5. The Rover Vitesse EFi (1989)

Description

Unfortunately, the real world is a different place to the dream world and although I would often borrow the BMW it didn’t become company policy at my level and so when the Cavalier CDi had done 60000 miles and it was time to give it back, I had to choose another car. I knew that this would be a wrench, I’d grown fond of the Cavalier. It was cosy and refined. I would not be able to match its levels of luxury nor the power from the 1800 fuel injected engine, so I decided to avoid comparison as much as possible by choosing something quite different.

I chose a black Rover 216 Vitesse EFi. It was the same body shape as my first company car, the Rover 213S but it was top-of-the-range sporty model. It had a very pokey 1600 fuel injected engine, alloy wheels, all the go-faster paraphernalia. Inside it had velour seats, walnut burr surrounds, electric windows all round, electric mirrors, a sunshine roof and, must impressive of all, a rather nice instrument cluster including a tachometer.
Wow!
However, it still suffered from the uncoordinated feel of the Rover 213S interior, perfectly adequate switches, radiator levers, gear lever cover but all different, there was no uniformity enveloping the dark-grey facia here. It was not a BMW, but it would have to suffice. If you double-declutched from fourth to third you could get quite an acceptable grunt from the little engine. It was also front wheel drive so I could throw it about willy-nilly and it was very forgiving. I can’t be one hundred percent certain about this, but I think it was the first stereo I had that had RDS (I was never really sure what that stood for, so I won’t guess here) and a traffic programme which meant that once you’d tuned into radio 4 it would stay locked in wherever you went re-tuning frequencies automatically in FM only, of course. The traffic facility would interrupt whatever you were listening to, to give you the local road problems taken from local radio station bulletins. The only problem with this service was that it worked rather better than was absolutely necessary, so you’d be cruising along the M4 listening to Shola Archer’s latest jeopardy moment when bish-bash Radio Wiltshire would cut in blaring out its uniquely irritating and unnecessary jingle followed by a facile smiling announcer taking their job far too seriously and telling you the M4 was fine but that there was a flock of geese blocking the B3000 in Little Piddle-in-the Marsh! Then you were put back to Shola Archer just as she was about to tell that she was a…Radio Avon would cut in with a new but equally annoying jingle then a different but equally facile announcer would tell you that the M4 was fine but Mrs Cock-Fawcett had broken down on the B4789 and there are delays of 2 minutes in the village of Hotclunge-on-the-hill. If you were really unlucky you got three or four different BBC stations one after the other telling you exactly the same fucking thing and by the time you got your programme back the end credits were rolling. Before satellite navigation this was quite helpful – as long as it wasn’t telling you about the twenty mile tail back you’d just driven into when you could have turned off two miles back and taken a detour.
My overall recollection of the Rover 216 Vitesse was a positive one even though several unkind rogues would take the piss: ‘mutton done up as mutton’, ‘Rover had been polishing the turd’ et cetera. I remember it as quite responsive, not massive inside but roomy enough. One of my customers, a particularly fat and obnoxious lucky slob who’d found himself being elevated to Production Director on account of his unique knowledge of direct marketing software had recently got a Porsche 944 as a company car. He would take the piss out of my little Rover remorselessly. I wasn’t allowed to punch my customers on the nose so I had to take it like a man! Now companies at the time did have serious problems with staff attrition but they weren’t made of money. So what was happening was that companies were giving generous car allowances and allowing employees access to certain cars according to grades and then allowing them to ‘top-up’ to get better cars. As the economy boomed and quality sales people were at a premium, attrition was high in sales. To prevent companies from gathering expensive cars returned to the fleet that no-one wanted, employees were required to sign contracts that meant that if they left before the lease expired then they were liable to pay the outstanding incremental ‘top-up’ left until the end of the lease. It was a neat and tidy way of allowing employees to drive about in flashy-motors, but it encouraged employees to stay-put and there were no stranded liabilities to the company if they did not. So my obnoxious customer was probably paying an additional £500 per month to have the dubious pleasure of driving a Porsche – which wasn’t a real Porsche, that was a 911, this was a poor-man’s 944. It was around this time that an insane aphorism became the commonplace around the coffee machines.

