Peter Haynes - RM Sotheby's: My Dad's pre-war Aston Martin, BMW 328, Ferrari 250 SWB, Citroen 2CV, GS and GS Pallas. S9E3

So it wasn't a giveaway, but they're three million quid now. And Dad said, right, that is an Austin seven. If you can build it, if you can put all of that back together, you can keep it. That's your first car. I don't know what spec it was, but it felt very, very luxurious. I remember thinking the princess was uh kind of like a limo. I raced that car at the Goodwood Revival 2004. So in the end, I sold the Aston, which I'm sad about. He had a white Porsche 924 with martini stripes on it. And I used to hair around there on my bicycle, and I ended up having a head-on collision with that Honda Subit and a CX Palace as well, which I love. It's still like riding on a magic carpet.

Welcome to my dad's car. Enjoy.

Welcome to my dad's car. And you know what? It could be a new question.

Hey there, Peter. I'm very good. How are you?

Yeah, we're good. Thanks for we're recording it.

Excellent. Yeah, that that would be great, would it?

No, I don't think I've done one yet where I've forgotten to do it, but um it's one day it'll happen, wouldn't it? Of course it will at some point. Yes. Cool. Uh yeah, Peter meet Paul in a second. Paul, Peter. Hello, Paul. Hello. Yeah, are you doing this in the car?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Andy always asks, yeah. I've got my child's mirror reflecting in the background, but yeah, Jag your XJR today. I don't think I've ever done it, not in a car, have I, Andy?

I don't think so. No, Land Rovers and M5s, I think, have been the previous.

Yeah, so we've got a Jag today, it's your XJR today.

Yours or customers, or mine. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mine, yeah.

Cool, cool. Jumping on the Jag bandwagon.

Yeah, I've well I've had this, no, I've had a I've had a couple of them. I've had this one for a little while. The reason I drive this one is it's one of the only cars I own with IceFix in it.

Okay.

So when I had the baby, I was like, oh my god, quick, find something with IceFix in it. And I literally went through all the cars, and out of like 40 cars, this and the Land Rover were the only two with IceFix. So that's how come I ended up in this.

Fair enough. Not a bad place to be, I guess.

No, it's alright. I don't mind it. Yeah, it has its jaguar isms. But other than that, it's alright. It's not bad.

So, okay, we'll start things off. Um, for the benefit of the tape, we're joined by Peter Haynes, who works for RM Sotheby's. Peter, do you want to give us a little bit of a rundown on what you get up to there and uh then we'll jump into it?

Yeah, sure. So I've worked in and around the motor industry all of my life, really, since since I began working in my early 20s. And then eventually um I started my own agency. And in about two oh gosh, it would have been, I think, late 2006, I was contacted by RM Sotheby's because they were opening a European office. They were opening an office in London, and they hadn't uh operated in Europe at all at that point. They they were a well-known auction house in North America, and all of the auctions they did were in North America, and then they had decided to get into the European market. Um, but but at the time they were a very, very small operation, it was a handful of people, and they had no sort of marketing or PR capability in-house in Europe. So they engaged me back then to work with them from the launch of the business. Um, and I remained working with them sort of as a consultant for many, many years. Um, and then eventually I joined them as the European marketing director a few years ago, and that's what I do. So, although I've been full-time with the business for only whatever it is, five, six years, my working relationship with them goes back 20 years, 20 years this year, actually. So um, yeah, it's good fun.

You do a you do a podcast anyway, don't you? So I'm imagining this is gonna be uh Yeah, I do.

Uh uh inconsistently, we launched one at RM Sotherbiz, and and uh well you know, because you're doing a podcast, it it's just so time consuming. Yeah, you know, we did start off doing them with quite a regular cadence, but then my availability became really difficult. And then, you know, so yeah, I've done a bit.

I could I could appreciate that. The schedule thing is hard, isn't it?

Yeah, it is, it is, and it I mean, we've tried to freestyle it a few times where we've decided to record one and quite honestly haven't had the faintest clue what we're gonna talk about before we start, which you can sometimes you can get away with, but generally not. So it's the prep that's the time consuming bit. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I find at least with this, basically, we're asking the same questions kind of week in, week out, but it's a different guest each time, so you end up obviously off in different places and whereas yeah, I don't think I'd want to be doing one where you've just got to dream up the next like niche. Yeah. Like, yeah, do electric windows matter or whatever it might be.

