850 – My first car

By Rory Cole

My first car, after learning to drive at the age of nine or ten under the expert tuition of my generous father, was a blue FIAT 850 Saloon reg NTM 504H. I am very lucky because my parents own a few fields behind our house, and that is where I learnt to drive in my dad’s road going, standard 600. About a year later, desperate to get my hands on a FIAT of my very own and with £50 birthday money saved, I managed to convince my parents into allowing me to buy my dad’s blue 850.

For the next couple of months, the thought of the scruffy little car never left my mind. By the end of Christmas, with money from relatives and a little I had scraped together from here and there, I managed to get, in total another another £50 and was now able to do so.

After a while of driving the car it’s exhaust needed replacing so it was removed and then immediately, lovingly replaced with, to me, the legendary four branch version I had had my eyes on, in my dad’s garage, for some time. This made the engine much quieter and slightly increased performance. It kept going for another month or so during which I (accompanied by my dad) continued cruising it around the fields.

Next, and nasty smoke and fumes from the engine revealed a missing manifold stud, which was letting out oil. Luckily a top up and replacement stud more or less solved the problem. What we did not know was that all the oil along with hay seed from the fields had subsequently clogged up the radiator matrix, restricting air flow and causing the engine to get hot. This problem stayed with the car for about six months until it got so bad that we could not drive it for longer than about ten minutes. Ignorant to the real problem we replaced hoses, flushed out the radiator and tried running it without a thermostat. None of these things seemed to solve the problem so the car was abandoned in a barn for around three months. After a while I began feeling sorry for it so we dragged it out again only to find binding brakes, a poor earth and not surprisingly still an overheating problem. We unseized the brakes and solved the earth problem quite easily. Then with added information about 850s with oily engines, courtesy of Greg Schmitt  and his book ‘FIAT and Abarth tricks’ we eventually solved the overheating! (Apparently oily engines and lots of road dirt can sometimes sludge up the outside of radiators).

With all these improvements and the car now in tip top mechanical condition we continued to run it for another  four or five months without anything drastic going wrong. This driving included, as well as in the dry summer months, also during the winter’s pouring rain and squelchy mud (which was nice) especially when we slid around all over the place. However contrary to all this fun, over the thirty years of the car’s life, lots of M.O.T patching, no waxoil and damp conditions were all starting to take their toll on the little car and although two years previously the car had been M.O.T’d it had been slowly crumbled away to hardly any strong metal at all. (Me driving it off road for all that time probably did not help!) So after nasty clunking noises coming from underneath we decided the time had come to get it over our inspection pit and give it a good looking over. When we did so it was only to reveal an immeasurable amount of rot, which included: Rotten sills (Both sides) – you could run your hand along the inside of each from underneath. Rotten front wings – basically held together with filler. Rotten floor – after the removal of the rubber mats I managed to get my whole foot through it, with very little effort. Rotten rear wheel arches – chunks of metal were falling off all over the place. Rotten front panel – literally hanging off and rotten door posts – just very rotten. The nasty clunking noise turned out to be where rot had crept all the way around the part of the inner wing where the shock absorber and control arm were mounted and this whole lump of metal and suspension was flexing on a tiny piece of metal still attached, as we went over bumps.

After much disagreement, I eventually accepted my dad’s wise decision to discontinue driving the car as surprisingly he thought it was unsafe. This was a very sad moment.

I decided that it there was no point trying to restore it as it would be stupidly uneconomical, no point trying to  sell it as there are very few people interested in 850s and it was not structurally worth anything. So I spent a couple of long days stripping absolutely everything off the car, removed the engine and then did what was only to be inevitable, forced myself into having it taken to THE DREADED SCRAP YARD.

One slight problem at the time was that I had very little money, let alone enough to afford the trailer hire to get it there. So, after measuring up my dad’s old horse box, I chiselled about eighteen inches off the nose of the car, which was very easy, and only took me about half an hour, then I managed to get it inside the horse box, which is how we got it to the scrap yard.

The End

(On reflection, two & a bit years on, it wasn’t really
was it?) [The End I mean]

Please share and like us: