Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / The Capri That Got Away; Nissan is Dying, Ozzy is Dead

Transcript

The Capri That Got Away; Nissan is Dying, Ozzy is Dead · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept
• 0:07
  sports bike rider hailing from California.
• 0:10
  He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and
• 0:12
  fast and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:36
  Well, sadly we can't, can we 'cause of copyright, but obviously, well not
• 0:40
  obviously, 'cause you might be listening to this at any point in time, but Aussie
• 0:45
  recently died, the Prince of Darkness.
• 0:49
  The face of heavy metal.
• 0:51
  I can't believe the number of people who've paid tribute to him.
• 0:53
  I want to pay tribute to him because the number of people who've paid
• 0:57
  tribute to him, because when I liked heavy metal in the eighties, metal guys
• 1:01
  all thought he was a bit of a clown.
• 1:03
  He'd like gone to LA and you know, was managed by that terrible woman,
• 1:08
  Sharon, and all right, bark at the moon was good and over the mountain
• 1:12
  was good, but didn't have metal, didn't have the crossover appeal here.
• 1:18
  That it did there just didn't get played on the radio 'cause of the Freddy dirty
• 1:22
  B, b, C, so people didn't like it.
• 1:25
  So what a bag of shit that was basically.
• 1:28
  But that isn't why I started talking about this, uh, podcast.
• 1:33
  This, that isn't why, why I started recording this.
• 1:35
  No, sir. I recorded this because I wanted to lay down some ideas.
• 1:40
  This, uh, where my mind had had run on from, uh, from Ozzy.
• 1:44
  I never really got that into Sabbath.
• 1:46
  Club nights, people will play paranoid, but I always found the
• 1:50
  early Sabbath stuff too slow.
• 1:52
  Remember, this was this period where I was enjoying Judas Priest and dio
• 1:57
  and getting into Metallica and Slayer.
• 1:59
  And Slayer were the fastest and the most extreme thing that there was out there.
• 2:03
  Really.
• 2:03
  I mean, sure there was kind of then.
• 2:05
  You know what I mean?
• 2:06
  They always were kind of what they are now.
• 2:08
  It was a bit like, are these guys real or are these guys Spinal Tap?
• 2:11
  They're like midway in between, aren't they?
• 2:13
  Venom?
• 2:13
  I love you Venom, and I get how you birthed Black Metal.
• 2:17
  That's a whole separate story.
• 2:18
  Listeners, if you don't know that one about how Black metal was born
• 2:22
  out of Venom's black metal song.
• 2:25
  Which was not really written very seriously and they were more
• 2:28
  like a punk band who couldn't really play their instruments.
• 2:31
  And it's ironic that these Swedish black metals who've developed the
• 2:35
  genre since have actually often been quite accomplished musicians.
• 2:39
  I don't get black metal, so you won't get any of that on, uh, with me.
• 2:43
  But Sabbath, I first got into them when I had a cassette that
• 2:49
  had Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
• 2:51
  On it and I listened to that cassette, which the other side was Haw Wind's
• 2:57
  Levitation, which are both great albums and I love both of them to this day.
• 3:00
  And I feel like both of them, I could just go backwards and forwards and backwards
• 3:04
  and forwards in that blue Cortina crusader that I had as a calf for, for my work that
• 3:09
  summer, I was selling aerial photographs.
• 3:12
  Door to door in the Worcester countryside.
• 3:14
  Isn't that so old fashioned?
• 3:16
  People thought it was a novelty to be able to look at their houses from a plane.
• 3:20
  And if you persuaded them convincingly enough, they part with money at
• 3:25
  the doorstep for a framed photo.
• 3:27
  The clothes involved stepping into the door and framing the photo in people's,
• 3:32
  you know, living rooms or hallways.
• 3:34
  On a Sunday afternoon or Monday afternoon or or whenever they were home.
• 3:39
  Really looking back, an interesting job in many ways.
• 3:43
  But in my Cortina, I listened to Sabbath a lot and I fell in love with Sabbath.
• 3:48
  So I was listening to Sabbath when in this particular incident took place,
• 3:52
  which was that my blue Ford Cortina.
• 3:54
  We were living in Marvin at the time.
• 3:56
  When I was on my way to, to a location, I remember I was pulling out of
• 4:00
  a T junction and I pulled right.