I think you're okay for probably about the first 10, aren't you? And then you'll start to end up, have I told that story before? And then you sort of slowly start to run out of things after I reckon about 10 or 15.

Yeah, very much so.

Yeah, yeah. When you see these groups that are doing a hundred plus podcasts, you've got to have an amazingly interesting life or a lot of prep, one or the other. Yeah. Or both.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think if you've done more than like 10 podcasts, you're already in like the top 20% or something ridiculous of all podcasts ever made. Is that right? Yeah. Staggering statistic. And like if you get past 25, you're then like top five percent ever made, or something like that.

Wow.

So yeah, we're 107 in or something, I think I've done.

You're right up there, yeah.

So doing something right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, let's um we'll start things off. Um, yeah, for those listening, we're joined by Paul Harding. So you will be familiar with him being a previous guest on the podcast under his own right, also sort of chief interrogator on the episode with myself, and um, yeah, other sort of guest appearances. So, yeah, welcome along to Paul. Oh yeah. Yeah, Peter, what's your earliest car memory?

Well, I guess fittingly for your podcast, cars have been a part of my life since as long as I can remember, because although my dad didn't work in the motor industry at all, he started buying cars in the late 1950s and into the early 60s, and I was born in 1970. And of course, of a man of his generation, the cars that interested him most were pre-war cars. Okay. And his first everyday car was a 1930 Aston Martin, which he bought for about 395 quid, which to put into context was I think slightly cheaper than had he gone out and bought a brand new Frog Eye Sprite. Wow. So you're going back to an era when old cars, classic cars, they were just old cars. People weren't buying them because they were investments. There wasn't this market that was driving values up. So if in the late 50s or early 60s, if you were going to buy a car made in 1930, it was kind of just an old car that nobody really wanted. So there was no real value attached to them. So by the time I was born, he had a garage of all of this stuff that he had bought. Um, because he wasn't a particularly wealthy guy. You know, we're just a middle class family, but he had started to accrue cars that he hadn't paid a huge amount of money for. So, really, from the uh the earlier stage, dad had this garage of amazing stuff. And so I I can't remember a time in my life when that wasn't a part of my life. And luckily, you know, I've got two sons and they're they're adult now. I've been a total failure in getting my two kids to have an interest in cars. I've got one that loves sport, I've got one that loves music, but they really have no interest in cars at all. Where whereas my dad did a brilliant job of getting me engaged with his interest and his passion. So I yeah, I just loved it. I loved going in them, I liked being in the garage with him when he was tinkering and all of that kind of stuff. Do you have any of his cars? So various cars came and went during my lifetime. And then when he sort of retired, which is quite a long time ago, he had some cars that had fairly significant value, which he then sold because that was going to supplement his pension, which is totally fair enough. So that Aston Martin that he bought when he was around and about 20 years old, I did inherit that car. Okay. I'm slightly ashamed and sad that I don't own it now, but I did have that car for a while after he died. The trouble was, I already owned a pre-war, I had an Alvis, which is a less exotic car, but I had a pre-war Alvis that I'd owned for a number of years, and they both did a slightly similar thing because well, they were both the same colour for a start. They were both green, four-seat, sort of pre-war touring cars. And I absolutely loved my Alvis. And although the Aston was a more valuable car by a long way, but I didn't really have the space to keep both of them, and they both kind of did a similar thing, but the Alvis was actually much bigger back seat. So my children were relatively small at the time. And if I was to drive to the Cotswolds from Sussex in a pre-war car, the Alvis was the better car for it. So in the end, I sold the Aston, which I'm sad about. Yeah. The long drive in either car. Well, you say that, you know, I I think this is a bit of a misconception about pre-war cars because I think a lot of people think that they break down all the time, that they're delicate, that they're uncomfortable to be in. And some of them, for sure, some of them are. But I mean, the Aston Martin, when me and my sister were both small, I mean, we we would do long family holidays in that car. Wow. And the Alvis proved to be the same, you know. I I I guess for a context, I've got a Series 3 Land Rover, which I love, but it will at best cruise at 40 miles an hour. And if you spend any longer in it than about 45 minutes, you want to blow your brains out because you you know, it's fine for driving to the pub. But a good pre-war car, you can put it on a motorway and it will sit at 60 miles an hour all day long. And and if they're well built and well restored, they don't break down.

