Dawg’s Blawg

For over 20 years now I’ve enjoyed taking my cars to trackdays, the ideal opportunity to test the car and myself at or beyond the limits. Past activities have seen me pedalling assorted Alfa Romeos of many shapes, sizes and colours (only one of them was red!) which always proved that they take to the track like ducks to water. So when it comes to a trip to Donington or the Nurburgring, it’s the 75 Twinspark that gets dusted off every time. But there’s one event that’s a bit special. The Classic and Sportscar (now Retro Cars) Action Day at Castle Combe. This takes place every summer and allows you out for fixed 10-15 minute sessions for around £35 a go. And that’s the one I take the Fiat 125 to. 

Continental Drift-my favourite picture of the Fiat in action.

Unlike an Alfa, the Fiat isn’t really track bred. They had quite a competition history, a 125 won the first Rally of Cyprus back in 1970 beating all the Works Escorts and there’s an amusing story of a British rally driver whose twincam Escort died on the way to an event forcing him to stop off at his fathers Fiat Dealership and take the 125 demonstrator in an attempt to gather a few points for a finish. He won the event, by miles! In Australia and New Zealand, these things are held in the same regard as Lotus Cortinas are here and were circuit raced very successfully. When you think about it they’ve got it all going for them, disc brakes all round, twincam engine, double wishbone front suspension, all the stuff you’d find in a period Alfa Romeo. And we all know how good they are on the track don’t we?  

So what’s the Fiat like out there then? Good eh? In a word, no. The engine’s willing enough, in a straight drag race my 99bhp twin carbed “Abnormale” will happily keep up with Stig’s 1600 Alfa Spider (he’s got 104bhp) although his tops out at 112mph where the Fiat is all out at somewhere around 105 (100 for a stock 125). The engine is wonderful, blaring round to 7500 rpm every time and the gears are nice and close (1^st  is a bit low) so they’re pretty evenly matched in a straight line but I can pedal the Spider round Castle Combe three seconds a lap quicker than the Fiat will go. And do it lap after lap.

So where’s the time going? It’s got to be in the corners. First, you have to slow down. Those disc brakes may have been hefty in 1970 but Fiat later fitted the very same discs to the Uno which weighs around 7-800kg. A 125 weighs 1030kg (about the same as the Spider) so after a few laps the brakes are lightly toasted. Despite being a 1600 and having what we in the trade refer to as “small front brakes” the Alfa has generously sized discs at both ends and even in hard use they remain good all day. By the time we’re half way through a 15 minute session, the Fiat’s brakes have thrown in the towel and walked off in a huff. They’re powerful enough while they’re still there (three laps!) but even then the whole car nosedives into the tarmac in a way that the Alfa doesn’t making braking an “adventure”, shall we say.  

Assuming you have managed to slow the car you turn in and aim for the apex. And never quite hit it. Stig’s Spider will clip the cone every time and my 75 (chassis design dating from the early 70’s Alfetta remember) is even better. A lot of this is down to the suspension components. The Alfas have the lower wishbone attached by solid pivot bushes, the Fiat uses rubber. Big lumps of it. And boy can you feel it as the car squirms around. And they weren’t that good at designing geometry either, the front wheels adopt all sorts of weird and wonderful angles so there’s lots of understeer as well as bumpsteer (the tracking changes as the suspension compresses).

The steering itself is hopelessly low geared, sometimes requiring nearly a full turn of lock and an unscheduled trip across the grass to get the car out of the second chicane. It’s not light like an Alfa is either, on the road it’s heavy when parking and lightens up beautifully on the move but load it up in a corner and it’s like some sort of muscle building contraption. Eventually the car will lurch into a rather untidy looking slide as the rear axle downs tools joins in the General Strike. This is no surprise as it’s held in with leaf springs which lift the inside rear wheel and allow the precious horses to escape in a cloud of tyre smoke. Despite additional “reaction arms” which an Escort somehow does without the rear suspension has no place in a sports saloon.    

Damp track and an absolute limit of 1 minute 40 seconds a lap. Bah!

