The emotions of seeing cars you long-ago sold | Thank Frankel it's Friday

I saw one of mine as I made my way a motoring-themed quiz last week. I get asked to do a few of these things because I have friends who seem to think I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of cars. And they’re kind enough to cover their disappointment well when they discover I don’t. Anyway, this one was hosted by Hagerty and was raising money for Spinal Track, a charity that provides track and rally day experiences for people with disabilities, in cars like Toyota GT86s and VW Golf GTIs converted to hand controls. 

Run by Nathalie McGloin, the world’s only tetraplegic racing driver, it’s a brilliant charity doing important work providing opportunities to people who’d otherwise never get the chance to experience the thrill of driving a car absolutely on the limit; so if you were minded to point a few quid in a charitable direction this Christmas, it’s well worth heading to www.spinaltrack.org and taking a look. All of which is only tenuously linked to the subject of this week’s column but I saw the chance for a gratuitous plug and I took it.

The car was a Riviera blue Porsche 968 Sport – my old 968 Sport – and by the standards of some of the other stuff you find littered around this part of the world, a fairly unremarkable find.

Have you ever unexpectedly stumbled across a car you used to own? I’m not sure I have, and it set off an entire cascade of equally unexpected feelings within me.

A slightly strange facet of my personality which I think stems from having spent the last 35 years with cars coming and going on an often daily basis, is that while I love cars as much today as I did when I was eight years old, I very rarely miss them when they’re gone. I’ve owned an entire smorgasbord of sometimes weird and occasionally wonderful cars from a 1929 Alvis Silver Eagle to a 1958 Aston Martin DB2/4 MkIII to a 1995 Porsche 993 Carrera RS and the only thing I regret about selling any of them is how much richer I’d now be had I not. It appears that in my case out of sight really is out of mind.

But now the 968 was looking right back at me with those odd laid-down eyes with a look I might have mistaken for seeming somewhat reproachful. And in that instant, I missed it very much.

It came to me through a rather curious set of circumstances. It was early 2016 when Porsche invited me to Scotland to drive some of its more precious road cars, including a 918 Spyder, whose acquaintance I had yet to take. There was but one catch: I had to turn up in my own Porsche and, looking around the shed, I discovered I was clean out.

By lucky hap, I had a mate who did own a Porsche, this Porsche, and it was stuck on his drive on the Isle of Wight. He’s owned it since the turn of the century having bought it from, you guessed it, my brother. So I knew the car, knew its history and knew my mate wanted to sell it. Better still the sea air had got to its paintwork and wheels while a family of mice had used its upholstery as building material for their new home. Which meant I could afford it.

The idea was to take it to Scotland, hoon about in it for a few days, drive the 918, come back and sell the car pronto. All of which I did; all, that is, except for the last bit. I had such fun in that car, and enjoyed the way its superb natural balance and that fine, torquey engine allowed it to keep pace with almost uniformly faster cars that I decided to keep it. I restored the wheels, fixed the paint and even found someone who sourced a roll of upholstery (not easy as it was unique to the 968 Sport of which just 306 were built) and repaired the interior so well you’d never know a rodent had once sunk its gnashers into it. I would own and love it forever.

Which is not what happened at all. Like all nice cars I’ve owned, the pressure of work meant that whenever I needed to be somewhere far away – and this is not the kind of car you take on a five-mile jaunt to the pub – I needed to be in something else. Frustrated with the guilt I felt at owning and not using it I sold it and didn’t think of it again until I saw it gazing back at me last week.

Did I feel any sudden urge to reclaim it? Not really. It’s a reasonable example of a nice old Porsche, but with no purpose for it in my life other than to get me behind the wheel of the 918, I should have listened to myself and got shot of it as soon as I had. I notice too that it has barely moved since I sold it: I hope its new owner has more sense than me and actually uses it for the purpose for which it was designed. If you’d like that to be you, you can find its details by searching Hangar 136.