• 4:02
  Pulled out to the left, rather as I got into my carriageway and took second,
• 4:07
  the shifter just came off in my hand.
• 4:10
  Like literally it was like waving around in my hand.
• 4:14
  I can't remember whether the car was in first gear or in second gear,
• 4:17
  but by the way, luckily we were on a downhill, so I just dipped the clutch
• 4:22
  and rolled down the hill and rolled to a standstill as luck would have it
• 4:28
  at a gas station and garage using as the end of the story, but it's not.
• 4:33
  The point of the story is what happened next, which was that the
• 4:37
  garage man offered to repair the car.
• 4:39
  I had been perusing the yard, which is as so often with country
• 4:44
  garages had cars that had been hit on the road hanging out in them.
• 4:49
  Now one car that was parked towards the back was a red Ford
• 4:53
  Capri, three liter ST plater.
• 4:57
  If memory served, that would make it a 78 or 79, but certainly.
• 5:02
  Right in that area.
• 5:03
  Now it was red.
• 5:04
  Had it been black, probably this would've gone another way.
• 5:09
  Had it been white, probably this would've gone another way, but because it was red,
• 5:13
  when the Garage man said to me, do you wanna trade your Cortina on that Capri?
• 5:18
  I can't remember what he said it needed, but he was like, you know that and some
• 5:22
  money, and you could walk outta here with the Capri and leave the Cortina with me.
• 5:27
  The continue wasn't a good car, by the way.
• 5:29
  I'll insert a picture of it.
• 5:31
  It was a tired example, eh, when, when I shamefully I couldn't part with
• 5:36
  it and my dad took it to an auction and uh, some gypsies paid 30 pounds.
• 5:41
  For it.
• 5:42
  So you can tell what kind of car it was.
• 5:44
  I mean, it was like the had before I had it, that was the one where
• 5:46
  it had the carburetor was held together with a carpentry screw.
• 5:50
  So on the way home from purchasing it in Ponti front, it couldn't
• 5:53
  climb a hill because it couldn't open the second Venturi on the
• 5:56
  carburetor, as I've observed before.
• 5:58
  I don't know why I didn't just go to a scrap yard and buy another carretta.
• 6:01
  I mean, it could have taken it off as easy as, but that really goes to
• 6:04
  show, I mean, I'm not a great mechanic now, but it really goes to show.
• 6:07
  What an absolutely hopeless mechanic I was.
• 6:10
  So I turned the guy down and said, no, I will not take.
• 6:15
  That Capri three liter s with the wheels that I really like, and that S
• 6:20
  stripe down the side just like Bodhi silver car in the professionals.
• 6:26
  But red never did like red that much.
• 6:29
  I remember looking at the car and thinking to myself, I really want to do this.
• 6:33
  But I'm gonna be too deeply in the hole financially because the job I was
• 6:39
  doing was a commission only sales job.
• 6:42
  So obviously I wasn't gonna earn any money that day because the shift lever had come
• 6:46
  off in my hand ina, you know, you couldn't spend that too many days where you weren't
• 6:50
  selling anything and you couldn't be desperate with the selling 'cause then you
• 6:54
  definitely weren't gonna sell anything.
• 6:55
  This is a complete aside.
• 6:57
  One day I went to a village, and in the village there was a Bugatti museum.
• 7:01
  Little did I know it was Chelsea Walsh.
• 7:03
  Little did I know it was the Bugatti Society.
• 7:05
  However, the bloke who was in there got talking to me, and although they
• 7:09
  weren't open, I went in so long before.
• 7:12
  The Pebble beach here long before I ever knew about anything other than,
• 7:17
  well, I dunno, whatever I was excited about when I was a whipper snapper of
• 7:21
  21 Capri three liters and Subaru and Prezis, and it was before motorcycles,
• 7:26
  I should say at at that time.
• 7:28
  But I remember at that time being blown away by the craftsmanship
• 7:35
  of the Bugatti Straight Ape.
• 7:36
  I remember leaving being like.
• 7:39
  I get it.
• 7:41
  Like I totally, I went away with my mind being blown, feeling like
• 7:47
  this was the best day at work ever, even though I'd not earned a penny,
• 7:52
  because I just probably tried to sell this bloke an aerial photograph of
• 7:55
  the bottom of Chelsea Wall Shore.
• 7:57
  I can't even remember which hill climb it is.
