12:00 pm, April 22, 2015
CAR dealers are wily old people, and we’ll do anything to secure a sale. I was reminded of this the other day over a pint in the Crab and Cleaver with my old buddy Doug, who used to run a car lot not dissimilar to my own over the other side of town.
There was many a time when we helped each other out, swapping stock or directing customers to each other’s sites if we didn’t have what they wanted.
I recall about 20 years ago, when Doug belled me excitedly to tell me he had a client currently on his way to my lot, to have a look at a British Racing Green Jag that I’d picked up from Walsall auctions the previous week.
The Jag was a lovely old thing, a 4.2-litre XJ6, 10 years old but amazingly free of the corrosion that used to blight the old things so badly. I knew that if the punter was in the market for a smart old Jag, he’d find it hard to resist – but it was only when I came off the phone that I remembered I had a job on the to-do list before retailing it.
It was a simple fix. The bush on the nearside front antiroll bar mount had perished, meaning every time you hit an uneven bit of road, it would clonk like a good ’un. The kind of fault that you or I know is an easy-enough fix, but may well lead a customer to think the front suspension was about to fall off, such was the racket.
The thing is, from what Doug had told me, the sale was on. I had roughly 10 minutes to rack my brains and come up with a solution, and by Jove I got one!
As the customer pulled up at my lot in a really quite smart-looking Granada Ghia X, which I was more than happy to take in part-ex, a brainwave struck me. I scuttled over (or waddled, to be fair) to the boot of my own smoker, an old Rover V8, in which I’d luckily stashed my golf bag, and retrieved my ammunition.
As suspected, the customer was hugely enthusiastic as he caressed the Jaguar’s curves. It was, he said, the perfect car and the perfect colour, and that if it drove as well as it looked, we’d pretty much be on for a deal.
After I’d fired up the old XK engine and let it settle to a gentle purr, showed him through the sheaths of service history and pointed out how fresh and clean the oil looked, I had him on a hook – all except for one thing. The clonk.
Unsurprisingly, the deadly knocking manifested itself within 200 yards of my lot. ‘Clunk’ went the nearside front, every time we hit a bump. ‘Clunk, clonk, clunk’. It was really rather embarrassing. I bluffed my way through as much as I could. ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘It never made this noise when I took it home for the weekend, and I used it quite a bit – the lads at the golf club
loved it. Indeed, if you’d not come over this afternoon, I reckon my mate Dave would be ready to make me an offer on it. But you know how it is – you snooze, you lose…’
‘But how could I sleep with that racket going on?’ was his admittedly witty retort.
I promised, of course, to take a look at it straight away and committed to him that, if he agreed to pay a deposit, by the time he came to pick the car up I’d have made sure the noise was gone completely.
He was semi-agreeable, but I could see he was more than a little concerned. After all, who would want to part with a wedge of cash to buy a car they knew needed some more wedge hosing into it as soon as they got home?
Back at the lot, he immediately made for the nearside front and started to feel around all the suspension mounts near the bulkhead, where the noise was at its loudest.
And that’s where I pulled off my masterstroke. I leaned into the car, popped open the glovebox, and proceeded to whip out one of my golf balls.
‘Well, would you believe it!’ I exclaimed. ‘Of course. After my game on Sunday I still had this ball in my pocket, which made driving a little uncomfortable, so I popped it in the glovebox for safekeeping. I even remember it clonking around on the way home. How stupid of me to forget – I told you it wasn’t coming from the suspension.’
He fell for it. Hook, line, and indeed, sinker. We did a deal there and then, I agreed a good price for the Granada in part-ex, and the following day I ordered up and fitted the anti-roll bar mount to restore the Jaguar to its useful peaceful self.
It served him well, too. I took it back five years later against a state-of-the-art XJ40. And when I took it down the road, a familiar knocking noise emerged from the front lefthand corner. I opened the glovebox and there, clearly left for me to find, was a golf ball and a Post-it note.
‘You can’t fool me that easily,’ it said. ‘But it’s been a bloody lovely car.’ What a guy.
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