Dad cars: what's the best car your dad's ever had?
We dredge up our favourite dad cars from the dim and distant past
Mitsubishi Evo 6 Tommi Makinen
James Wilson – Content editor
Massive spoiler, dustbin lid sized exhaust and bright red rally-inspired livery was pretty much the ultimate formula for a car in my 6 year-old mind, and that was exactly what my dad’s Evo 6 Tommi Makinen edition offered. Back in the early 00s the old man worked as a general manager at a Mitsubishi dealership up in sunny North Yorkshire, and as it was the golden era for Evos back then he had a string of demonstrators which did wonders for the school run. The Tommi was by far my favourite, but its pièce de résistance was that its number plate read ‘Y NOT’, which, coincidentally was my father's reasoning every time he decided to unleash his inner Makinen...
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And finally... “My dad’s got a drag racer” – 1955 Ford Popular
Dean Gibson – Content editor
The one car that my dad had which will always stick with me was one that I never saw move under its own power, but it still had a pretty big impact on my love of cars. When I was little, my dad had a double garage at the bottom of the garden of our west London semi, and in one corner there sat his Ford Popular. However, it wasn’t your typical post-war transport, as my dad had transformed it into a drag racer.
My dad bought the Pop in 1965 from a scrapyard for £10, then sold the engine and gearbox on for £10 (so it was effectively a free car!) and then went about turning it into a quarter-mile terror with go-faster parts and lessons learned from reading Hot Rod magazine from the US every month.
He first fitted it with a Jaguar XK straight-six and then a ‘proper’ 302 cubic inch (5.0-litre) Chevy V8 running on methanol fuel, which was good for 500bhp. The front wings and bonnet were replaced by a fibreglass flip front, there was a Jaguar four-speed gearbox and the rear axle came from a Land Rover, while the front wheels came from a Lotus single seater and the rear tyres were used Formula One rubber, bought from a mate who worked at Goodyear’s racing tyre division.
The interior was stripped and fitted with a central driver’s seat and there was a rudimentary roll cage, but it was the purple metalflake paint job (as applied by my granddad) and the name, ‘Wild Thing’ (after The Troggs’ hit), that were the parts that I really remember.
By the late 1960s, Wild Thing could cover the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds with a top speed of 122mph, and it beat AC Cobras and Jaguar E-Types in the process. There was the potential for it to go even faster, too, but money was tight, and then I was born, so Wild Thing was retired to that garage in west London. My dad sold Wild Thing in the 1990s, and that was the only time I saw it move, when it was being towed to another garage in west London.
It then disappeared, being passed through a number of different owners who rebuilt and modified it to their own needs. So when my dad found it again a few years ago, it was nothing like the car he’d built. I think he still regrets selling it. I think I do, too.
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