This one has a special place in my heart, but I will get to that shortly.
My Dad bought this one to replace the VW.
It was his "work car" - the car he drove to work, and he got it for very little money, and fixed up a few things and it just kept on going and going.
The paint was nowhere near as shiny as the one in the pic - in fact there was no gloss left on it - or very little anyway.
This car was the car my brother learned to drive on, and them I learned to drive on it as well, but by that time we have discarded the brown falcon wagon and acquired a FIAT 131 Wagon - there will be another post on that.
The thing is, by the time I got my license the little black Fiat had been use by each and every one of the four kids of the family, and seeing as I am the baby of the family, by the time it came to me it sort of "became" mine.
So this is the first car that I ever had, although it never ceased to belong to my father, but to all intents and purposes it was mine.
And as it had been through so much in the way of learning and "young driving" it kind of suffered for it.
I have so many stories about this car that it seems like as soon as I start to think of one another rolls into it - I just don't know what to include here.
First of all, when I used it to get to my final year in school, it would sit in the car park all day. One day when I came down to the carpark after school, one of my mates had drawn on it with chalk - it was dark, dark blue, and as the clearcoat had basically all gone due to age, the surface of the paint was like a blackboard. Anyway, my mate had written on it "The Mighty Fiat" - that was the nickname, given to it out of irony, for most of my mates had six cylinder engined big cars. But it stuck, and my mate wrote those words one either side of the rear quarter panels.
This started a trend, and it ended up with chalked flames down the sides, and someone wrote across the bootlid "I FIAT but I don't believe it" - there was a comedian at the time whose catchphrase was "I see it but I don't believe it".
Anyway, being summer time here there was no rain to wash it off, so it stayed like that for a few months.
Yep everyone knew my little car.
And whilst it leaked oil and boiled over regularly, it always got me home. I could trust it, but you had to know how pamper it when it was needed.
Eventually it was delicensed by the police for general bad condition.
It was a basketcase by that time,but I knew everything it did, and so I am still confident it was not unsafe.
But a stranger driving it may just have killed himself.
Maybe it wasn't that safe after all......
So many stories with this one..... it was the car that I proposed to my wife in. We drove it all over the place, went out with mates in it, I hooned all over the place with it, surely nearly killed myself with some of the antics with my mates - but I survived - somehow.
And I have so many memories of it.
This was the start of a tragic love affair with FIAT's - only an Italian car lover can possibly understand, but let me say that although I am not an Alfisti, I have a certain ... ummm... affinity with them, and would not averse to owning a real Alfa at some stage. Likewise a Lancia would be welcome in garage. But a FIAT is never far from my heart, and my heart would lead me to buy another if the opportunity arose with the funds available.
There may be more posts about this one, but that will do for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment