Man buys Austin Allegro sold unseen and attempts to drive 298 miles home

According to Take me to the truth by Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera ‘At the seat of all our emotional needs, beyond the search for love or joy lies a deep sense of abandonment, a sense of persistent threat, and a feeling of inadequacy. Unfortunately, this is the legacy of the ego-self, and it is always trying to eradicate these ancient feelings through distraction.’

Though I've not finished the book I have to admit thus far it explains why I bought an Austin Allegro, once voted worst car in the world. I couldn’t imagine a better way of distracting myself from existential angst.

It's not as if I didn't have the perfect car already. This is my daily driver. I dropped 600 two and a half years ago on a MK 1 Fiat Punto with less than 23,000 on the clock.

Fiat Punto SX55                                                              

                             

I’m very happy with it. It's fuel efficient, it never goes wrong, it has a very natty interior with electric windows. We're now approaching our 15,000 mile anniversary. I’ve been to the Lake District, to the infamous Naworth Crossing and the ancient and mysterious island of Thanet – well it used to be an island- AND I’ve driven it in all hours and weathers across the cinematic landscape of Wales. I moved all my worldy chattels with this car and it’s still going strong. To say the least I can see why it won European Car of the Year in 1993, but that’s kind of irrelevant, because I always wanted an Austin Allegro. 

Is my Allegro fixation allied to my also being an underachiever with overlooked qualities? Do I crave Allegro because my formative memories of the Austin Allegro were happy ones in an otherwise difficult time when my parents bought one in Angelic white in 1979 and separated shortly after? Maybe I just go for the looks? 

So I wanted an Allegro, preferably all of them, but there was just one small problem with this particular bee in my bonnet: I never seem to have disposable income and Allegros are increasingly few and far between. The handful left are either rotting in gardens and garages, broken for spares or passed between enthusiasts for upwards of a couple of grand. I had an Ebay alert dropping news about Allegros in my inbox for months and it was quiet, I must say. But then, suddenly...

A classified advert for an Allegro appeared. Not just any Allegro. A "useable" 1974 Allegro for £1500. A Mk 1 with quartic steering wheel, vinyl roof...original mud flaps? Gosh. Where did they find this? Area 51? Genuine enquiries were welcome, which means you can knock them down a bit, maybe knock them down a lot, but I didn’t want to take that risk. I wanted this thing and I was a little irrational.

An Allegro with 37,000 miles on the clock awaits a buyer

Personally I’d always imagined buying a 2 door series 2 or a Vanden Plas anyway it came. I wouldn’t even dream of an Allegro 1750 SS. That said, any series 1 is the bomb in itself; the car intended by its makers before its feathers began to melt in the sun. I got a tarot reading. "Don’t buy it", my necromancer said. The five card spread say it’s a bad idea. It’ll break down, you’re a dreamer but you’ll go ahead and buy it anyway. 

I rang the seller first thing in the morning to ask what issues the car had and the signs were not good. Unusually for the owner of a car he said he wasn't actually sure what sort of mechanical shape the car was in. I wondered how you can run a classic car restoration business and not know the condition of a car, even one acquired in part exchange. It’s your bread and butter. And why would you not restore it yourself? I wondered, but did not manifest my concerns so bluntly. I simply asked the seller if he could tell me what the issues were and he said he'd take it for a spin to see if it worked okay.

I was on tenterhooks until midday when the call came. My man in Durham had had the Allegro doing 70 on the motorway and it seemed pretty smooth...apart from some knocking. I managed to make the sentence about the knocking shrink and crawl into a small ball in my brain but I was still somewhat perturbed. I didn’t want anyone taking a 45 year old car I was about to buy for a quick thrash on the motorway. You’re not actually supposed to drive Allegros. You’re supposed to sell them on Ebay and say that it was running fine last time you drove it but it’s been SORN for a while and you’ve been too busy to work on it.

But seriously, Austin Allegros were not expected to survive the drive home from the local dealer, how on earth can a bone stock Allegro (or so it appeared) be expected to drag itself over half the country? There’s a reason I haven’t seen an Allegro on Britain’s roads in two decades. The few that are left are Sunday drivers boodling around the first three letters of their postcode. Reports online suggest that out of 642,350 built there are now around 150 in existence. Many of the remaining cars seem to be worth more ransacked for their parts than they are left in one piece. And when they’re gone, they’re gone. 