• 8:00
  Yeah, so I didn't take the Capri three liter SI bitterly regret
• 8:04
  not taking the Capri three liter s now at the, uh, age of 51.
• 8:09
  I recently saw one cross the auction block and it made me think of the car.
• 8:14
  It was not long after Ozzy himself had passed, and I was like, you
• 8:19
  know, I still wanna say right.
• 8:21
  He, he was a showman, but it was really lemmy.
• 8:26
  That was the spirit of rock and roll.
• 8:28
  It was really lemmy.
• 8:29
  I think I'm gonna leave it there.
• 8:31
  Actually I'm not.
• 8:33
  'cause that's only 10 minutes, isn't it?
• 8:35
  So I'm gonna pivot onto my second thought.
• 8:38
  I don't think Nissan's gonna make it.
• 8:40
  It's hard to say.
• 8:42
  I really can't see a world in which Nissan's going to make it.
• 8:48
  I think they are going to go the way that Austin Rover went.
• 8:53
  Either quickly or slowly, but I just can't see a way of them surviving
• 8:59
  what's happening at the moment.
• 9:00
  Toyota have been very wise to spot this move to hybrid.
• 9:05
  Everyone else is scurrying back to making gas motors as fast
• 9:10
  as as they can so that they do.
• 9:13
  At Christmas time, I did that pod where I talked about how I'd been
• 9:17
  to Mexico and how in Mexico City it was like invasion of the Chinese
• 9:24
  car makers and motorcycle makers.
• 9:27
  And the motorcycle makers seemed particularly well established
• 9:30
  and I didn't really dig into them too much, you may recall.
• 9:33
  But the car makers I looked at closely enough to, to realize that there
• 9:38
  were four makers and each one of them had introduced a range of models.
• 9:41
  And largely it was Nissan and Volkswagen's lunch that was being
• 9:46
  eaten because Mexico used to be Nissan Centras left, right and center.
• 9:50
  All the taxi camps used to be, and they weren't.
• 9:52
  I was, I was shocked at, uh, you know, so, so that made me think,
• 9:57
  gosh, Nissan, what your strategy gonna gonna be going forward?
• 10:01
  Just a, a word on that.
• 10:03
  Toyota are Japan's largest.
• 10:05
  Car Baker Honda a second.
• 10:08
  So much as in the way that you see GM being more conservative than Ford.
• 10:13
  You know Ford Do the aluminum pickup truck Ford do the turbo V six pickup truck.
• 10:21
  The Ford truck offers.
• 10:22
  Better value.
• 10:23
  The Chevy is a more 5.3 small block goes on for hundreds of thousands of
• 10:28
  miles, or at least the old ones did.
• 10:30
  So that's the, the reputation.
• 10:32
  You know, these are, uh, the slightly different positioning
• 10:34
  between the two of them.
• 10:35
  And, and certainly in terms of driving dynamics, you know, Hondas traditionally
• 10:39
  were always a little bit sharper to drive than Toyotas, you know, uh,
• 10:43
  ACORD certainly of 20 years ago.
• 10:46
  A little bit better than Camry's and civics were definitely
• 10:49
  better than Corollas and, and the reliability, you know, it was
• 10:52
  there or thereabouts, wasn't it?
• 10:53
  'cause certainly Honda made a great engine, but you know,
• 10:56
  the paint wasn't all there.
• 10:58
  But I, I'm falling down a rat hole of comparing those two makers.
• 11:03
  The point is, Nissan's not in the conversation.
• 11:06
  That's the the point here that once they were, and now they're not.
• 11:12
  And it's crazy because any collectible Japanese car event, you go to be my guest.
• 11:18
  Tell me if I'm wrong.
• 11:20
  I reckon half the Japanese collectible cars are Nissans, not
• 11:25
  Toyotas, not Hondas, but Nissans.
• 11:29
  So that means that if they do go away, or if they become, you know, a
• 11:33
  badge engineered BYD or a sub-brand of Toyota or something like that, if that
• 11:39
  does happen, we've lost the best of the Japanese in terms of creativity.
• 11:45
  So let's stop and think about that where we are with that.
• 11:48
  Look, the skyline was the first time a Japanese car had.
• 11:55
  Done something that couldn't be found as a reference point in something that
• 12:02
  had existed in Europe or America before.
