was written off, and his Mk1 Triumph 2000 estate was rotten beyond reasonable repair, he bought himself a cheap Stag for transport. At £1700, it was clearly far from perfect. It had a Ford Essex engine (which involved an utterly ghastly bonnet bulge) with cracked exhaust manifolds, a leaky hood and some very dodgy repairs on the sills. Over the year or so that he owned it it broke down nearly as often as Henrietta Herald. Amazingly he once suggested I should have bought it off him instead of getting the OWL!

Well, insanity must run in the family, because five years on and finding myself with not one usable car among the four I own, I just couldn't resist a Stag which was advertised in the local WHY. Not a beaten up old nail though; I had quite enough projects on the go already, I needed something reliable and usable.

A Stag ? Reliable ? Well contrary to popular belief there is no fundamental reason why not, and at an asking price of £5100 I figured this ought to be a good one. I was less sure after speaking to the vendor, and after a test drive it was clear there were some problems. I thought I might offer £3500, but knowing that he had already rejected one offer I asked first what that offer had been. Guess what ? Well I said I'd think about it and returned home expecting to remain Stag-less. The next day I rang the vendor and offered £3700 - a figure intended to suggest the car was overpriced without having to be so rude as to say so. To my surprise he said he'd think about it, and by the end of that week we had agreed on £3800 as a suitable figure. After all, there was a photographic record of an extensive restoration, receipts for a new engine and gearbox and so forth. Only when I actually collected the car did I discover that the vendor had actually been dishonest. The advert said "MOT" - but the ticket expired the day after it was published. Of course I was exceedingly foolish not to have asked - had I done so I would probably not have bought it, certainly not at that money. Still, it was in pretty good nick, so an MOT wouldn't be a problem, would it ? Don't you believe it!

As usual, I had checked some basic things before the test (and fixed a broken contact on the left hand brake light), so I was a tad annoyed when the left front sidelight didn't work at the test centre, and neither did the right hand inner headlamp and right hand rear indicator. But those were the least of it. PAS fluid leak, rear subframe bushes shot, brake hoses perished, dodgy passenger seat-belt (inertia lock didn't work!), poor hand brake effort and the left front brake binding. What's more, being able to have a really good look underneath showed that the restoration had not been done as well as it appeared. Well I ordered the relevant bits - seatbelts had to be a pair (from James Paddock) because ones that fit the original buckles are no longer available. The rest of it I bought from 2000 specialist Chris Witor because he's just about the only reliable source of proper Avon rubber subframe bushes. The reproduction ones may be less than a quarter of the price, but with a probable service life less than a year it's just not worth it. The headlamp turned out to have just blown, but I was slightly surprised to find they are all sealed beam units - not UK spec for a Stag. The side light was a worn out spring in the fitting - why on earth do people spend all the money on new panels and a professional respray and then re-use knackered old electrical fittings ? And as for the state of the wiring..... AAaaaaaaarrrrrrggghhh! Sometimes I could throttle someone. Which reminds me - when you're fitting new wings at a cost of £300 each, only a complete total brain-dead idiot forgets to protect the hidden side from rust. Which means nearly all car restorations are apparently done by complete total brain-dead idiots.

Then I had a look at the binding brake. One of the pistons in the front left caliper was completely siezed so I opted for a reconditioned caliper. The right hand one worked ok, but with one of those pistons being very hard to retract I decided to replace both calipers. And so it was ready for a re-test at the beginning of February 1999. Unfortunately the test centre I had taken it to first time were fully booked so I went somewhere else. This tester appeared determined to fail it, even spending a good twenty minutes looking for some rust (he succeeded eventually in finding a bodge hiding some, but how he had the nerve to call it a failure point I don't know). To make things worse the electrics had decided to play up with the sidelights coming on when the brakes were applied!

Well the brake light problem turned out to be a short between the two circuits in the wiring for a tow bar. The car hasn't got a tow bar. Somebody had removed the tow bar but rather than remove the wiring they just chopped the end off and left it dangling in the boot. Presumably it was the same person who crimped one of the connectors on the left hand outer headlight to the insulation rather than the wire. And presumably it was also the same person who, when the fuel pump inertia switch failed, ran a new wire from the steering column connectors (just pushed in between plug and socket) all the way to the boot (under the driver's seat, trapped by the seat frame, across to the left side into the boot and back across the boot to the fuel pump on the right) in order to bypass the failed switch.

Well I finally got it on the road, and it got some interesting comments. Bear in mind that the OWL is the same colour. Several friends from church made the same comment, which went like this : Friend : Your car is looking stunning! Me : It's a different car Friend : Yes, quite a transformation! Me : No, it's a different car, not the same one. Count the doors! It's not as if I hadn't told them I'd bought a Stag either!

Regrettably all was not sweetness and light on the Stag front even then. I changed the gearknob overdrive switch to get it working, and discovered a progressive fault which caused it to disengage on overrun. This got worse to the point of not working when hot, but even so it showed every sign of being the inhibitor switch. Unfortunately this is basically inaccessible in situ. However, within a month or so the gearbox had lost third gear, so it had to come out. Then I took the hard top off and discovered the hood frame was broken in three places and missing the vital catches to hold it together so you can get it back out of its cubbyhole. Shortly after having the gearbox replaced (and moving to Cambridge) the sticky starter solenoid took its revenge and the starter motor actually failed on me. At this point I had had enough - the Stag had driven me to the extreme of actually buying a non-Triumph.

As if this wasn't insult enough, the Stag has continued to plague me with problems. In fairness, it did at least have the decency to work whenever the Volkswagen decided to let me down, but no sooner had I fixed the VW than the Stag's viscous fan gave up. This rapidly reached the point where the fan blades were hitting the radiator, so I had to abandon it at Mum's for a while.

Months later I finally managed to recover the Stag, somewhat after its MOT had run out. Again the electrics were playing up, with the rear indicators not working, but that wasn't too hard to fix. Unfortunately there was some corrosion on the left hand chassis rail, but before I could get anything done about that I managed to prang the modern car. Suddenly the Stag was urgent! At great expense I had the welding done, along with the other MOT work (new handbrake cable and rear wheel cylinders). Amazingly it came back with the handbrake hardly working, but with a new MOT. Once again it entered regular daily service. It wasn't long before more problems arose. Two months later the handbrake took to disengaging when the door was slammed shut, much to my embarrasment the first time as I had just parked on a slope! Then a fortnight later I had two flat tyres, followed within a week by the handbrake ratchet failing completely and the front left suspension drag strut ripping its mounting out of the chassis rail.

Despite these problems I took it on the 2000 Round Britain Reliability Run, though admittedly mostly because I had entered before realising how much trouble it was going to be!

Back to cars page