But they're actually great things. Fantastic. It's nice to hear that the Aston was actually being used as his car. It wasn't just a toy, that was the car that did. Well, when he first bought it, yes.

I mean, he was driving it to work every day, and not much after he bought the Aston Martin, he bought a BMW 328, a pre-war BMW 328, which is um an absolutely terrific car, like probably one of the best pre-war sports cars ever made. Okay. I know there's very exotic stuff like 6C and 8C alphas and various Bugatti's and things like that, but that car is an exceptional and very fast and very refined sports cars. It's got the famous six-cylinder engine, which after the war, as part of war reparations, that engine kind of passed to Bristol. So that's the engine in various post-war Bristols. You'll find it in the post-war Fraser Nash sports cars and Cooper Bristol, Formula Two racing cars. You know, you can make them go extremely fast. How very nice. And we had a huge amount of use of that car. He only sold that. I mean, he bought that in the early 60s, and I raced that car at the Goodwood Revival 2004. Oh, wow. Okay. So it stayed in the family for a long time. Yeah, that's cool. That's really cool.

I definitely have to go and Google that because as soon as you said BMW 328, my brain instantly went uh a 90s E36.

No, not enough. Not an E36. Yeah. There are many, many people that think that William Lyons took his design cues for the XK120 from a BMW 328. And if you were to get both of them on a computer screen, you can definitely see the lineage from a 328 to an XK120.

I'm definitely going to be nosy afterwards and search it out. I'm intrigued.

I was going to have a quick look and then I realised I disconnected my mouse to plug my microphone in so it won't work. Okay. Um, what did your mum make of his choices of the kind of pre-war cars? And have you got brothers and sisters? Like from that point of view, I guess, I guess if the cars were only 20, 30 years old at that time, that was kind of normal. They weren't as antiquated as if I chose to drive one now.

No, I mean he started buying cars, as I say, in the early 1960s. He didn't marry my mum until the late 60s. I was born in 1970. Yeah. And so he dabbled with various other post-war cars. He owned an XK 140, he had a Morgan at one point. He um he came very close to buying a Ferrari 250 short wheelbase at one point. Wow. Yeah, when I was about six, six years old. You know, so lots of things interested him. But by the time he married my mum, I mean my mum didn't really have any interest in cars. And more to the point, she used to spend so long doing her hair and makeup that the idea of driving in a car with no roof didn't really interest her that much. Um but but I think, and you know, and this is a more general thing about cars. Any type of car, really, you know, if you get into the scene and you start joining owners' clubs and really choose to get involved, that world suddenly becomes part of your social life. And Dad was big into the historic BMW club, and they used to organise rallies all over Europe that he would take the 328 on, and mum would go with him, and they were just nice holidays, they were just nice driving holidays with lots of very nice people. Yeah. The Frozen Ash Car Club. Um, Dad and I were very involved in the vintage sports car club. And it's interesting that when Dad died at his funeral, I would say that probably 50 to 60 percent of the people in the church were really good, sort of almost lifelong friends that were people that had only come into his life through cars being his hobby. Wow. Which I think says a lot about it. We can relate to that. Yeah, absolutely, and so can I. I mean, I think you know, if I was to drop down tomorrow, probably half the people in my funeral would be people that I've known or met through the car world in one way or another. So I think Mum kind of enjoyed the social side of it far more than she ever actually had any interest in the cars in themselves. So, yeah, it was just important to him. You know, he didn't particularly like what he did for a living. He had to go to an office and he worked very hard. And the time that he spent tinkering with his cars, you know, lifting cylinder heads or going on rallies or doing events and all of that kind of stuff was really, really important to him. And it remained that way all of his life. And I think, you know, in terms of the father and son relationship that I had with him, where I'm so grateful is that it was a shared hobby that he and I formed a really strong bond over. So it's not that he was an absent father, but he did work very hard. But what he and I were able to do was, you know, drive up to Silverstone to erase me, uh, get in the car at four o'clock on a Saturday morning and spend the weekend there, and then try, you know, that that was really quality time that he and I spent for many, many, many years, um, which kind of wouldn't have happened had we not had this shared interest.

