Driving Spirit

02/10/2026

Steve and Dave make good around the sides of the boos and C pillar.

02/10/2026

A particularly rare sight, nowadays. This Super is in with us for some Driving Spirit love. We invite you to follow our progress here!

29/09/2026

Dead pan? Serious Steve tackles the flawed floor.

29/09/2026

We’re gradually turning this ship around…

29/09/2026

That moment when you blink and realise your little child has suddenly become an adult…

Or when you turn your back for a moment and then realise the Charleston is back together and suddenly shiny! What happened in the meantime?

23/09/2026

My first really proper job was as trainee parts coordinator for Malaya Garage, Billingshurst - main dealer for Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Reliant Scimitar. The cars were all very interesting. I noted that Porsche 911s and 928s were of far higher quality than 924s - which had VW parts labels. But I also noticed that Mercedes-Benz were cars of unparalleled quality - different again from Porsche. Scimitar? Well, they were not in the same league, but I really, REALLY liked them all the same.
Mercedes-Benz, in reality, probably built the best cars in the world, back in those days, despite Rolls Royce sitting comfortably on that accolade.
Meanwhile I drove my beloved 1975 2CV to and from work and held a reverence for the hydropneumatic genius of larger Citroëns.
I acknowledged that Citroën cars, for all their brilliance, were inferior in build quality to the Germans, among whom Mercedes-Benz were the apotheosis. Citroëns were ultimately rust-buckets.

Yesterday at Driving Spirit, I took stock of this stronghold of the mind.

Up aloft on our two poster ramp was this particularly dog-eared 1968 DS21 that we have been gradually working through. And in truth, with its bottom exposed for all to see, it really wasn’t so bad as we had anticipated.

Meanwhile, next door, our absolutely ingenious neighbour, ‘Isambard Kindom’ Swampy Beevis was trying very hard to weld a 1983 Mercedes-Benz 280 CE, a car from their golden period - just as our DS was from Citroën’s finest hour. There is nothing…NOTHING! that will ever defeat Swampy and yet he was wincing as he described his ordeal with this utterly rotten German jalopy. So much so that we downed tools to go and inspect the decay and the laboured attempts to bring something solid back into the mix.

The owner had bought it blind from eBay, paying over £5k and not even picking it up in person.

It occurred to me that Citroën cars from those glory days were possibly no rustier than the best cars in the world and maybe even less so…maybe! That is certainly what our fifteen years older DS was telling us yesterday.

18/09/2026

18/09/2026

This has been in our workshop undergoing periodic recommissioning work since 2024 - over two years. Everything has taken time due to spares being made of that rare metal, unobtanium,
The rear brake shoes, for example, arrived this August - a year and three weeks after ordering them. I’ve been a Piaggio Master Dealer in the past; I know this is how things roll in Italy, although that’s a rather excessive delay. The engine needed work as there was insufficient compression to get it going. But even a simple rebore was not straightforward. The new piston had a 16mm gudgeon pin. The original - and thus the small end of the conrod - was 17mm. So we had to have the new piston machined to accept the old pin.

However, today was a Red Letter day! For the first time in our custody…he runs! He even drives! This is extremely encouraging.

16/09/2026

Making the seemingly impossible possible after careful D-liberation.