Ivor had quite a dry wit and when we got to the ground he took one look at Pierpoint's ashen face and remarked to him that I must have been in my Nigel Mansell mode again. Got some smashing memories of those great days.
Esme, Ivor's wife, used to drop him off at my place as we usually travelled to games in my car. Back then they lived in Bishopston and I lived in the Mayals, so it was about a 5 minute drive across Clyne Common, past the golf course for them to get to mine. My business demanded that I had several cars as they were all subjected to fast, heavy-duty motoring on a regular basis and, understandably, would also break down on a regular basis because of this. Apart from the Jag I had two or three other cars one of which was an NSU RO80.
Petrolheads will know what I mean when I say that for its time this car was something else! Futuristic or what!!
It was longer and wider than a Jaguar XJ6 and powered by two Wankel rotary engines. This unit worked like a spinning top in that the faster you went the more balanced it became and the quieter it got. It had 3 forward gears and one reverse but was semi-automatic in that the clutch was in the handle of the floor mounted gear stick. This meant that on the floor you only had the brake and gas pedals and you just changed gear by moving the stick. A great advantage of that system was that in traffic you had no clutch to depress in and out as it had a torque convertor, the same as a full automatic box. Great in London traffic jams where I've spent a large part of my life!!
Trouble was that the engines on that model weren't durable as the rotor seals kept breaking due to over-revving. In a conventional car the noise from the engine will tell you either to change up or tap off but in an RO80 the car gets quieter the faster you go, so it was all too easy to over-rev and blow the tips. I remember going up the Glynneath bank one morning doing about 110. I glanced at the rev counter and almost choked as it was in the red. I was still in second stupid bugger that I was and made the quickest change to top that you'd ever seen!
I got away with it that time but lost out months later when the seals did finally blow. The seals problem was eventally solved by Rolls Royce. What I've been told is that they created a seal that didn't break and, in exchange for a licence to use the Wankel engine in Scorpion tanks, gifted the patent to NSU. But it was too late. NSU went under and were taken over by Audi. The car was so ahead of it's time; wedge shaped, it was the first mass produced car to be designed via a wind tunnel, which aided it's huge performance. Mazda have since used the engine with massive success in track saloon car racing and, when I lived in South Africa, I drove a Wankel powered Mazda on a track day at Kyalami Grand Prix racing circuit. Wish I still owned that RO80 today though - worth a lot of money even with a blown engine!
But back to the reason for this post. I used to drive very quickly and Ivor knew that Esme wouldn't have been too happy about this when he rode with me, so he made me promise never to tell her a thing about it. I kept my promise but Esme was an extremely intelligent and smart lady then and still is today. She certainly was last time we met and LadyGG is in contact with her several times a week. And Esme knew exactly what was going on....... somehow....... because on one particular day when she dropped him off, she took me to one side and said, "You make sure you bring him home to me safe and well." And, of course, I did. Such lovely people and such a shame that they couldn't grow old together. They deserved to.