Definitely. Do you remember kind of people in the street with interesting cars, kind of back then what neighbors were driving?

Or well, my dad mainly ran his own business. There was one period where he was employed and he had a white Porsche 924 with martini stripes on it. Okay, yeah, cool. And and that was the only good modern car that dad ever had when I was young. He had it for two years and then it went. But for the main part, he was quite misly when it came to buying the cars that you know you drove to the supermarket and that I went to school in. So they had a lot of fairly terrible cars. Um, an Austin Princess, a Hillman Avenger. Um, he had a couple of Citroen GSs and a CX Palace as well, which I loved. GS is a great car. Yeah, and and still that dashboard with the pods by the steering wheel, and and one of the GSs had that single-spoke steering wheel. And when you looked through the steering wheel, there was like a schematic of the car, yeah, like a profile schematic with all these weird lines coming off it and those weird speedos and rev counters and all that. I absolutely crazy. And if you get in a GS or a CX today, it's still like riding on a magic carpet, right? You know, that citron ride quality, absolutely amazing. Um, some of my earliest memories were riding in the back of my mum's Citron Diane, which is a bit like a two C V with a slightly bigger engine. And of course, uh, Diana's got a bench seat in the back. And because it was the 70s, nobody gave a monkeys about how safe anybody was in the car. And I used to play this game where I would sit up on my knees with my hands behind my back sort of clenched together, looking out of the rear windows on this bench. And I would make my mum weave if if we found a straight road, she would then weave the car. And being a citron, Diane, the car then starts rocking like a boat. And the game was how long could I stay up on my knees without falling over? And and the other thing I used to do, because it's got a full-length sunroof, because in those days, I think even if you'd passed a policeman, they wouldn't have cared. I used to stand on the back seat of that car in the summer and just my journey to school, I had my head through the sunroof. That is great. I travel like that today if I could. Well, it's mad because at no point did either of my parents think, oh, that might be dangerous, you know. Um, no, nobody ever seemed to care. No, it's probably thought it was good fun. Yeah, exactly. And so I, you know, that that was fun. Yeah, then as I say, my dad just sort of sort of had various relatively cheap secondhand cars when I although I do remember when he got the Austin Princess, which was a 2.2 litre automatic. I don't know what spec it was, but it felt very, very luxurious. I remember thinking the princess was uh kind of like a limo, as terrible as people think they are now with uh retrospect. Uh, he he started to get slightly better cars later in life as work got better for him. Yeah, yeah. He had a lot of BWs from e-turbes through to later generations of cars, but but neighbours uh we we never lived in a street because we always lived in quite rural spots. Yeah, the family that did live next door, they um they had a scimitar GTE. Is it a GTE? Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, GTE, yeah. Which I remember thinking was a really, really cool thing. Um couple of neighbours had I'm very, very bad on my nomenclature for 80s era as Mercedes, you know, their W1 something or other.

Yeah, they're confusing.

Yeah, yeah. I'm I mean another neighbor had um one of those early 80s massive Mercedes estate cars with the additional seat at the back that looked rearwards out through the rear window, yeah, like Volvo's did at that time as well. Yeah, and I remember thinking, you know, I love those cars. And do you do you remember the very, very first generation of Honda Civic? Tiny, tiny little sort of very rounded little machine.

The first pictures I got with my dad are in one of those, but he had a couple of blue ones, three-door autos, but yeah.

Yeah, they're insanely rare these days.