Oh, dash it, I thought. It was 300 miles away, I wasn't going to risk losing this thing, I might never get another chance. I just had to go for broke. If it broke down or the wheels fell off did it matter? It was my dream to sit in an Allegro that’s mine, hear its engine tick over, put some stuff in its weird boot, go the distance in it. If that distance was 10 miles then what? It wasn't as if you could hire Austin Allegros. The only Allegro available for hire and drive was (until recently) the ugly and underpowered 1 litre series 3 and that cost about the third of a price of an Allegro just to use it for a day or two. It’s like they had such a low opinion of Allegro enthusiasts that they thought they’d buy the worst example they could find and overcharge for the privilege.

So I stuck a £300 deposit down, registered the car as road tax exempt, bought car insurance for £86, booked a Nat Express coach ticket to Durham for £44 and a hotel in Durham for £45 and got a free upgrade on my RAC recovery. Then it was just a waiting game. On Sunday storm Ciara blew in and I worried about my Allegro taking a beating. Then my partner announced that we were finished and I had to move out and I wondered where I was going to park it. We were back on on Monday and she made me fried egg sandwiches with brown sauce for the journey.

The distance from Llandrindod Wells to Durham was about 13 hours door to door. First we drove 27 miles to Newtown and got a drive thru Breakfast. My partner wouldn't go inside McDonald's because she has CPD and was worried she'd catch Coronavirus so we sat in the car park watching a McDonald's employee trying to replace the bin liners in the high winds. It was viral video stuff but we just enjoyed the moment and kept our smartphones in our pockets. Then Rachel dropped me off at the bus stop and when the coach didn't show up we went on a brief wild goose chase thinking we showed up at the wrong place. But it turned up 15 minutes late and I was out of the biting cold wind and on my way to Allegro Land via Birmingham and Leeds. 

Sitting at the back turned out to be a bad idea. The girl in the two seats opposite my side of the aisle spent a lot of time on the phone talking loudly about being blazed and being proudly unaccountable for her actions on acid and she wasn't gonna lie about this and not gonna lie about that but basically she'd "adopted two children" and didn't care if the police arrested her, she was going to do her social worker over if she didn't meet her in Birmingham. Then a young scallywag behind me started venting down his phone at his mate about how he was going to beat a girl up in words perhaps more colourful. The book I was reading said these two people were a projection of my co-created reality. Hamlet said nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. On reflection, at the very least these individuals were a helpful signpost reminding me to be less like them whilst not judging them. A bit like the Allegro trash talkers on YouTube.

When we got to Birmingham it had some back streets with a rundown, vulnerable and soon to be redeveloped look that reminded me of the UK 40 years ago. The garish mismatch of new build and old Victorian industrial buildings, the ornate stranded pubs that have had the buildings next to them demolished and which look like they might not survive the next five years. After a couple of hours I was on a bus to Leeds. 

I kid you not when I say that this Take Me to the Truth book got me thinking about my Allegro because it was talking intuition and I considered my own actions and realised that I was using my intuition in regard to the car purchase. I absolutely believed the Allegro was going to get me home. Then I turned the page and the book actually used buying a used car as an example, saying that if all the advice says it's a bad idea but your gut still says it's okay go with it.

I had a pleasant night’s sleep in a clean garret in one of those 1930s pubs built in the same style up and down the country, and with a Sainsbury's Local next door. Durham is a lovely city that spared no expense on its banks and now excels in charity shops. How the British empire has fallen. In some ways, the Allegro symbolises that transition from greatness to being an also ran, combining as it does advances, relics, refinement and harshness all in one package. I guess you can choose to see the glass as half empty or half full. A car a lot less great than we wanted it to be but so much greater than its haters will ever give it credit for. 

