I Like Driving In My Car (Part 5)

The sheer enjoyment I was having with my Renault 5 GT Turbo made any concerns I may have had regarding the place I’d bought it from disappear from my mind, but slowly the true state of this particular car revealed itself. It started with black smoke coming out of the exhaust pipe, which I soon learnt was the turbocharger on its way out. Then the car started to overheat, a problem which never really went away how ever many times it went to my mechanic to be fixed. Eventually I had to have the engine replaced as its constant thrashing by previous owners had finally caught up with it. The overheating aspect was a constant drain on my enthusiasm and confidence in the car. I knew that turbocharged engines tended to run hotter than normally aspirated engines, but this car seemed to want to overheat nearly every time I used it. We tried the cooling fan and the switch, the thermostat, the intercooler, the water pump (which I managed to replace myself after much swearing and grazing of hands) but nothing seemed to work. I lost count of the number of times that I had to pull over if I was stuck in traffic and then lift the bonnet and start fiddling around with the cooling system. The reason for the overheating was a lack of water circulating round the cooling system, thus creating air pockets. A side effect of this was that the air (and what little water there was) would heat up and thus expand, and this would result in the coolant hoses becoming rock hard, and in one extreme case one of them burst. The standard procedure for me to perform at the roadside would be to release the pressure by loosening the cover on the coolant reservoir and then topping up the system with water (I had quickly learnt to keep a jerry can full of water in the boot at all times). Unfortunately I would invariably burn my hands whilst undoing the reservoir as the system would erupt like a geyser, but I soon got used to this. The other problem of course is that you should never refill the cooling system whilst the engine is hot, and certainly not whilst it’s close to meltdown, so I really wasn’t doing the engine any favours by carrying out this procedure on a regular basis.

For as long as I owned the GT Turbo I spent more time looking at the temperature gauge than looking at the road, and it’s a habit which took me years to overcome once I’d got rid of it. The engine would only overheat if I was in traffic; in normal circumstances where there was a fairly constant supply of cool air to the radiator, the car would run at an acceptable temperature. It was any prolonged period where the engine was ticking over but the car wasn’t moving when things would start to get a bit too hot. This was ably demonstrated when I decided that I would drive my sister and I to my mum’s house near Paris in the car (yes, I admit that I did need my head examining), and it was absolutely fine on the French motorways and country roads. Whilst I’m on the subject, the French may have many facets to their

culture that we Brits don’t agree with, but they REALLY know how to build roads, I can tell you. I was amazed at the almost non-existent levels of ‘road noise’ (i.e. the noise that the tyres make on the road whilst driving) on French roads – it was as if we were floating along and not in contact with the road at all. This was compounded by the fact that I felt such embarrassment on the way home when we emerged from the train and trundled onto the M20, and it was like driving up some bloody dirt track. What the French must think when they drive in the UK God only knows, but exactly the same is true of the Eurostar. When I went on the train on my own to visit my mum, I found it almost laughable that this beautiful and futuristic train which had attracted so much hype and publicity had to trundle its way along the crappy tracks through London and Kent at about 20 mph, and then as soon as it pulled away from the station at Calais it accelerated to it’s full 186mph in the space of about two minutes and didn’t slow down until the outskirts of Paris. But I digress………….

The GT Turbo was perfectly at home on the main roads in France and as close to ‘cool as a cucumber’ as it could ever get, but when we reached the town of Chantilly where my mum lived at the time, there was a little bit of traffic which didn’t help my poor car which had been travelling at about 80mph for several hours. As I say, it was fine whilst it was moving along and there was plenty of air circulating round the engine bay, but the longer you drove it the worse the problem would be when you eventually encountered some traffic. On this particular occasion I managed to get away without having to pull over and perform my usual emergency procedure, by drawing away the heat from the engine by opening all the air vents and turning the fan on to maximum heat and maximum power, but suffice to say that I did begin to get a little worried, i.e. I was shouting and screaming at the traffic and jumping up and down in my seat. When we eventually reached my mum’s house a short time later, I jumped out of the car like Zebedee, not even saying hello to her until I’d whipped up the bonnet and taken off the reservoir cover. Whilst we were in France, I had some great fun with a friend of my mum’s who owned a bona-fide left hand drive BMW M3. We went out for several ‘races’ in our cars, though I must admit that I had trouble keeping up even in my own pocket rocket. Before we came home I managed to get a new cooling fan switch from the local garage (thank God I was driving a Renault) which seemed to help a bit, and I remember my mum telling me that she’d embarrassed herself at this same garage by asking for a new headlamp for her own car, but her grasp of the French language at the time was still rather shaky and what she actually asked them for was a chicken.