Yeah, suit, super rare. There was a very long shared driveway that must have been, I don't know, 800 metres long from where you turned off the road, and then the road forks, and one fork went to my parents' house, and the other fork went to another house. And I used to hair around there on my bicycle, and I ended up having a head-on collision with that Honda Civic. Oh, uh-oh. Yeah, and definitely did damage to my bicycle, but also did a bit of damage to my neighbour's civic. But yeah, one of the most exciting things for me from the youngest age was when my dad would have a friend come over. Okay, and a lot of his friends had really interesting cars, and I remember all sorts of stuff. So they might be some of his pre-war car mates that would turn up in various Bentleys, or he had a friend with a type 37 Bugatti that would sometimes come over. But then he had it, he had another friend with a Morgan plus eight, and I remember sitting in the hallway looking out of the window, waiting for this Morgan to arrive, and then badgering this guy for him to take me down the road in it. Yeah, well our friends. Yeah, well, I suppose I mean, if you go to the pre-war cars, again, you've got to remember that it's really easy to contextualize the ownership of certain cars in a kind of a 2026 context. Yeah, no, I understand that. Because it goes back to what I said at the beginning, is that these were cars that could be bought for very modest sums of money, depending on when you bought them. I mean, the car market didn't start to go bananas really until the mid-late 80s. You know, we had that late 1980s boom where everything suddenly started to go insane. And yes, there were dips and troughs, and then the market started to rampage again in the late 2000s, 2010, 2011. And there's been a whole shift in how people perceive old cars or classic cars. It's now an investment class. There are lots of millionaires, and you've got to be rich to play the game. But in those days, that just wasn't the case. If I went to a vintage sports car race meet with my dad, even into the early 1980s, if you saw a pre-war Bugatti, the chances were it had been towed there on a sort of a Brian James style trailer behind a Ford Branada with a tow bar.

Yeah, yeah.

And the guy that owned it might have been a hill farmer from Wales. But you know what I mean? Yeah. These weren't hedge funders. They weren't multi-millionaire property developers. They were just ordinary people that loved cars and were buying them at quite sensible money. I get that completely.

School he had friends so they still had interesting cars. Like, I don't really, none of my friends really, a few do, but not many in this day and age, especially on the school run. No one drives an interesting car anymore.

No, no. I mean, the other car, uh he had a very good friend. His name was Ron. He was a journalist on the Daily Telegraph. And he had a uh a BMW, it wasn't a three-litre CSL, it was uh a CS. So it wasn't the lightweight. You know, this was in the 1980s, late 1980s, I would guess, when a three-litre CS was quite an old car, but that was his everyday transport. Um that's the car I would love to buy a I'd love to buy a CSL. Very few better-looking cars of that era have been made, I think.

What do you own at the minute? I was just intrigued to know what cars you got at the minute.

Um, well, as it happens, I'm in a bit of a fallow period at the moment because the last car I had, I mean, apart from my Land Rover, the last interesting car, uh which I sold about a year ago, was a Ferrari Boxer, a BB512. Nice, which was a very rare colour called uh Azuro Blue, a sort of like a light metallic blue. Oh nice, yeah. Uh I do a bit of historic racing, so I'd had in fact there's a picture over my shoulder on the wall, which is a Lotus 11. So I'd been racing a Lotus 11 for a few years, but then racing's become too expensive for me. It's crazy, money. Owning the car is one thing, but being able to keep rebuilding the engine, paying entry fees, buying tires, it's absolutely nuts. Uh I mean, I remember the straw that broke the camel's back for me was doing the Goodwood members meeting a couple of years ago and having a few problems with the car, rapidly getting an engine rebuilt and this, that, and the other. And I came away from the that weekend and the whole thing had cost thousands, you know, and I just thought, this is just money I don't have. I'm I'm done with it. Rating's hard work. Yeah, and it is a lot of hard work and it's a big commitment. I've owned three Ferraris over the last 10 years, which I'm very fortunate to have done. Uh, the only sort of really sort of modern-ish one I've had was a 430 Schooler. Oh, I'd love one of those. Which was a great bit of kit. Didn't have it for very long, didn't drive it that much, but a great car. Um, some people don't know what these are, and when you start talking Ferrari novicature, it's all gets a bit confusing. I had a 365 GTC 4, which is uh an early 70s V12. But basically, mechanically, it's the same as a Daytona, but it's a 2 plus 2. So if you've got small children or adults with no legs, they can get in the back. But other than that, you can't get two adults in the back. And I had one of those. Yeah. The trouble is with cars like that, and it was the same with the boxer, they come with a huge amount of anxiety. You know, when you open the rear clanshell on a Ferrari boxer, you're looking at an engine that's the size of an aircraft carrier, you know, flat 12. And when it's all working fine, everything's good. Yeah. When something happens or something goes wrong, or suddenly it's running on eight cylinders, not twelve cylinders, the whole thing just plays with your head because you're just thinking, what's gone wrong? Can I fix this? Is it gonna have to go to a special like what are the telephone number costs that are gonna be involved with putting this right? And I was lucky to have the money to buy the cars, but I wasn't wealthy enough to kind of look after them in the way that they need to be looked after. And with the scuderia, you know, it's the same thing. If you get in the car one day and you pull the paddle and nothing happens, you know that you're just gonna have a world of misery on your hands.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, a pair of front brake discs on a scuder, carbon brake discs, you can only replace them as a pair, you can't replace them as a single unit, and they're like 10 grand a pair, you know. So I'm much happier if I mean the Lotus 11 was great, it's a 1500cc Coventry climax engine, four-cylinder. When you open the bonnet, it's not much different to looking at an A-series engine, you know? You know what everything is, you know how it works, you can work on it easily, so you don't get the same level of anxiety with cars like that. Yeah.

