Competition: Tell us about your first car and be featured on Autocar

Cropley's first car was a 1948 Ford V8 ‘Beetleback’

Our new writing contest gave Steve Cropley the chance to drive down memory lane and talk about his first car. Now we want you to do the same

What was the first car you ever owned? You can probably remember it like it was yesterday, but could you write about it? 

To help give readers a chance to show off their writing (and to help you pass the time while the UK is on lockdown) we're running a 'My First Car' competition.

Whether your first motor was a Bentley or, more likely, a two-decade-old hatchback that smelt vaguely of mothballs, we want to hear about it. The rules are simple: tell us about said car in just 300 words alongside some pictures of the machine and hopefully yourself.

Please email your entries to autocar@haymarket.com. The best will be published on the Autocar website.

*For some inspiration, we asked editor-in-chief Steve Cropley to spill the beans on his first motor:*

For half a century I’ve wanted to write about buying and owning my first car. Routine enough, you may think; why not just do it? The fact is that it has always seemed a bit too obvious and cheesy; a bit too self indulgent. Besides, there was always too much of today’s stuff around to take priority.

So what makes my self indulgence allowable now? Space, mainly. The car news flow continues at present but for obvious reasons it’s only a trickle. Editorially speaking, we’re enjoying producing the sort of varied, off-the-wall, group participation features and elements we usually dream up for Christmas (and we hope you’re enjoying them) but it also means there’s space available for other things. Even for the tale of my first car, a 1948 Ford “Beetleback” saloon powered by the famous Flathead V8 that powered millions of Blue Oval cars and trucks between 1932 and 1953.

In truth, I didn’t buy the Beetleback. Not all of it anyway. I paid £30 for a 60% interest and a similarly car-obsessed schoolmate called Pete forked over the other £20. We were 16, unlicensed, still at school, and the money was our lives’ savings. Buying that car was the kind of dopey thing you couldn’t do now — and we shouldn’t have done then — but when you lived in the outback Australian town of my childhood, with its mile-wide streets, haphazardly scattered houses, sleepy policemen, vacant allotments all over the place — and bushland stretching from our town for hundreds of miles in every direction — you could get away with it.

The car, a chalky-grey US-built sedan with suicide doors and six turns from lock to lock, was battered but reasonably fit when it began life with us. My grandfather had owned several, and I reckoned (without having anything to compare it with) that the Beetleback was close to being the world’s greatest car. Even when it was already 17years old and ravaged by many years of bush driving, with 165,000 miles on the clock.

We bought it via a small-ad in the local paper with a few months of registration left, never giving a thought to insurance. And we were immensely proud of it. Either Pete or I would drive it to school each day, leaving it on a vacant allotment just over the hill, away from the eyes of our teachers who would surely have hit the roof. As would our parents, from whom we managed to conceal its existence for the three months we owned it, our last three months at school.

We became undercover heroes with a lot of boys and took a favoured few for rides: there was always a queue. The girls were a lot less sure about the project. They provided proof of the theory that girls grow up faster by having a far clearer perception of how many people we were deceiving, and how many laws we were breaking.

Heedless of all that, we had fun. We drove as far and fast as our pocket-money would allow, setting records in local filling stations for the smallest amounts of petrol ever bought. The old Ford sounded amazing (courtesy of a large rust-hole in the silencer) and the oily old bent-eight was ridiculously torquey so we thought it was fast. The three-on-the-tree gear change was always a challenge (no synchromesh) and the clutch tended to overheat and stink the cabin out. We bounced over many miles of out-of-town bush tracks, every bump amplified by the non-independent front suspension and the trampoline of a front bench seat, and we learned quickly about dirt-roads oversteer, what with all that wheel-twirling and no power assistance.

Then things started going wrong. The mechanical fuel pump’s diaphragm ruptured and we couldn’t find a replacement, so we drilled holes in the bonnet and wired an old motorcycle oil tank (capacity 0.5 gallons) in place to gravity-feed the Ford’s Stromberg 97 carburettor via a plastic fuel line. That meant making stops every four or five miles (we were averaging 10mpg) to replenish the tiny tank from a jerrycan in the boot, but even this hardly hindered our enjoyment.

On the last day of school, without warning, the Beetleback’s engine blew up. Like all schools, we had a final day shindig before everyone went off to study for exams and ours (after an early, necessarily brief episode pulling doughnuts in the school quadrangle) was a large, unruly out-of town picnic. On the way back, while going pretty hard, the V8 started emitting loud clanking noises. The cabin filled with white smoke and we coasted to a halt at the edge of town.

We never drove the Ford again. We didn’t even establish for certain what went wrong, though I’m pretty sure it was something like a holed piston. The engine block was intact and there was no more than the usual amount of oil on the floor. I managed to sell the car for £15 (£9 for me, £6 for Pete), negotiating with the prospective new owner through my bedroom window while ostensibly studying. The bloke had heard about our engine lunching itself and wanted to use the rest of the car for spares. He put a rope around the front axle and towed it out of our lives.

We both passed our exams, amazingly, which is probably why Pete managed to have a distinguished career as a high-ranking Australian government official, and I’m still here doing what I do.

*READ MORE*

*Back by popular demand: Reinventing the Ford Capri *

*Ford GT vs Ford Fiesta ST: In search of the blue bloodline *

*Ford GT updated for 2020 with more power, new features*