Three Classic Vauxhalls
(25 October 2002)
(CARkeys recently went along to a Vauxhall driving day, when the company not only brought along a good selection of current machinery but also let us loose in three cars from its heritage collection. It's certainly fun to get behind the wheel of vehicles from long-gone decades, but they do show how design has moved on - although some nostalgia details still appeal.)
H-Type 10hp (1938)
(by David Finlay)
I haven't done it very often, but I like driving cars from the 1930s. They're from a sufficiently distant era to be interesting but not so early in motoring evolution that you have to adjust every component while they're actually running and concoct your own fuel from boot polish, fallopian tubes and horseradishes.
Other people seem to like cars of this era too. When I drove the Vauxhall Ten I inconvenienced almost every other road user within sight as I went through all the effort of getting it up to 30mph, but nobody seemed to mind. In fact most of them smiled, and quite a few waved.
Well, apart from anything else, it's quite cute, isn't it? Upright and perky at the front, with perhaps a foreshadowing of the Chrysler PT Cruiser at the rear. It's also very small, though it has no problem carrying a full complement of adults - not at all a bad bit of packaging, at the expense of anything that might be construed these days as safety equipment.
You're very conscious of not being cocooned from the outside world. And there's no fuzziness in any of the controls, either - far more than in a modern car, you know you're in charge of a collection of mechanical devices (particularly if you get your double-declutching wrong and feel the crunch of non-synchromesh gears rattling up through the lever).
I liked the period details, such as the ornate little speedometer, the very dainty switch that controls the almost completely useless windscreen wipers, and the push-button starter. (How ironic that this is now a selling point for high-performance cars like the Ford Focus RS!) My absolute favourites were the direction indicators - little lights on stalks that spring from between the doors on the appropriate side of the car - but I was also amused by the deep compartments on either side of the dash. Although this can't possibly be the reason they were added, they make extremely handy mobile phone holders.
F-Type Victor Series II (1961)
(by Ross Finlay)
Chocolate and cream colour scheme, wraparound windscreen and sizeable rear fins: not exactly for the shy retiring flower kind of motorist. But the last of the semi-American styled Victors was another one which had other drivers smiling and waving.
The last time I drove one of these cars was when it had just gone out of production, and I'd forgotten how amazingly thin the steering wheel rim is. It gives you the impression that the steering is bound to be quite light, but the first sharp corner soon explodes that theory.
The bonnet and boot seem to take up a lot of the bumper-to-bumper length, but it's good to be reminded how roomy and airy passenger cabins of that era tended to be, with excellent all-round visibility, while also offering decent luggage space. They certainly weren't subtle - the Victor has a lot of brown-painted metal and polished brown vinyl inside.
Three-speed column change, chromed horn ring, close-up driving position, strip speedometer, wing-mounted rather than door mirrors, umbrella hand brake and massive-looking defrost controls: this is all very late-1950s. The Series II was coming to the end of its production life in 1961.
Once up and running, the car goes well enough for its age, but it's an age when a 1.5-litre saloon like this was regarded as quite nippy if it did 0-60mph in two blinks of an eye below 30 seconds.
Viva SL (1966)
(by David Finlay)
As a child I had something of a fixation about rear light clusters. It was the first thing I used to identify a car, and I particularly liked the ones on the Viva. Of such things are careers in motoring journalism made.
There's a lot of space in the front, but it seems to start from waist height - you feel as if you're sitting on the floor. The seat belts are horrible things with no retracting mechanism, so they drape messily over the seats when not in use, and unless you've adjusted them properly they do very little to hold you in place.
But I like the large-diameter, small-rimmed steering wheel and the unbelievably short gearlever (something of a Vauxhall feature well into the 1970s). The 1200cc engine doesn't have much grunt, but because the Viva is - in modern terms - a very light car for its size, performance is better than you might think. You can certainly nip away from traffic lights very smartly.
I can just about remember watching Vivas at race meetings, and some of them were very quick. One especially successful example had a 2.3-litre engine, but someone also found a way to cram in a five-litre V8 of some description. Driving the Heritage Centre's SL I tried to imagine what that car must have been like, and decided that the guy who built and raced it must have been a braver man than I am.
