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Keeping it in the family

21 August, 2019

 

 

Some cars inspire so much affection that their value soars way beyond their guide price. ‘Geraldine’ is one of those priceless classics.

After Chris Steele sold his grandmother’s Hillman Super Minx, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. So, after more than a decade, he launched a mission to find it and then restore it. 

Whenever he saw a Hillman Super Minx in red with a white flash, he’d be looking for the plate or other clues to see if it was Nana’s old ‘Geraldine’.


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Eventually, as Hillman Super Minx sightings dropped away, Chris decided he had to try to find Geraldine. The people he had sold it to had passed it on. He discovered the registration was on hold, but it was already past the time when you could look up owners online from a car’s rego plates. Chris contacted the New Zealand Transport Authority, explaining that he wanted to buy the car back and asking to contact the current owner. He was told the authority couldn’t provide details because of the Privacy Act. Chris was quite persistent and, in the end, spoke to a senior executive, who agreed to send the owner a letter on Chris’s behalf. A few days later, the person who had owned it for the past 11 years contacted Chris.


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Chris Steele’s grandmother owned the Mark IV Super Minx from 1967 through to 2000, kept it garaged every night, and kept detailed notes of everything done to the car, in tiny writing in tiny notebooks. In one of them, she recorded that she had paid 1165 pounds for it.

“If the car got rained on, it was always dried down,” says Chris.

This attention to the details is clearly in the genes. When restoring the car, Chris sourced, among many other parts, a mint-condition steering wheel. It’s still in its packaging. The one in the car bears the scars of his grandmother’s rings.

“I’ve got a near concours condition wheel but I couldn’t bear to change it,” Chris explains. “It’s a special feeling that comes from knowing that’s the same wheel they held.”


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The car underwent a bare metal rebuild and the result is a triumph of passion and dedication and the full story is in September’s New Zealand Classic Car, on sale now.


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Lunch with … Cary Taylor

11 September, 2024

Many years ago — in June 1995 to be more precise — I was being wowed with yet another terrific tale from Geoff Manning who had worked spanners on all types of racing cars. We were chatting at Bruce McLaren Intermediate school on the 25th anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Kiwi for whom the school was named. Geoff, who had been part of Ford’s Le Mans programme in the ’60s, and also Graham Hill’s chief mechanic — clearly realising that he had me in the palm of his hand — offered a piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten: “If you want the really good stories, talk to the mechanics.”
Without doubt the top mechanics, those involved in the highest echelons of motor racing, have stories galore — after all, they had relationships with their drivers so intimate that, to quote Geoff all those years ago, “Mechanics know what really happened.”

ROTARY CHIC

6 September, 2024

Kerry Bowman readily describes himself as a dyed-in-the-wool Citroën fan and a keen Citroën Car Club member. His Auckland home holds some of the chic French cars and many parts. He has also owned a number of examples of the marque as daily drivers, but he now drives a Birotor GS. They are rare, even in France, and this is a car which was not supposed to see the light of day outside France’s borders, yet somehow this one escaped the buyback to be one of the few survivors out in the world.
It’s a special car Kerry first saw while overseas in the ’70s, indulging an interest sparked early on by his father’s keenness for Citroëns back home in Tauranga. He was keen to see one ‘in the flesh’.
“I got interested in this Birotor when I bought a GS in Paris in 1972. I got in contact with Citroën Cars in Slough, and they got me an invitation to the Earls Court Motor Show where they had the first Birotor prototype on display. I said to a guy on the stand, ‘I’d like one of these,’ and he said I wouldn’t be allowed to get one. Citroën were building them for their own market to test them, and they were only left-hand drive.”