4267 moves to England

[matt clark]

Like a lot of people in their mid-30s, I was introduced to BTTF at quite a young age, and it was easy to fall in love with the time machine - but I didn't really think of it as a car, or even a real object - it was just a cool movie 'thing'. A couple of years later - in 1997 - I was beginning to take an interest in cars, and by chance I looked at a classic car mag in the shop I worked in, and the first page I opened it to was this piece featuring Rob Lamrock's car.



The article hooked me; it focused more on the 'so near yet so far' aspect of the history rather than the scandal, and was a largely sympathetic write-up of the car. As I did more research I realised that in the UK, at that time, articles like this were rare - most very sour about the car due to the money invested and the scandal surrounding it. For contrast, a car book in my school library had a section on the DeLorean written by Quentin Willson, and you can imagine what that was like... From there I hoovered up everything I could on the car; before the internet, I paid a book finder to track down Ivan Fallon's book for me, and I found the Gold Portfolio (the collection of magazine articles reprinted as a book). That led me to the UK owners club, at that point run by Dave Howarth, who was always good enough to patiently chat to me about the cars whenever I phoned up with whatever collection of dumb questions a 13-year old could muster (a lot, as it turned out). Eventually he invited me up the the big annual classic car show in Birmingham on set-up day to see my first car, and it was: awesome.



I think everyone remembers the first time they saw one, mainly how in real life they look nothing like they do on TV - it always surprises me how low and flat they are. I took a saturday job working in an exotic car body shop, around Countaches and 308s all day long, and none of them seemed as incredible as the DeLorean did. From that point onwards, I was determined to get one - which ended up proving difficult as I was also chasing a career in TV / film which typically means waiting a few years for it to pay off. I was still at uni when John died in 2005; the price of cars here didn't really spike much, and, still having a terrible reputation, I thought I still had plenty of time to get one at what now seems like an absurdly low price. After that, though, they started to rise and the race was on to get one while also having to pay London rents, save up to buy a house, and keep a daily driver on the road. It was touch and go for a long time, but Dave and Chris Parnham of the DOC were great at keeping me engaged with the idea of getting a car. Chris in particular kept me in the loop with all the RHD cars he was uncovering, or photo archives he found, or factory workers he was meeting. One of the best things about this car is the community behind it - I think that's the perk of being in the club of an underdog or not overly prestigious marque.

For my 30th birthday my girlfriend secretly got in touch with Chris and arranged for him to lend me one of his right hand drive cars for the day - getting handed the keys to #522 and told "come back in the evening" was hands down the best, and most terrifying, present I could have asked for. I was always worried actually driving one would be a bit of a let down - and to be fair by that point my daily driver 3-series was a lot quicker... but that didn't make it any less special.




A year later, having managed to not drive it into a wall, he also gave me the keys to another of his RHD cars, VIN #5683 - the factory-made auto, to take down to the same car show where I saw my first car, while he drove Pilot 20 down on a trailer.




Interestingly, that second RHD car was advertised for sale in that first magazine I'd bought back in 1997. This was back when the RHD cars were slowly being discovered - you can get even get a decent LHD car here for that price now. The red car listed there for £10,500 seems like such a bargain now.



About a year ago, I started seriously looking for a car - by which point prices here had risen to 3 times what they were when I first became interested, and the disparity between the £/$ wasn't as favourable as it was then. I was a bit despondent - I was seeing project cars here go for £20k on occasion and I felt like they were rising faster than I could catch up with them (owning a house, it turns out, is an expensive thing to do). A few months ago, my girlfriend sent me a link to a BHCC car - I'd stopped checking there as they were selling some real basket cases - but the one she sent me actually didn't look *too* bad. Rough overall, but the fundamentals looked solid enough, and certainly savable for the money. A day later I got a call starting me on a big Netflix show, which I took as a good omen, so I tentatively reached out to them - asking first about the shipping process because that would be the make or break of it - and to their credit, they were really helpful and it was surprisingly cheap, so, following some haggling, and after 21 years, I pulled the trigger on #4267.




It took about two and a half months from buying it to it arriving in Southampton - I finally got to go see it on Friday - only for 20 minutes, and even in this state, it's pretty amazing to have my own car after all this time. Seeing it in the warehouse like this reminded me of the very first car I saw at the NEC - I think these cars look best under warehouse lighting conditions! I'm having it transported to where it's going to live this week, so on Saturday I'll have a chance to fully inspect it and figure out where to start...






For those of you who use Instagram, I've set up an account for my car here: http://instagram.com/delorean4267/ - I'll be posting the work there over the next... few years? I guess? As well as stuff from DeLorean events I've been too, memorabilia I own, that sort of thing.