Date Registered: 11/10/1985 (Car was collected on the 5th October)
Supplying Dealer : Felixstowe Carriage Company.
SONO: TBC
Status: One owner from new and in original condition.
Options : None
The Owner Says:
One Friday evening In the spring of 1985 At the age of 19 . I was driving home for the weekend from college in Cirencester to Suffolk and I stopped at the garage on Oxford bypass in the showroom of this GM garage was a brand-new Nova sport. I clearly remember standing peering through the glass of the showroom admiring the car that stood before me. Although I wasn’t entirely clear at the time what it was and I certainly didn’t know the importance that the Nova sports would have in my life.
My immediate family are farmers and sailors and it had only been when I went to agricultural College and met one or two very keen rally enthusiasts that I had learnt anything about car rallying, the talk was often all about my friends mini Cooper which it had which had been rally prepared,(I wasn’t sure for quite some time. What this actually meant but it sounded really cool ) of course, in those days rallying was dominated by Audi Quattro sport and the Peugeot T16. These cars I understood at the time that there had only been 500 made of which made them very special.
I left college in the summer of 1985 and went back to work on my family farm in Suffolk. That summer we’re taken on a lot more work and bought a large ford TW30 180 hp tractor, which at the time was considered massive in order to justify this expense. We kept it running 24 hours a day. I did the night shift. Most of that summer, which was an incredible experience and meant I was earning enough money that by that autumn I could be looking for a new car.
I knew what I wanted and I scoured the newspapers for the object of my dreams and Behold in Felixstowe, only a few miles away, Felixstowe carriage company was advertising. It had one Nova sport on the road price £5475. So one day in mid September. I set out in my mother’s old Morris Marina to Felixstowe. I’ll always remember stopping at the traffic lights with the garage directly ahead of me and there in the showroom stood and Nova sport looking identical to the one I had seen many months earlier in Oxford.
The salesmans job was not a hard one . I negotiated a hire purchase deal for rest of the purchase price I didn’t have in cash and agreed to return in a couple weeks time to pick the car up so on October 5th, 1985, at about 1130 in the morning I left, Felixstowe carriage company driving my new Nova sport. He was as you can imagine, slightly more interesting to drive than I had anticipated, I drove directly, 30 miles north, where my girlfriend lived with her parents were the landlords of the pub. I parked my new car in the pub car park and proceeded upstairs where the family lived above the pub within 5 min Clare my girlfriend (now my wife), said to her mother Jonathan’s got his new car with him today is outside look my future mother-in-law looked out of the window and said it looks like a noddy car to me. So that was it. From day one. My Nova was called Noddy
The first couple of years I had noddy, he simply was my everyday car, which I was incredibly proud of just taking the on trips out with my girlfriend shopping and very normal trips by the only changes I made to them in the early years was having his name painted on his backside in red .
Things began to become a bit more interesting when I had my 21st birthday party and I decided to look up some of my old school friends who I’ve lost touch with. Although I didn’t really know where most of them lived one of them a chap called Gary had a particularly unusual surname being Zoller, so he was easy to find in the phone book and I invited him along. He turned out her family who were very involved in motorsports and the local car clubs and at first sight of my Nova rally special suggested that we should rally at this is something I’ve wanted to do since my college days, but it never really come across anyone who knew how to achieve it. So, plans were made and myself and Gary’s rally career began.
Initially, the 12 car navigational club events, mainly run from pubs for a couple of hours. Not very many changes to noddy need to be made, but he steadily acquired a sump guard a roll cage cut-offs which bonnet ends fire extinguisher hollbay high lift cam ,straight cut close ratio gearbox, soft compound tyres full harness extra reversing light internal map leading light throughout the late 1980s, as we did more and more serious navigational events. Our favourite event was the annual Curtis Bennett rally in Wales from Llandrindod Wells, it would be based at a large hotel in early evening and the cars of which there would be 50 or 60 would set off 1 min apart around. Your navigator would then dive you using the very cryptic clues throughout the night all over the Welsh hills and beyond until after dawn, when you would finish.
The next day there would be an autotest in a field which was just as fun, if not better, and one of our finest achievements was that noddy came first and second in this event. On one occasion since Gary took part separately to myself and he beat me.
It is impossible, of course, to tell you in a few short words, all the things I’ve done with my Nova sport over the last 30 years.
There are a few memorable occasions that spring to mind. I was once on the way home from a black-tie ball with two girls in the back in ballgowns and myself and another chap in dinner jackets, when we saw flames coming out of the bonnet (which turned out to be from some sound proofing between the sump guard and some which had got soaked somehow in oil and caught fire) the flames could be seen in the dark coming out from the bonnet, presumably passed the carburettors, so we pulled in on the side of the dual carriageway drag the girls out the car and douse the flames with the fire extinguisher. This must have made a strange sight to passers-by in the night,
I was for many years, a keen member of the Young farmers club’s in Suffolk and noddy became a very familiar sight at almost all YFC events. His distinctive exhaust on arrival rally stickier and numbers on his side meant he would really go unnoticed.
By the early 1990s. Myself and Gary had decided to progress to stage running this meant for the first time taking noddy to events on the trailer. Since these events are much more likely to be car wrecking and very few people. If anyone drive stage rallies to the event. I had by this time acquired a Sierra XR4i 4×4 , as my everyday car and this was used to tow noddy on a trailer to stage rallies all over the country from Yorkshire to Wales. We never won any of these events, but finished every single event we started due to our consistency and ability to stay on the road and nurse the vehicles through when necessary, and did quite well on the Conway challenge championship one year.
In the mid-90s. Myself and Clare were married and I drove to the church in noddy and we left for our honeymoon in him.
Years went by and we had a son, then a daughter and I used to use my Nova to take them to school from time to time, to the delight of my son, who, by the time he was 12 or 13, was very keen to drive noddy round the fields if allowed.
the last time noddy was tax was 2008. He spent most of that time in a shed and the last 18 months. He has stood outside on our lawn.
One interesting fact to point out is that My son is now 19, !
2015
2015
2015
C149 TDX and C142 FTM
C149 TDX and C142 FTM
C149 TDX and C142 FTM
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2015
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2015
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2015
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C149 TDX and C142 FTM
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C149 TDX and C142 FTM
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C149 TDX and C142 FTM
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2 Comments
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Hi All, I am the ex owner of C142FTM seen in the photos with the owner of C149TDX, I am also his cousin! I bought my Sport about a year after him, however I didnt know he had one too till we both turned up at a family reunion in them!, shame I didnt keep mine, I wonder if it still exists somewhere!
Great to hear from you Graham and congratulations on the first post on the NSR. Posts like these are the reason we started the register and it is great hearing your story.
We believe C142 FTM to be a Vauxhall Press car but we have no further information to prove this and believe the car was taken off the road some time ago. If we hear any news regarding C142 FTM we will be in touch.