                                                                     

OXFAM, Durham

 

                 NATIONAL WESTMINSTER BANK (Eye candy on the way to pick up the car)

                                                                       

LLOYD'S BANK

In the morning I walked 5 miles to an industrial estate in the countryside to buy my Allegro. As I walked down the damp lane to the car dealer I felt a bit like an unwelcome stranger in a Wild West saloon. There were some people milling about who looked me up and down with mild disapproval. The dealer John- I'm guessing forward slash mechanic- was friendly enough and he wanted to take me for a spin but I said there was no point. I’d come all that way and wasn't going to not buy the car. Nonetheless, he jumped in the driver’s seat and revved the engine a few times a little too enthusiastically. I was reaching for my wallet.

                                                                   

ALLEGRO LAND AHEAD

            

 ALSO PEUGEOT 205 LAND, ESCORT MK III LAND, ETC.

At first, it felt like a mistake. The Allegro was a fragile little thing with tinny doors that felt like they might break off. When I sat in the driver's seat I sank down far into the worn and stained vinyl cushion. I started it and the engine chugged away willingly but it sounded like it might peter out at any moment. The console was cracked, the tachometer housing looked twice its age, there was no carpet, a tidy CD player that was a very acceptable anachronism but turned out to be routed through the mono centre speaker so you got an authentically bad sound like a cheap transistor radio. And the fuel gauge didn't work. I got the sense they were probably laughing at me out the other side of their faces but it was time to go. I could see from the odometer that John did 7 miles on his little jaunt.

                          

THE FIRST FUEL STOP 

I drove down the narrow country road that curved out of the industrial estate into a straight run of two hundred yards up to the main road. When I reached the junction I tried to brake and couldn't help noticing that the car treated the depression of the pedal almost as advice reluctantly taken rather than an urgent instruction. Then I instinctively glanced down at the wing mirror to check it was safe to turn, but wing mirror there was not. I realised I'd been sold a car that wasn't road legal, having been told it was useable, but I was simply too embarrassed to drive it back. I guess it was technically useable but the absence of a mirror was something I should have been told when I rang to make inquiries, even though it was obvious from the photograph. But the mirror wasn't John's problem anymore, I accepted the car on trust, I didn’t even ask if he’d put oil in it.

Eventually, I found the mirror in the glove compartment and made a temporary repair with gaffa tape.

As I pulled away into the main road the thought of getting half way down the M1 and into deepest Wales seemed like a crazy one. My first nervy thought was "Wow, 45 years of car design has really improved cars," but it was hard to choose between old design and old age. I couldn't believe, for instance, that the brakes were as bad on new cars. It was also very noisy and a radically different driving experience even to my Punto, let alone the Ecosport my partner drives. The steering was incredibly light and I only knew I was going left or right because I turned left or right when I turned the steering wheel, there was minimal feedback that said it was so. Or to put it another way, it felt like a child’s toy steering wheel that didn't actually steer anything. 

On the other hand, I was impressed by the engine. My fears that a 1300 might be a bit sluggish evaporated. The engine was torquey with ample acceleration and didn’t sound at all puny. The gear shift was a smooth and slightly quirky action that was fun to engage. Overall, it felt like being in charge of a runaway lawnmower and being scared and having fun at the same time.

I pulled into a garage just down the road and put £30 in the tank. A man from the dealership next door wandered over to reminisce fondly about simpler times when he sold Allegros brand new. It was really handy having seen him around because after I paid for the petrol and put some LPG in the tank I repeatedly failed in my attempt to start the car. I tracked him down and he showed me how to use the choke and it was right as rain. But home felt like a very long way away.

My heart was in my mouth getting it safely through traffic and roundabouts onto the motorway but traffic was light and once I was on the M1 all was well. Eventually I noticed there were circular holes in the passenger footwell and I could see the road but it was well in the sense that the car didn't mind going. I mostly cruised between 50 and 60 but sometimes I drifted up to 70-75 and it didn’t seem bothered. Eventually, I tried to cut across to the M62 and I messed it up slightly but after a bit of a tangent I was on target and I pulled into a services.