Um, you probably didn't, but kind of back to the trips with your parents in the car. Did you ever have music on, or were these kind of pre-radio, pre-tape player?

Well, I mean, most of our family holidays were sort of driving holidays to France in cars like Austin Princesses. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, none of the kind of old stuff that dad owned. Uh, there was no means of playing music. My mum used to be before I was born, me and my sister were bought, she was a professional jazz singer. Oh wow. Um, music was a big part of her life. Not so much dad, I have to say.

Yeah, fair enough. Um, so obviously father tinkered and sold and stuff. He was hands-on, was he? Like he was kind of happy taking stuff apart, putting it back together again.

Very there was very little in a mechanical sense that he couldn't do. Yeah. He couldn't weld, for example. I never knew him to turn his hand to welding, but then he didn't own many cars that needed that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, he was forever lifting engines out and taking them to pieces and putting them back together again. And he felt very strongly about when I began to sort of really get interested in cars, he felt it was very important that I learned. Yeah. When I was about 15, a transit turned up on the drive one day, and out of the back started coming all of these bits, like there was a front axle and then a rear axle came out, and then there was a chassis, which was basically an A-shape, it was an A-frame, and um and some old wheels with knacker tires on them, and all of this stuff came out of this van and got put into the garage. And dad said, Right, that is an Austin 7. If you can build it, if you can put all of that back together, you can keep it. That's your first car. It's still setting boxes today. No, no, you know, I I was so up for it, and so I've spent probably two years with him in the garage learning how to put the bits of an Austin 7 together. And then I had a 1968 Chrome Bumper MG midget. Dad bought it for me, it was shiny, but it was actually crap. Somebody had given it a quick respray just to make it look good. But under the respray was paper mache and chicken wire that was basically holding the bodywork together, and the engine was using as much oil in a week as I was using in petrol. And eventually the um the engine uh one of the valves went. And instead of taking the car to a garage, he just said, Right, okay, let's take the cinderhead off and let's have a look. And then, you know, he made me spend ages at the workbench with uh, you know, one of those sticky rods and grinding paste, lapping the new valves onto the valve seats. And so he just taught me, he just said, you know, if a car breaks.

But that's a huge generational thing there, that is, because you know, my dad didn't think anything, he used to have a little mini on a damp morning. Oh, okay, get out, take the plugs out, wire brush them all, put them all back in, start it and off you go to work.

Yeah.

Imagine telling a bloke now with his 26-bait Range Rover, right? If it doesn't start, whip all the plugs out of it, give a little bit of a wire brush, put you go, what? People are annoyed that they've got but fuel in it.

Well, and and of course, the fact is, I mean, if if you go to a sort of a main car dealer, I'm not picking on anyone, let's just say a Honda dealer, you know, that the mechanics in inverted commas, or technicians as they like to call themselves, really, for the main part, all they're trained to do is plug the car into a laptop to run the diagnostics, and then you know I have this problem, I have a garage, yeah, they can't do anything, literally can't do anything. No.

They are trained, or they have a piece of paper that they follow instructions, and that's it, they can't do anything else.