• 12:04
  So by that I, I mean that sure, the skyline looked at what the
• 12:08
  Porsche Turbo was doing and said, let's be better than that.
• 12:11
  But it was also different from that, wasn't it?
• 12:14
  It was also had its own kind of swagger and, and that's
• 12:18
  why they call them Godzilla.
• 12:20
  They're right to, it meant that, you know, they came from Japan and
• 12:23
  dominated, I think, but to me it always felt like here was a expression
• 12:30
  of something purely Japanese.
• 12:32
  But with Nissan, it's deeper than that, isn't it?
• 12:34
  It's the S fourteens.
• 12:36
  The Sylvia's.
• 12:37
  What you might have got is Nissan two hundreds in your
• 12:40
  market, or as one eighties.
• 12:43
  They came with different noses and tails on them and different engines
• 12:46
  and wheels and trims and all of that.
• 12:49
  But the point is.
• 12:51
  The S 14 platform, the Sylvia platform is the basis of more
• 12:57
  drift cars than, than any other.
• 12:59
  It's, uh, truly it's the escort mark two ad drift, isn't it?
• 13:03
  Let's frame it like that.
• 13:05
  There's the Z cars as well, isn't there?
• 13:07
  There's the, the two 40 Z, which yes, you can say, you know, it's a bit like
• 13:12
  a Jaguar type and a bit like a Ford Mustang, or, no, that was the Sika.
• 13:16
  That was like the Ford Mustang.
• 13:17
  But no, the point is that Japanese thing it, it brought the best of
• 13:22
  what Jaguar were doing to a package that was very affordable and reliable
• 13:27
  and reach people that couldn't have otherwise accessed and enjoyed that
• 13:32
  kind of straight six grand touring car.
• 13:35
  Mark Gamy, who's not on the pod now bloody well, should be really more than
• 13:39
  a hundred thousand miles, 150,000 miles.
• 13:41
  And in Nissan three 50 Z still got the same clutch and he's gamy so
• 13:45
  you'd know like, you know, he's not been that gentle with it.
• 13:48
  There were a lot of motorway miles there, but there were also
• 13:51
  a couple of nerve berg ring.
• 13:53
  Track days in there, a couple of other track days, you know, in uh, uh,
• 13:57
  circuits around England and the company.
• 13:59
  Car Miles was through the winter, salt roads, original
• 14:03
  cloud, all original body panels.
• 14:05
  He did ding a wheel on it once when he span it.
• 14:07
  We talked about that on another pod.
• 14:09
  But yeah, there is a breadth and depth to what Nissan did.
• 14:14
  The Z 31 300 zx, the Z 32, 300 zx, that twin Turbo one.
• 14:21
  I personally feel like of all Japanese collector cars,
• 14:28
  everyone knows the koska skyline.
• 14:30
  I like the Ken Mary one.
• 14:32
  I like them because I knew them from rallying when it was like the
• 14:35
  180 SSS or something like that.
• 14:38
  That's what they called them.
• 14:39
  I didn't realize that they did.
• 14:42
  Uh, skyline.
• 14:44
  Race version of it.
• 14:46
  I have an exquisite Japanese model of one that's on goal.
• 14:51
  What an a base, which is like knockoff, American racing talk thrust, kind of, or
• 14:56
  what we would call min, like kind of not talk thrust, mini like kind of wheels.
• 15:00
  I'll include a photo of, of that car.
• 15:04
  Sincerely, hope I'm wrong.
• 15:05
  But I feel like I've been here before and I feel like I wanted to hold up my hand
• 15:09
  and say, Nissan, the engine's on fire and the plane is diving for the ground.
• 15:14
  And I, I can't see you guys dealing with this Chinese ev invasion.
• 15:20
  These guys, they're just gonna eat your lunch and, and I just don't
• 15:24
  see anywhere for you guys to run.
• 15:26
  Sorry.
• 15:27
  Thank you.
• 15:28
  Drive through.
• 15:39
  This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part
• 15:42
  of our Motoring Podcast network.
• 15:44
  For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational
• 15:48
  content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring
• 15:52
  Historian, break Fix, and many others.
• 15:54
  If you'd like to support Grand Touring Motor Sports and the Motoring
• 15:57
  Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at
• 16:00
  www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.
• 16:05
  Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and
• 16:08
  expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has
• 16:11
  been published with their consent.
• 16:13
  If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators
• 16:17
  of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.