Another incident of note where my car overheated was on the way to a gay pub in Greenwich called The Gloucester (as featured in the film Beautiful Thing if anyone’s seen it). There were five of us in the car on this particular evening, and the traffic had been particularly bad on the journey so far. As we approached a roundabout on the outskirts of Greenwich, I realised that the car was almost past the point of no return and I had to find somewhere to pull over and do the necessary. Unfortunately there was nowhere to stop before the roundabout as it was a dual carriageway, but I could see a lay-by just around the corner off of the first exit and decided that I could pull in there. The problem was that I knew that if I had to stop at the roundabout to wait for the traffic to pass the engine would explode, so I had to pretty much pull straight out onto the roundabout whether there was a car approaching from one of the other exits or not. Fortunately I knew that the Renault had enough power to perform this feat without jeopardising either the car or its occupants, so as I approached the roundabout I didn’t bother slowing down, but could just see out of the corner of my eye a car pulling onto the roundabout. I calculated that I would be able to pull in front of it with just enough space to spare, but what the corner of my eye didn’t notice was that it was a police car. Of course all this happened in a matter of seconds, and I knew that regardless of the police I still had to sort out the car, so after pulling out in front of them I turned the corner and pulled straight into the lay-by, which I’m sure was very helpful to them as they would have asked me to pull over anyway.

Sure enough, the lights and sirens went on and they followed me into the lay-by, but I initially ignored them and started to rush about as usual opening the bonnet and fiddling about with the engine, trying my best to answer the policeman’s questions as politely as possible. His first question was the usual ‘Is this your car, sir?’ to which I replied ‘Yes’. The second question was ‘Where are you going?’ which I replied to straight away. The fact that I’d told him that we were all off to a well-known gay pub probably didn’t help matters, and this prompted his colleague to put his head through the open window of the Renault and inspect all my friends, who by this point were either pissing themselves with laughter or shitting their pants from the stunt I’d just pulled. He then asked me for my driving licence which I duly produced, and after examining it for a few seconds he asked me what my address was. To this day I’m still amazed (and eternally grateful) at my brain for coming the rescue in a split second. You see, I’d moved house a month or so previously but hadn’t yet sent my licence back to the DVLA to have the details changed, but fortunately my brain remembered this fact and quoted the policemen my former address rather than the new one. I then went on to explain the situation with the car overheating and this being the reason for my somewhat dangerous stunt on the roundabout, and fortunately the engine was exhibiting it’s usual blistering heat (of the kind that makes the air shimmer) and clouds of steam so it was not as if I was making the whole thing up. The two constables seemed satisfied with my explanation, and of course I spouted the usual apologies and that I would get the problem fixed as soon as possible. After the engine had cooled down a bit and I’d refilled the system, we went on our way and had a nice evening at the pub.

The problem with the overheating came to a head when I’d reached the point where I could only make the short journey from home to work and back without the problem occurring. Any longer journeys would have meant the engine having the time to heat up to a point where the trouble would start, and at this point I’d just had enough. I made the decision that I’d rather get a reconditioned engine for the car and then sell it in full working order rather than trying to sell it with an overheating engine and get peanuts for it, but unfortunately my funds at the time meant that I had to do this as cheaply as possible. I ended up going back to the same place that I bought the car and buying a reconditioned engine off of him, though I must have been crazy to even consider it after all the trouble I’d had with the car so far. Fortunately the new engine was fine, although the car was off the road for about three weeks whilst it was being fitted. Before I replaced the engine I had to replace the turbocharger which was on its way out and started to billow black smoke out of the exhaust pipe. The period between the start of the smoke and the replacement of the turbocharger wasn’t much fun because the fumes managed to seep into the cabin somehow, and this was especially apparent when on the motorway. How I didn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning I’ll never know. I had a very patient and understanding mechanic at the time who over the years had become more than familiar with each of may cars, but the GT Turbo spent almost as much time in his garage as it did on the road. Such was my blindly stubborn attitude towards the car which made me hang on to it for so long throwing money at it, I often didn’t have the means to pay for the repairs immediately even though I needed to use the car for work and gigs. As he’d been my grandfather’s mechanic for many years, he knew me well enough and was kind enough to let me pay for most of the work in instalments, sometimes with embarrassingly long gaps in between payments. On top of that I would visit him at least one a week to ask his advice about something or other or to get him to look at something, so I really did get my money’s worth out of him.

I also had an unfortunate incident (which this time wasn’t a fault of the car) when I was driving behind a refuse collection lorry one day, and suddenly a small log fell off the top of it and bounced into the road in front of my car before smashing the front bumper. I was so gob smacked at what happened that by the time I’d pulled over to inspect the damage, the lorry had disappeared into the distance and I had no opportunity to note the registration number. Many a phone call to the local council followed, but because I had (a) no registration number for the refuse lorry and (b) couldn’t remember what colour the lorry was to identify whether it was the council’s own vehicle or that of a sub-contractor, I couldn’t prove to them what had happened. In the end they offered to pay for half of the repair cost, which for once I thought was very charitable of them, but the whole episode just made me think that the car was jinxed.

As much as the car was great fun when it was working and I loved it to bits, I finally admitted defeat after a couple of years and decided that enough was enough. I can’t remember exactly how much I paid for it – around £2500 I think – but I eventually sold it for £1750 which wasn’t bad I suppose, though I must have spent at least a grand just keeping it going, never mind the hungry petrol bills. If my stupidity at buying the first car I saw and even going back to the same place to buy a replacement engine wasn’t unbelievable enough (plus the huge amount of money the car had cost me to run, insure and just keep on the road) then my next choice of car would surely confirm that I should have been carted off to the funny farm……………….