5:51 am, November 15, 2011
DOBIES Seat’s sales manager is showing his commitment to the brand by embarking on a restoration of a classic Seat.
Alan Herring, who heads the sales team at Dobies Seat in Carlisle, is so passionate about the Barcelona-based car maker and its heritage he will attempt to breathe new life into a battered Mk I Ibiza with no fewer than seven not-so-careful owners.
He snapped up the G-reg 900cc five-door Special – believed to be one of just 15 of its kind left in the UK.
Now the dedicated dad-of-two from Morton will spend around six months, and his own money, in an effort to bring it back to its former glory and restore the showroom sparkle.
Once completed, he intends to give the model pride of place in Dobies’ spacious Parkhouse Road showroom, where it will sit alongside its stunning successors.
An excited Herring said: ‘I’d been looking online for months for a MkI Ibiza I could restore but they are so few and far between now that I was beginning to lose hope of ever finding one. Then this one popped up on eBay and I snapped it up straight away without any questions.
‘The car was in Newark in Nottinghamshire and so it cost more to get it transported here than it did to buy it but, to me, it’s worth every penny.’
Once the car arrived in Carlisle, Herring had Dobies’ experienced technicians put it through an MoT in the dealership’s state-of-the-art workshop, where the true extent of the work facing him was revealed. The car, which was first registered in 1990, clocked-up several ‘fails’ mostly relating to the brakes and several patches of rust.
But despite its problems, the previously unloved Ibiza still starts first time and ticks over nicely giving Alan, who has already restored a number of vehicles, great confidence.
Before embarking on his latest project, he said: ‘I’m not aiming to get the car into concourse condition, but I do want to do things properly.
‘My intention is to restore it in a sympathetic way which will leave it as close as possible to the way it was when it rolled off the production line in Barcelona more than two decades ago.’