Absolutely, yeah. And you're absolutely right, Paul. It is a generational thing. And and I come from an era where cars were relatively straightforward and you could work on them yourselves, and you could save an awful lot of money, but that's an era that's long gone. Yeah, Andy and I are in the middle of that era. Yeah, yeah. Some of my dad's pre-war cars, they had magnetos, it was a magneto ignition. If your magneto breaks, you try and find somebody that knows what a magneto is or knows how to fix it. Yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible. So um, yeah, it's different times.

You can't even get someone to set up a carburetor these days, but they are now there.

Well, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, man in a brown coat, sort of knee-length brown coat with poppers down the front. That's what you want.

Yeah, pens in a top pocket. Yeah, just comes out with a piece of metal and listens to your engine and tells you exactly what's wrong with it. They don't exist anymore. But people like that, when I do see them, they're fascinating because they're always so skilled but don't realise how skilled they are.

Yeah, they've not got a bit of paper to say what they can do necessarily, have they? No, no, but they're so good. They've got 60 years that tells them what they can do.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and there used to be a guy, uh, it was a company called Morgans, and they would fix things like magnetos. They were car electricians, but you know, I remember old Mr. Morgan, who had been doing it for 50 years and was probably born in the 20s or something, you know, horrible, grubby little workshop in a in a back street, but the guy was an absolute genius, and then he trained young Mr. Morgan, his son. But I don't think that company exists anymore because even when young Mr. Morgan had his kids, kids generally aren't interested in standing at a workbench fixing car electrics in a grubby little workshop. So all of these skills are just being lost, yeah, and it's really hard to find people that can do it.

I think those opportunities, I guess, for the next generation have just become wider and wider and wider, haven't they? I guess the potential for being able to travel, being able to kind of work remotely, and just all these new industries, etc., it's not just following the footsteps. Whether we'll see uh it'd be yeah, interesting, whether there'll be a return to far more manual trades as almost a fight back against AI as AI takes the office-based jobs. Well, I think there will be. And people will have to go back to being a plumber or a mechanic or whatever it is because those other jobs.

It's trying to understand it because a lot of the kids these days don't understand it. So uh a good example, actually, which I've had a conversation recently, is uh one of the Miguel's family. She's married to a chap that his dad's a clockmaker, and he has become a clockmaker purely because of what his dad does, and he doesn't really want to do it, he just kind of does it. And I was trying to explain to him at your age, he is what mid to late 20s, and he can completely take apart a manual clock and put it back together. And I'm like, you will be worth a fortune. Don't go and get a basic office job somewhere, stick at it because you'll be able to charge my serious money to the right people to rebuild clocks because that industry is still there, there is still watch collectors, watches hugely popular. I said, If you can strip down a watch and rebuild it, which you can, someone will pay you good money for this. Don't dismiss what because you think it's a rubbish old job because your dad did it. Don't think it's a rubbish old job. In 10 years' time, you're gonna be one of the only blokes that can do this.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, and without sort of it's not really a political point and not wanting to get political, but it it was very, very common from earlier generations to get an apprenticeship and learn a trade. Yeah and apprenticeships sort of kind of almost completely disappeared. And you you also, you know, if you go back like where university was concerned, it was only really a really small percentage of 18-year-old kids that went to university. But when we've moved to an era where um I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's just a fact. You know, most 18-year-olds, assuming that they haven't completely screwed up their exams, expect to go to university and they go to university because they want to get a reasonably well-paid office job somewhere. Yeah. But nobody at school is giving these people the alternative. No, not at all. No one's thinking, oh, I might be able to earn a really good living if I'm a plumber and I'm really good at what I do or anything else. Everyone wants to go off and be a management consultant, which is great, but I think a lot of people are missing a trick, and not only that these days, my my youngest child is at university, but you know, I said to him, really think about it because you're gonna get student loans, you're gonna leave university with a 50 grand debt with a whole load of interest being applied to it. Do you really want to do that or is there an alternative?

Yeah, I stopped taking apprentices. I used to do loads. I've got various awards for work experience, all sorts. I I stopped doing it because they just weren't interested and they just weren't bothered, and the colleges or school weren't massively bothered. You get the odd teacher, but not much. And the problem I had is I could take a 15-year-old kid that's work experience, or I can take a guy that's 19 that's in his third year of college. Their knowledge is the same, there's nothing different between them. And I spoke to the college and said, Look, there is something failing here that within this time on this course they're learning, they're not coming to me being able to do anything, they still can't do anything, they can't do a set of basic pads or anything. So and I said, I can't take this on like Jamie Oliver did to Turkey Twizzlers. I don't have the time, but there is something wrong here. Considering I see all these people, it doesn't matter what age they come to me, they still can't do anything. So then you have to come out of being at college and start again and be completely retrained. And we have the same because my wife has beauty talents with exactly the same thing. They have to come out of it and be retrained again because they don't have the skills, they're all based on theory, they're not based on actual work and doing the job. And half of them don't want to do it at the same time either. So I'm like, well, I can't put myself out. And then I had a thing recently, literally two weeks ago, at my insurance company, I had to read you my insurance, and they said, Oh, we can't insure anyone under the age of 21. I was like, What do you mean you can't? And I had to fight because I've got a lad that works for me who's 19, and I had to fight to get him onto the insurance policy. And I said to him, So look, I've regardless of this, what happens if I want to employ young people? I can't do that anymore because you won't insure them, so I can't have them on the premises in case something falls on them. And they said, Yeah, yeah, well, there's so many claims we just now outright don't do anyone to age of 21. I was like, Well, that's not helping young people, is it? No, but you know, they don't care.

That madness. Yeah. Um, you mentioned a 250 short wheelbase, Peter, which it would be absolutely rude of us not to kind of go back to say, what's the story there?

Well, dad had a friend, his name was John Markey, and John Markey was a very smooth operator, he's quite a good-looking guy, always had really attractive girlfriends, and he was a very, very good driver, very good race driver, and had raced sort of on the international circuit, done the spahouse for kilometres and various other big races like that. And on the side, he used to deal cars, okay. And most of them were competition cars of one form or another. And he was always trying to get my dad to buy something. There's a really interesting story. I mean, dad and John Markey, uh John had a Cooper Maserati and uh they needed bits for the engine, and they went out to Italy to the Maserati factory, and out the back was uh this room where they had a load of Maseratis that were essentially for sale. But I'm talking like 250 F Grand Prix cars, you know, 5,000 GTs, 3,500 GTs, and you know, John had gone to the factory to go and buy a gasket set and something else, and he had come away with a 5,000 GT. Fantastic. Because it was a bargain and he was going to make money out of it and all the rest of it. But he he had a 250 short wheelbase, and he he was trying to persuade my dad that he should buy it. And it's quite an early memory for me, this, because I can't have been more than about five or six years old. It's very hard to know. I maybe I was seven or eight, but the mid-latish seventies. John had this uh short wheelbase, and he said to dad, Do you want to buy it? Do you want to buy it? And dad said, No, no, it's not really my thing. And John said, I'll tell you what, just borrow it for a bit. And if you like it, you might be persuaded. So dad borrowed this short wheelbase for a week or so, and and he and I were going to a race meeting at Donington Park. So we drove from Surrey to Donington Park and back again in it, which is a really, really vivid memory for me. But dad didn't buy it. I I don't know what it was at the time. Let's just say it was about five grand to buy it, five or six grand, which of course it just sounds comical. I don't know what dad would have been earning at that time. I mean, it might have been the case that dad's annual salary was four grand a year. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So it it wasn't a giveaway, but they're three million quid now, four million quid. You see, I can't remember this, but he said, we drove it up to Donington Park, but it didn't really seem to have very much get up and go. There were quite a few oil leaks, and you could smell hot oil everywhere, you could smell it in the cockpit. And he just knew that the thing needed a complete rebuild and said to John Markey, his mate, he said, No, John, even if I could afford it, it clearly needs a whole bucket load of money spending on it. And so didn't buy it. Fair enough. But I mean, there were so many incidents where dad had the opportunity to buy something really, really tasty, but didn't. And had he made a couple of different choices in his life, and had he kept those cars, I I tell you what, I wouldn't be working now, I'd be retired. Yeah. But you know, that's the way the cookie crumbles, right?