10:35 am, August 27, 2010
OUR trio of Mazda MX-5s bought as part of our 911 for 2011 bid have got a celebrity connection!
You may remember the Hyundai i10 World Cup car we sold as part of our charity challenge was formerly driven by Jeremy Clarkson, Tiff Needell and The Stig as part of their Duel video.
Well, now I’ve discovered these Mazdas – 20 of which were bought by the manufacturer to celebrate the roadster’s 20th anniversary – were sourced by none other than Mr Wheeler Dealer Mike Brewer!
How do I know? Well, he got in touch at the weekend via the medium that is Twitter to tell me! What’s more his Tweet confirmed the £500 we’ve paid for them is a bargain – and if anyone knows a thing or two about bargains it’s Mr Brewer!
This week Mazda got in touch too letting us know which cars we’re buying. The good news is they’re all copper red – a popular colour – and they’re all original 1.6-litre MX-5s, not Eunos Roadsters, which makes them more desirable.
Now the bad news. The first – G799 OCW – has failed its MOT on a bit of corrosion, faulty windscreen washers, front suspension play, a missing mount and a ‘major exhaust leak’.
The second – H109 XGH – has similar corrosion issues on the body and suspension, but the worrying failure was this: ‘N/side vehicle structure has an inadequate repair, seriously affecting strength of the body mountings (6.1.3).’
Sounds expensive. Apparently not according to our spanner man Matt Kendell of White’s Motors in Portsmouth. Matt is a good friend of the mag’s and has said he’s confident he can get two of them back on the road.
He’ll be using our third car – PJI 180 – as a donor. That one’s been written off after a lamppost tried to hump the back end whilst it was in the possession of a national, monthly car magazine.
The plan is to strip off all the spares we don’t use and flog them (somewhere) then weigh it in for scrap. We’re hoping we’ll get at least a few hundred for it.
ON A PLATE
We’ve even looked into removing the donor car’s plate and flogging that, but after advice from Rob Steel at Regfinder.net we decided against it.
For a start the car has to have a valid MOT (stupid rule) to move the plate, then we’d have the hassle of retention fees and would have to find a buyer – all for a very small return.
‘I’ve looked into it for you,’ said Rob. ‘It’s really not worth it. It’s an Irish plate and there’s loads of them around. You could spend out to get it on retention and then be lumbered with it for years until you find a buyer.’
So that was that. Now we’re just waiting for our trio to be delivered to Matt and his team which is scheduled for next Friday. Hopefully after that we’ll get them on the road asap.
I’ve got a feeling, though, this step on the 911 for 2011 ladder might take some time …
But I’ll end on a positive note. I drove past a used car site near me this week that had a red H-plate MX-5 with similar mileage to ours up for £2,295! That certainly gave me some hope for the future!
James
PS. Still waiting on some proper pictures of our cars which I can’t take until next week so apologies for these borrowed from the web…
