Colesman Ballz
Very well known Exeweb poster
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
- Messages
- 15,032
A couple of Stag stories for you. I never owned one but know a couple of chaps who have. On my course at college in Brighton was a Norwegian student called Tore who I got on very well with. Norwegian student's grants were humungus compared with English ones, so within a few days of arriving, he went out and bought a 3 year old MG Midget in bright yellow. Fast forward a couple of years and he returned after the summer break in a beautiful LH drive Stag. A few years later, when he and his English girlfriend decided to return to Norway to live, he thought that he could save a considerable sum by having some work and a full service done in England rather than wait until he got home. He went to a garage near his girlfriend',s mother's house in Essex, and had a very reasonable quote. Going back to collect the Stag, unfortunately he too became involved in an altercation with the garage owner, who had presented him with a bill of over double the original quote. The outcome was that the car would not be released to him until the full cost had been paid in cash. Now Tore wasn't going to stand for that, and hired a small crane and driver, went around to the garage on the following Sunday morning and lifted the Stag out over the wall. He had a spare set of keys, so by the time the owner arrived to open up on Monday morning, Tore and his beloved Stag were aboard a ferry in the middle of the North Sea !After a couple of posts about cars on the TV thread thought it was about time the subject had its own.
I have lost count of the number of cars I have had,probably 40+ in 42 years of driving since I was 17.
The one car I alway wanted when I was 20 was a Triumph Stag, but for a car dealer messing me around on my Cortina 2000E trade in,In 1981 I would have had one.
It was beautiful ‘P’reg in the rare colour of Jade plus desirable Manual with Overdrive.
I often regret getting my ‘arse in hand’ with the dealer over £100 at the time & not getting it..It may have been a blessing because the Stag was known as not the most reliable motor & was prone to overheating.
Anyone on here have one ?
Any other stories about cars,good & bad ?
Yes, Tore was certainly a bit of a lad. He had an unfortunate habit of getting speeding tickets (maybe the cops kept pulling him to check the Stag out ?), but avoided a ban under the "totting up" procedure by means of using multiple driving licences ! He would alternate having the points put on, between an International Licence, and his English one. Meanwhile his Norwegian one was kept "clean".
Fast forward a dozen years or so to 1988, and I had a Scottish lad called Lindsay as one of my assistants, whose pride and joy was an aging maroon example. Stags may have their faults and be unreliable but nevertheless both owners loved them. They were also very much "babe magnets", as evidenced in Lindsay's case. He parked it outside the front of the office, and every valentines day would go out to it and find a single red rose tucked under the wipers ! The chief suspect was one of the secretaries, but she wasn't admitting it and so it remained a mystery. Maybe the "magnetism" was in fact unisexual and Tarquin in accounts was the culprit, he certainly had the hots for Lindsay, so why not the Stag too as they came as a package !