“You know you’ve made it if you drive a Porsche by the time your thirty!” There was nothing about “..if you still love your wife” or “I want to dedicate myself to my family” or “I’ve discovered that we’re all pawns being manipulated by the establishment to accede to an overweening ambition that the majority of us will never aspire to!” No, German and Swedish cars were where it was at and Porsche was the big daddy of them all.
The April of 1990 was particularly wet and the Rover failed me. Directly under the carpet, was the floor, the aluminium exoskeleton of the car. That may seem obvious, but I’d thought that they’d be some sort of waterproof insulation, like an underlay, between metal and the carpet. In the exoskeleton were two washers one in each foot well of the rear cabin. Unfortunately, one of these had come loose and on a wet drive back from Plymouth and, unbeknownst to me, water had been pressure blasted from the road surface through the hole. It had saturated the carpet and was collecting in a muddy puddle behind the driver’s seat. I didn’t realise this and had parked up outside our house as usual. The next day the sun was out and it was hot, but strangely my car was steamed up on the inside and when I opened the door I was hit by a stench something akin to a slurry ditch emptying into the Basingstoke Canal. This put my car out of action for a week whilst it was in the garage being sorted out. This was annoying because my wife worked in London at the GLC and I was due to be in town too. It happened to be our wedding anniversary and I’d arranged to meet her after work to go to a concert and then a meal in Kensington before driving back home to Basingstoke. Fortunately, the company fleet manager took over and provided me with an adequate, if boring hire car: a brand new Escort MkIV. It was all a bit last minute and it arrived outside the house later than anticipated. I was in a hurry to get to a customer meeting in Kensington and I’d ignored the fact that I’d just leapt into the car and was finding out where the indicators and wipers were as I drove it. It had started to rain, the road was greasy on account of the oil and tyre remnants which had been embedded into the tarmac but which was now being dislodged by the rain and chemically amalgamated into an oil slick on the surface of the road. That’s my excuse anyway. I drove into London on the A4, down the Cromwell Road and as I came over the brow of a hill, I suddenly realised that the traffic was stationary in front of me. I slammed my breaks on, the surface was greasy, the wheels locked, and I went straight into the back of the car in front of me.

Guess what it was? Yes, that’s right, it was a Mazda 626!
I’d given it quite a whack and this time I was concerned for its driver, a dapper little Pakistani gentleman by the name of Mr. Patel. I was sincerely sorry, but it is testament to those clever souls in Japan that when they make a car, they make it properly. The Mazda’s bumper was staved in a little, but otherwise there wasn’t a dent on the bodywork nor were there any broken light clusters and even the number plate was intact. The Ford was an altogether different story though, it was completely wrecked and was later declared a write-off. It had been brand new that morning, I’d been the very first hiree and then two hours later I’d written it off. Best thing for it really, it had no redeeming qualities, but that’s just flippancy. I was pretty shaken by the crash and I was genuinely concerned for Mr. Patel who was saying his neck hurt. Fortunately, once all the formalities were concluded, he was able to drive off.

I, on the other hand, had some explaining to do.
The fleet manager didn’t seem in the least bit annoyed, he seemed to enjoy the challenge of getting me back on the road again. I wasn’t certain that I wanted to jump straight back in a car again, not that soon after the crash. I was still reliving it over and over in my mind as I sat in the Ford Twickenham garage where they had re-located the wrecked Escort.
I cancelled the customer meeting, they were very understanding and concerned about my wellbeing. I drank the free coffee offered in the garage while I waited for news from the fleet manager. Within an hour, a brand new Ford Orion Ghia 1.6i MkII arrived. This had the same engine as the XR3i and was a great car, in fact, it was exactly the opposite of what I felt I should be driving after the accident. Ideally, I wanted a steady, slow and safe Fiesta or something similar.
I cautiously drove to the centre of London and parked on the embankment behind Whitehall the other side of the river from the GLC in order to meet my wife coming over Westminster Bridge. She took one look at me, one look at the car and a puzzled expression came across her face. The shock of the crash was finally able to come to the surface and I burst into tears.

