What are the cars that you have owned and absolutely loved?

[Mike Harte]

I'll kick of with two complete opposites.

Firstly, a second-hand Triumph Stag Automatic, that was one of the last dozen to be produced by British Leyland, as they were then.

The other was my "company" car, a Toyota Crown Royal which the then importer managed to get for me, after he had let me have a drive of his. It wasn't anything much to look at, had the aerodynamics of a brick but it's 2.8 litre straight six was a beautiful engine, quiet as a mouse, and wonderfully smooth - it was demonstrated that you could stand up a 50 pence piece and it remain so on it's edge at tick-over. But there was plenty of grunt available, and cruising all day at 140 mph was no problem, and because of it's comfort, after a day's hard driving, one would get out feeling like you had just driven around the block.

It is believed that Rolls Royce actually purchased two Crowns so that they could reverse engineer the sophisticated air-conditioning that the car had, where you could have different systems running at the back and in the front.

Did over 250,000 miles in it over quite a few years, and the only mechanical issue in that time was caused by the petrol station where we purchased petrol allowed water to seep into their storage tank, and that made a bit of a mess with the engine which needed to be stripped, cleaned up and rebuilt, and completely destroyed the engine management computer system. Also, they had to remove the fuel tank, purge that of as much liquid as they could and allow it to be fully vented before they un-welded it to properly clean it out, and then re-welded it.

The petrol station then went bust, but with persistence I managed to get get the fuel supplier to pay the bill for the repairs and to get the car transported to the dealer, plus a hire car whilst it was off the road. And I had only had it for about a week at the time.

I would have carried on driving it, but the bodywork was beginning to go, and when it rained, water would drip down from the top of the driver's side of the windscreen.