I wasn't parked long before passers by were stopping in their tracks. The car is an old man magnet and every one has an Allegro story to tell. One crashed his Allegro into a bush, another had it as his first car and traded with his brother. One man just stood in front of the car staring at it in shock like it had just crashed into Roswell. Fortunately, nobody made a joke about it being called the 'All Aggro'. These were fond, misty-eyed souls charmed to see a species thought long extinct. When I went to start the engine it was more than willing after its motorway run but this time for the life of me I could not get the handbrake off. But it wasn't a problem. I simply waited for another old man to walk past and he knew instinctively that you have to lift the handbrake before you disengage. Maybe everyone knows that. I have a touch of Frank Spencer about me.

Once I got going again I seemed to end up on another tangent. For a long while the sat nav took me into the urban outskirts of some unknown northern town and I sensed a long tailback of cars stuck behind me but patient because I was driving a car that might disintegrate at any moment. 

It’s driving in urban conditions that really take you back in time. Suddenly the Allegro felt much more in touch with that bygone age of road markings and speed limit signs. The regular appearance of places in the road marked SLOW made sense because in that car if you didn't slow down it would probably end up in a hedge. Road signs marked 30 were also plainly for what they were designed, an indication of maximum speed allowed rather than the minimum that drivers today treat it as. I sped along at 28 and each surge of acceleration through the gears was conveyed in whining surround sound. The car felt appreciably more mechanical, less like a flawless spaceship that is the modern car. It actually reminded me a lot of the bus I used to catch from the outskirts of Hohhot, China into the city centre. That had an engine that made its presence felt.

Certainly, I was reminded of times gone by when old bangers with questionable road worthiness drove round screeching, wailing, dragging their exhausts and billowing noxious fumes and my Allegro was nowhere near as badly behaved but the car vibrated quite violently at one point as I waited at traffic lights -which might terrify a Millennial- but I remember cars doing that in my childhood and didn’t panic. 

Eventually I was back on a motorway and probably somewhere near Birmingham when I started to muse: I had no idea how much petrol the car had in it to start with. Assuming virtually none there was every chance I might run out before I got home. Expensive as motorway services are I stopped at one and put £15 in making the total outlay £45. That is, once I got the petrol cap open, which stubbornly refused all attempts for a while.

                         

Last petrol stop on the way home

It was a long, ill-advised journey ventured by someone who knows nothing about cars but the car ploughed on for mile after mile obviating any need for serious concern. If we'd been deluged I might have been in trouble but the rain fell mercifully with interruption, as the wipers actually seemed to get tired of wiping after a while and went more slowly. Otherwise, I had every reason to suppose all would end well. As I neared Wales I took stock of my situation and realised the car sounded about as refined as a 2nd world war tank but I'd quite forgotten that the lack of carpet and the mysterious holes in the undercarriage meant a significant amount of motorway noise was leaking inside.

When I finally got near Newtown the ride was starting to become fun. There were very few cars on the road and on that 27 mile stretch of twisty mountain road between Newtown and Llandrindod Wells none at all. I could just go at my discretion without being tailgated. But the car seems more up for the journey than ever handling the endless twists and turns and the steep inclines without demur. 

When I rolled into the car park in Llandrindod I forgot how bad the brakes were and curbed it when I pulled into a space. Something the Allegro turned out to be infinitely willing to forgive me for. 

A few days later I took her to the local garage where it currently resides awaiting some minor repairs- the frame and the engine being solid and sound- and the beginning of what I hope will be a rolling restoration. But if fate decrees otherwise and personal circumstances mean I have to sell it on I will do my best to find her a good home as I have a soft spot for these cars and am sorry so few remain. 

                              

Home and almost dry

All in all the Allegro turned out to be worse and better than I imagined but better overall. I wrongly imagined a somewhat more modern sense of handling but also a stickier shift and less willing and able engine. Though it would be nice to have one of the larger engines the Allegro comes with 4 speed feels like more of a blast from the past and the 1275 A series might be a sweet spot in terms of economy and power. 

When it comes down to it what the car has is bags of character and you either dig the baggage it comes with or you don’t. How good it was in its day is a fun argument to have but in a sense is academic as all cars of its age and ilk have been rendered much of a muchness and obsolete by the march of progress and it just comes down to whether or not you want to have the Allegro experience and maybe even do your bit to keep the Allegro dream alive. I for one am down for more Allegro adventures.