There was a second similar incident with the Rover. On mother’s day, we were in a hurry to get to my mother’s for Sunday lunch. As we leapt in the car, flowers and chocolates on the back seat, the oil warning light came on (as it had on the Friday on my way home). My wife saw it instantly, reminding me of my experience in the Cavalier CDi. To be fair, I had also thought about this on the Friday, but what with one thing and another the weekend had flown by and I hadn’t had the time or inclination to put some more oil in the Rover. My wife was insisting that we stop on the way to get some oil. A mile or two down the road, I stopped and like a dutiful mechanic I checked the oil levels on the dipstick. It was very low. This surprised me, so I went into the shop and bought some high performance grade oil and proceeded to pour half into the requisite orifice. I re-checked the dipstick again, but my filling had hardly made an impression. Confidently, I poured the remainder of the oil in, bought another bottle and poured that in too. This time the dipstick gave a better reading. I was really quite pleased with myself as we set off for Guildford, but less than a mile down the road, the car spluttered, huge black plumes of smoke issued from our rear end and I lost power.

Oh bollocks. What had I done now?
The car was just driveable so we limped back home leaving it on the drive in a cloud of oily smog to retrace our steps back to mum’s for Sunday lunch this time in my wife’s car. Later, when we returned I phoned the AA.
A portly taciturn mechanic appeared within 10 minutes and presented an expressionless deportment until that is he’d heard my explanation of the trouble. Then he began to laugh uncontrollably. I had to make him a cup of tea before he was able to explain my stupidity.
And how he relished that!
By this time, there was an audience of kids and their Dads gathering in the cul-de-sac.
Great.
It seems that one is required to let the engine cool a little before extracting the dipstick to wipe it clean, thrust it back and withdraw it again in order to take a reading. This would allow the oil to settle in a cooler engine down into the sump and that will give a truer reading. The oil had been a little low, but not as low as it had seemed from the warm engine reading. To cut a long story short, I had substantially overfilled the engine – somewhat. And when I started the engine and it had warmed up again the pressure had had nowhere to go other than by blowing through the head-gasket (whatever that is) and producing an effect that Hollywood would have been proud off.
It’s true, I was an idiot. I blame my father!
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. In order to redeem myself I decided to be useful and help the AA man because, amazingly, he didn’t think that I had terminally damaged the car. After the engine seizure of the Cavalier I thought it best (vis-à-vis my relationship with the fleet manager at work) not to wreck another car just yet.
The mechanic proceeded to drain the sump into the cat litter tray which I had intelligently cleaned and provided for the specific purpose required. He then disappeared from view and a few minutes later pushed the cat tray from under the vehicle towards me with its silky black contents shimmering in the failing light. I, ever-so-carefully, carried it towards the drain hole in the street where I intended to throw it away.
Well, you should have heard the palaver! It was only a little oil for God’s sake!
How was I supposed to know that you weren’t allowed to pour it down the drain. Bloody hell, when we were kids my mum put dead goldfish, and everything else including, one time, uneaten trifle and uneaten boiled potatoes down the toilet and a lot of other stuff too. Mind you, this had really pissed off our neighbour one time as the drain cover was in his garden and the blockage had pushed up mucky, smelly effluent into his kitchen overflowing the Belfast sink and seeping out onto his new floral linoleum.
“Do you know who’d do such a thing?” He’d asked my mum and dad as they stood beside him peering into the drain with acute interest.
“No, no. It’s despicable what some people will resort to,” my mum had replied.

