After selling the awe inspiring but back breaking Lotus Elise in Autumn 2006 and putting some of the money back into my mortgage, I decided that I needed something reasonably sensible – a baby was on the way!

I still wanted something with some ‘oomph’… I found a 2001 black BMW 3 series convertible (Y312UGC) that the pram would fit in the back of – perfect!

Except… it wasn’t.

It had a 3 litre flat 6 engine and where that produced plenty of power, it did indeed feel somewhat – flat. And heavy, after the lightweight Elise and relatively light MX-5. It just wasn’t fun to drive. Plus driving a black beamer, everyone treated you as if you were a cock.

Or a drug dealer.

Also, with Annie (my daughter) on her way, the wife at the time wanted something safer than the Audi A4 (her model performing surprisingly poorly in the safety tests) and we bought a 2002 Mazda6 1.8 in electric blue (MK52LKA); think it was around the £6K mark.

Great car. She still had it until recently (some idiot drove into the back of it end of June 2014) and although it was utterly scratched and battered (thank’s to her ‘spirited’ driving) it was still going strong, with only a flat battery to complain about in it’s 8 years of loyal service.

In the autumn of 2008 we had the financial crash!

My contract was not renewed and I was out of work for 5 months. Supporting a wife at Uni and with a 1 year old to feed, I was forced to the sell the BMW with a heavy loss – I got 7K for her and had bought her for 12.5k only 18 months before. It was a bad time to sell a thirsty (hard economic times) convertible (summer had ended) but I needed the cash…

I bought myself a cheap £900 Hyundai Coupe 2.0 in silver (S something TMB – Tommy Boy!). It was quite a lot of car for the money; leather interior, sunroof etc. The engine was meaty enough but not exactly refined; a bit noisy and the handling was pretty awful – but I had fun chucking her about 🙂

By spring 2009 I had some cash in my pockets again. I recalled the halcyon days of soft-top motoring and considered an MX-5 again… but fancied something different, and looked at the MG-TF but was put of by reliability issues.

In the end I decided Japanese reliability was the way to go, and chose a year 2000 blue Toyota MR2 for around the 3-4K mark. It had a happy easy revving 1.8 litre 140ish bhp engine (pretty much the same one as had been in the Elise, although that had been tuned to 190bhp) in a light car, and was pretty nippy. It was good fun whizzing over those Milton Keynes roundabouts (where I was working at the time). I was never keen on the general looks and bland blue colour, so, heading back to the trusted Halfords/eBay, I added racing stripes and a rear spoiler.

As you do 🙂

But the MR2 wasn’t to last long…

Next part of the story: Exotic car threesome