For more than a decade, John and Hazel Craig watched their beloved Rover 216 GTi gradually decay before their very eyes.
They’d passed the car on to John’s son Darren, who rarely drove it after a few years, and parked it outside his home to stop other cars parking there.
“The car just deteriorated, getting worse and worse,” says John, 75. “It was in a very sorry state with flat tyres, peeling lacquer on the bodywork, cobwebs in the engine compartment, moss and mould round the windows, on the roof and bonnet, and splits in the seams of the seats.
“It broke my heart every time I saw it as I’d always kept it in tip top condition. In the end we had to say ‘no, enough is enough, it’s coming home’.”
So the car the couple bought in 1997 for £6,295 was finally towed back to their home in East Harling, near Thetford in Norfolk, in 2023 for some much-needed love and attention.
Now the 1993 Rover, powered by a twin-cam Honda engine, looks much as it did when John and Hazel first fell in love with it after spotting it for sale on a shopping trip in Thetford.
“I’m really pleased to have it back looking more like it did when I originally bought it 27 years ago,” says John. “It’s definitely a forever car. Darren is also pleased it’s back to normal – but he’s definitely not having it back…”
John left school at 15 to be a butcher’s boy in London, riding a trade bike with a basket on the front, before riding a series of motorbikes as a rocker in the ‘60s.
He passed his driving test at 17, and cut his motoring teeth on a Triumph Herald at 17, before a trio of Ford Cortinas, the last one a sporty, lime green 1600E with a black vinyl roof.
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Then came a Triumph Acclaim, followed by a 1986 Rover 216 Vitesse, the predecessor to the R8 Rover which he and Hazel bought from Ames of Thetford, with 38,500 miles on the clock.
That’s not many cars for a 75-year-old. “I do tend to keep things for a long time,” he laughs.
After trading in one Rover for another, the couple quickly fell for the two-tone red and grey GTi (pictured here soon after they bought it).
“Oh it was lovely,” says John. “It was so comfortable because the seats wrap around you. We really enjoyed it, and just fell in love with it.”
They named the 1993 car Duchess and John used it daily to commute to work.
The beginning of the end for the Rover came in 2003, when the couple bought a caravan for towing holidays to Cornwall and fortnightly weekends away with a caravan club in East Anglia.
“We had a tow bar fitted, and it was only a small caravan,” says John. “The Rover coped very well, it pulled OK, but the caravan to car weight ratio was not strictly within the legal limits.
“Then we bought a larger caravan in 2005, and the Rover was struggling a bit up hills, so we thought it best to get another car and bought a Vectra. That started it all off!”
John and Hazel ‘sold’ the Rover to Darren, but John smiles: “We’re still waiting for the money…”
Darren used the car for commuting between his home in Thetford and work in Bury St Edmunds for about six years before he was made redundant.
He initially couldn’t afford to run the Rover, and then didn’t need it after securing a job within walking distance of his home.
The Rover was last MOTd in April 2011 and, for the next 12 years, it served as nothing more than a parking deterrent for neighbours.
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“He said he didn’t want to move the car because outside his front door was a parking space, so he kept it there,” says John. “He had people trying to buy it off him, but he said no, because he didn’t want anybody else parking there. It was effectively a bollard!
“But we kept going past the house and seeing it outside, getting worse and worse, so in the end me and my neighbour Steve Smith went over and told him what we were going to do. He said ‘fair enough’.”
The plan was to restore the GTi, built as part of a long-standing collaboration between Rover and Honda, who made the almost identical Concerto. Both cars were built at Rover’s Longbridge factory, and both were based on the fourth generation Civic.
With the car back home in March 2023, John, Steve and Hazel pushed it into the garage, where the real fun and games began.
“The first thing I did was vacuum the cobwebs out of the interior and engine compartment, and then the restoration began in my garage – with no pit,” says John.
“We worked under jacks and axle stands, and many knuckles were skinned. At times the language was somewhat colourful, but we also had plenty of laughs.
“On one occasion we spent nearly an hour trying to get the rear fog lights working. We checked the bulbs and wiring and anything else we could think of without success. Then it suddenly dawned on me that they would only work with the dipped headlights on. I turned them on and hey presto, we had working fog lights.”
John had only ever repaired cars, not restored them, but Steve had a little more experience of buying and doing up old cars to sell on.
“I was either over there helping him do his cars, or he was over here helping me,” adds John. “It’s just a hobby for him – we’re not real mechanics, just DIY ones.”
Given how long the car had been sitting idle, now with 93,000 miles covered, it was mostly a question of cleaning up some items and replacing others.
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“The most challenging part was getting the petrol tank out to clean it out,” says John. “We had to take the whole tank out and disconnect everything lying on our backs. The other difficult thing was changing the cambelt – thank goodness for Haynes manuals.”
New parts included a fuel pump, fuel filter, oil and air filters, wipers, CV joint rubber boots, brake pads, ignition module, water pump, thermostat, rocker cover gasket, the battery and, of course, four new tyres.
Even a bout of ill health with prostate problems didn’t stop John getting his hands dirty.
“He was working under the car with a catheter,” says Hazel.
“Well I couldn’t sit about doing nothing – I had to do something,” adds John.
The inside of the car wasn’t too bad, just needing a deep clean, a new gear knob, and some stitching on the seats where the leather part had hardened and come adrift.
The same could not be said for the bodywork, with the lacquer flaking and discolouration of the grey plastic bumpers.
“It was in a right state, with the paintwork on the spoiler completely coming off,” says John, “but it only needed a little bit of welding on the sills, which was quite surprising.”
Having prepared the body for a coat of its original Flame Red and grey paint, John tried his hand at spraying the door frames.
“But it wasn’t very good, so I thought we’d get a professional to do it,” he adds, the car going off to Terry Hannant at TPH Motorsports in East Harling. “I’m so chuffed with the job he did.
“The only thing he couldn’t get right was the bumpers. He said whatever he put on there, it didn’t change colour. So I came back and thought about it and tried different things and, in the end, I tried black shoe polish, put it on and it came up lovely.”
John says the restoration cost a very precise £3,717.83, with just a couple of jobs to go when funds allow – a professional stitching job on the seats, and alloy wheel refurbishment.
The Rover was finally taxed again on July 1, 2024, with John spotting the ideal opportunity for a good test run at a local residents’ day at Snetterton race circuit (pictured).
“A group of 20 of us went round the track for three laps behind a pace car,” he says, “and it was nice to see how it went.
“When you’ve changed the cambelt and done a restoration like we did, you’re very hesitant at first, but once I took it round Snetterton I knew I could rely on it – I knew we’d done a good job.
“It will never be up to concours standard, but I’m more than happy with it.”
The couple joined the Norfolk and Norwich Rover Owners Club, which caters for cars up to 2005, and now intend to use it for shows and sunny days.
“Now we’ve got it back, we’re going to keep it and enjoy it,” says John. “It’ll live in the garage all the time until we go out.
“We took it to a show at Old Buckenham, and got quite a lot of comments. People came up to me and said ‘my dad used to have one of these’, or ‘I had one of them’, which was nice really.
“Theirs might not have been a GTi, it might have been a standard one, but it brought back memories to them.”
The Rover may have only been back on the road for a few weeks at the time of writing, but John reckons he’s already polished it four times.
He certainly knows how to treat a Duchess.