In the summer of 1990, my wife and I and her sister and husband decided to go to the Dordogne for two weeks in the early summer. He took his brand new red Renault 19 and I took the Rover. I must say there was something terribly continental about that car in black with painted amber headlights as prescribed by the terrifyingly pedantic French police to deflect our headlamp beams away from oncoming drivers. Both cars handled themselves admirably especially when you consider that we had four up – we took my wife’s parents with our little boot crammed with luggage. When we go that far south we usually break the journey each way. We use the Michelin guide (not for the exorbitant prices of those restaurants with stars) but for those more modest establishments where a good affordable meal can be had with reasonable lodgings. The designation is called ‘restaurants with rooms’. In other words, the place concentrates on food rather than on the quality of the hotel part of the business. Our experience had always been excellent even with the more off the beaten track places. The reason for breaking the journey, besides getting a break from the driving, was to appreciate proper French cuisine. My experience of the cuisine of the Perigord is not great. To prepare ourselves for the culinary desert of the Perigord, we’d break our journey in Sancerre, or the Loire or the Sologne and over indulge in anticipation of the fast ahead of us. So eat well before you get there and as soon as you can on leaving Perigord. You will only ever eat geziers or confit de canard once in your life and that will be one time too much, but as a committed Francophile I will refrain from lambasting the local Perigord ethnic cuisine too much suffice it to say that the pizzas, steak-hache and spag-bol are excellent in the Dordogne, as is, more importantly, the wine and the local eau de vie: a ferocious plum brandy! We were booked to stay in a large Périgourdine farm house with a pool in an idyllic location perched atop of a hill overlooking chestnut forests that flowed in ripples down to the picturesque village of St. Leon-sur-Vezere. It had been hot and because it was early in the year the days were long. We lounged in the sunshine, drinking cocktails, listening to each other’s assorted tapes and reading countless books. In the evening, after going out for meals and more drinks, we’d return to watch the football in French (it was the 1990 World Cup) or to play backgammon or cards until dawn. The leitmotiv for that summer and for later summers was the sensational debut album by Texas: Southside. I was stunned at the guitar technique of Ally McErlaine and Sharleen Spiteri’s soulful and powerful voice especially on the tracks: ‘Everyday Now’, ‘Say a Prayer’ and the title instrumental ‘Southside’. These young Glaswegians had produced a mature delta-blues album that blew me away. I think that everything else they did afterwards, although excellent was never as fresh or exciting as their first album. When ever I hear those opening laid-back chords of ‘Everyday Now’ it takes me straight back to slipping Pina Coladas in a verdant steamy rural French sitting on a decrepit veranda as the sun goes down.

Brilliant.
There is a little postscript to this recollection, one of the reasons that Porsche driving customer of mine was considered obnoxious by me, besides his choice of car, was that I distinctly remember trying to convey the brilliance of the Texas album to him and he had interrupted me saying that he’d seen Texas supporting Simple Minds and the crowd had booed them off and he had joined in eager to see Simple Minds. Some people just want to be told what to listen to.
Fucking Simple Minds! Says it all, doesn’t it?
On the return journey, we found ourselves careering towards Calais to catch the ferry home with other traffic mysteriously thinning out until it seemed about forty miles out that we were the only Brits on the motorway to Calais. There were no mobile phones and smart phones were the thing of science fiction so we had developed an elaborate signalling system between us to communicate: pee breaks, petrol breaks, we-are-hungry breaks, we’re-lost breaks and even change-for-peage breaks. Our system facilitated communications in our little convoy, especially important when we were trying to stay together on the peripherique around Paris. Driving around the peripherique on a Friday afternoon, horns blaring out, drivers hanging out of their open windows smoking Gauloises and cursing loudly is something that everyone should experience at least once in their lives. At a petrol and pee break, we discovered what everyone else already knew: there was a ferry strike at Calais and all channel crossing traffic was being diverted to Boulogne.
Oh my God!
By the time we hit Boulogne, which is a little port anyway, it looked like the end of the world was nigh. Boulogne centre was more or less gridlocked. The French police, not known for their bedside manner, were irritably pulsing queues of English cars in circles around the town and after a prescribed number of circuits the cars would be allowed to enter the ferry port. Just like when planes are held in circular holding patterns over Heathrow. Considering the mayhem, we got a lucky break and driving really close to each other to avoid getting separated we were funnelled into the port after only one circuit. We could see the ferry docking. We were parked up in one of the four interminable lines of cars waiting to embark. We got out of the cars and chatted confidently that in a hour or so we’d be in England. The ferry had docked and was off-loading cars and there seemed plenty of time when my father-in-law asked if there was time for him to take a quick comfort break.
As soon as he’d disappeared behind a line of lorries to find the toilets the two queues to our left started to move into the gaping mouth of the leviathan. There was no sign of him as the third queue, our queue, started to move forward. I was confidently saying to the others that it’ll be fine there was plenty of time and therefore the others should go ahead. He wouldn’t be long and we’d get on later and see them in the bar. As the Renault started to move forward, he appeared and effected, as best he could, a run towards us. He leapt in and we pulled off, only a few cars having overtaken us between us and the Renault. The gap between us and the car in front invited an official to stand in the middle of our lane and stop us. We saw the Renault disappearing into the ferry.
“Sorry, mate. It’s full now, you’ll have to go on the next one.”
I could see my wife’s sister frantically signalling to us over her shoulder from the disappearing Renault. I had no reply. I hadn’t developed a signal for: “your Dad has fucked up and we’ll be late. Put the kettle on, see you in a couple of hours.”

I had had a number of successful outsourcing deals over the four years I was with this firm. The firm was small and so everyone was expected to muck in. There wasn’t the same divisions of labour as there are in larger corporates and this meant that you get lots of exposure to experiences that you might not ordinarily get. Often, I’d handle contract negotiations leading all the way to the close alone. This was particularly valued from a CV standpoint. A group of four of us had started all around the same time and we were all initially successful and therefore retained, but the company thought that the commission scheme was too generous and so they changed it from total revenue value scheme to margin scheme. This was designed to stop reckless contracts that in the long term made no money and to compel sales to consider profitability and contract safe guards to avoid or reduce company liabilities from sweep clauses et cetera. The industry was growing up and ‘share holder value’ had become the watchword.

The initial scheme was very innovative and I have not heard of its like since. Essentially, rather than a one-off payment following successful contract close, the company paid out a percentage of the customer’s monthly invoice value. The downside for more experienced ‘tin’ type sales people was that they couldn’t go out and buy a yacht or lavish the mistress with the latest little open top motor, but I’d never had these experiences nor wanted them and so I didn’t miss them. The upside for people like me was that your wages went up demonstrably and you could predict this for the period of the contract normally five years; assuming you didn’t do anything stupid and kept your job, of course. That meant that you could commit to greater outgoings and of course if you signed one or two large outsourcing deals a year each deal added to the increase in monthly earnings. It was against this background that we moved to a new four bedroomed, detached family home that was on our map-of-life if we were to have the family we wanted and a prosperous future.
The margin scheme was different again. This scheme paid out on the nose and proved very useful to help with all the upfront cash required to move house. Of course, interest rates went through the roof as soon as we’d moved and all the additional headroom we thought we might have from the commission payments, to cover the fact that my pregnant wife wouldn’t be working for a while, went to pay the incremental building society fees.
Two of our original intake of salespeople left unable to work within the new margin philosophy but the two of us who remained worked it to our advantage and were earning well. However, there was a growing feeling that I’d grown out of this particular backwater and wanting something more challenging that would recognise my experience. I needed a bigger more ambitious company with more corporate benefits’ package and more opportunity for career enhancement.
In the late summer, a head-hunter called representing an outsourcing company that matched all my earlier ideal criteria. They were willing to put forward a very compelling package and commission scheme for people with experience such as mine. I went along to three interviews and was told they’d like to make me an offer. It was indeed a good match and I felt confident that I could work with the management and that the company’s services were competitive. The only problem was it was located in Cambridge and I’d have to be based there, at least for the first month or two, until I’d learnt the ropes. Thereafter, I’d probably only be required to be there once or twice a week at most. It was an attractive offer, but I couldn’t get over the fact that it was in Cambridge: 120 miles from home. The sales director sensed that this was the one critical issue that I would find it hard to get over before accepting and indeed I was erring on the side of staying put and looking for something else. It wasn’t long before he had found my soft underbelly and he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He offered me a brand new BMW 520i SE.
Call me an old tart – I accepted immediately.

 

SUMMARY (7/10): The Rover Vitesse was clearly a step up from the 213S, but a step down from the Cavalier CDi. It professed to a sporty pedigree, but in reality it was not up to much. It looked a lot better than it drove but it did have its moments and it had to work hard. There were one or two issues but when it came to it, it did not let me down in any significant way and the return journey to the Dordogne is proof of that. The truth is that I liked it, but knew also that it was as good as I could get and unfortunately, then as now, that’s not good enough.

Next time, it’s the BMW 520i SE (1990).