Clara On Arrival

It didn't start with a 124 at all!

I had had VAG cars all my life and was quite happy with my A4 3.0l Cabriolet, thank you very much. Lovely car. In fact so much so that I was thinking about buying an 80 Cabriolet and had started looking at the values of them...

Nothing really came of that as I investigated the cost of insuring a second car and decided that since the insurance was going to be very nearly the cost of the car it wasn't worth doing. (This was before I discovered classic car insurance).

Then one day a friend in the village in which we lived mentioned that he had seen W114 250CE outside his house and pointed us in the direction of the website of the company to which it belonged. Not even realising that there was a classic car dealer in our village we had a look round their website and almost immediately called them to ask if we could go and look at a W123 280CE. She really was rather beautiful and after a little delay - she had been sold to someone else who failed to follow up on his offer - we became the proud owners of a signal red coupe.

Bertha On The Afsluitdijk

After many trials, tribulations and amazing times with this lovely car, shown above on the Afsluitdijk, 450 miles from home, from which we drove home in one day - and having fallen in love with Mercedes Benz - fast forward around eighteen months and my Audi goes expensively wrong as is their wont. Not knowing if or when I would get her back and not thinking that I would trust her if I did I started looking at other options.

One such option was two W124 300 CEs for what I thought was the price of one - but actually turned out to be for the price of three. A 225 mile round trip in our 123 later I was about to be the owner of not one but two W124 300 CEs. One had two very rusty front wings the other one rusty front wing and what appeared to be a leaky head gasket and there were a few other issues with them but hey things can be fixed - can't they?

The plan was that I could maybe use one of them as my daily driver and restore and sell the other... Ha ha - we'll see how that pans out!

A couple of days later both were delivered and then I spent a very panicky evening extremely concerned that I wouldn't get good title to them as the registration documents hadn't been signed by the previous owners. That was a very worrying evening...

Thilde On Arrival

2 Why Clara?