 But then that’s the whole thing isn’t it? The 125 never was a sports saloon. The term didn’t even exist in 1967 when it hit the shows. Look up Fiats publicity blurb from the time and the 125 was described as a “large family car”. And they didn’t mean “large compared to the 500” either, there’s more room inside than in my brother in law’s Vectra. The only reason that there’s a twincam in it is because Fiat wanted a decent amount of power and the old 1800 engine was past it. Any other manufacturer would have solved this problem by throwing a big iron two litre pushrod engine in but Fiat already had a 1438cc twincam in the 124 Sport and it seemed logical to put a longer crank in it and make it a 1600. And to my mind that’s a better way of getting 90-100bhp than fitting a bigger engine. So basically it’s just a family car with a racecar engine in it!  So anyway, next time you go to Castle Combe and see a very loud “Lada” flying over the top of Avon rise into Quarry Corner in a cloud of blue smoke, spare a thought for the driver. SPG had a guest drive at last year’s event and got out of the car looking like a damp cloth. He’s still laughing about it now though. The car apparently looks neat and composed on the track (I’ve never actually seen it from outside!) but inside, it’s complete mayhem, featuring smoke, flames, blood, sweat, flailing elbows, screaming rubber, yowling carbs, sudden expletives and no guarantee of a satisfactory result.  “Yaaarrgh!” SPG starts to regret taking up the offer of a “guest drive” as the lactic acid builds up in his shoulders.

Sorting through some old paperwork the other day while trying to find my tax forms, I tripped over the registration document for my trusty Fiat 125. This immediately made me think of how long I’ve owned the car. So I looked. “Acquired vehicle 1^st July 2005” was the answer to that one. Could’ve sworn it’s been longer than that! “Wonder how many miles I’ve done?” I thought. Nipped down to the garage and looked, 99,402 on the clock, hmmm, ran back into the house and turfed out the disc full of pictures I took when I got it and checked the mileage showing then. “90,538” said the odometer, meaning that I’ve done a paltry 8,864 miles in it. Now that’s a bit funny, it feels like much more than that too. In the case of the ownership, it has been, the car’s previous owner, the legendary Pete Sawyer had lost the registration document so I’d owned the car a good few months before I stumped up the £19 fee for a new one. As for the mileage, there’s an extra 2 miles to add for the journey on the end of a rope from Pete’s house to mine but that hardly counts does it? I think that the reason for the difference between perceived and actual time/mileage is because the whole four years of our partnership have been an absolute hoot with so many great memories. Here’s the story so far.

In February 2005, I sold my Alfa GT Junior to my pal Tim Haynes which left me with an Alfa 75 as a daily driver and an empty garage. At the time I was working for the AA as an insurance broker and as an antidote to the mind-numbing tedium, I enjoyed getting my hands dirty fixing up cars on the weekends. Obviously, an empty garage couldn’t remain that way for long as my lovely (and long suffering) partner Liz would eventually fill the space with gardening-related rubbish. I needed a car to fiddle with and fast! At that time, the aforementioned Pete Sawyer had a Fiat 125 on his drive that needed to go. It had been offered up on the Club Forum but there had been no takers so he was on the verge of weighing it in for scrap. I told him that I’d take it on and see what I could do with it, reasoning that if I couldn’t sort it out, I could always scrap it myself.  As delivered, the car had several faults. Firstly, the owner of the car before Pete had unfortunately died while it was in the middle of having new sills welded on. The garage had stopped work with the new sills loosely tacked into place. They’d also just fitted a 5-speed gearbox but not done much about the resulting hole in the transmission tunnel where the gearlever had moved. The engine had run (briefly) but had gone very sick and oil was pouring through the breather pipe into the airbox in a slightly alarming fashion. Firing the car up also alerted me to the fact that most of the exhaust system was missing. There was a rather nasty thump in the left hand rear wing which, although it had missed the door, hadn’t done much for the wheelarch and the bottom half of the car was painted in thick underseal with white paint on top which gave the impression that a crocodile was hiding under it. To top it off, the brakes were made of sponge and pressing the pedal did little to retard the car (or for the state of my underpants) on that two mile rope-job. Oh, and Pete had lost the carpet. There were two good points, it was free and it was a Fiat 125. Cool. 

Back at home, with Liz’s sceptical comments ringing in my ears I got to work. New plugs had the engine running but it soon went back onto two cylinders when the oil breather burped a fresh load of 20w/50 into the carburettor. Suspecting a holed piston or worse (how can it be worse!), I pulled the cylinder head off to discover a reasonably fit looking engine albeit one with rather worn looking piston rings. While the head was off I took it apart, cleaned all the valves, lapped them in and put it back together. The cause of the overflowing breather turned out to be a fuel leak from the pump which was filling the sump with petrol until it literally overflowed! A £12 pump from the local parts place sorted that one out. Refilled with new oil the engine ran beautifully but the neighbours then drew my attention to the lack of exhaust. Pete’s parts pile yielded a 132 exhaust which just about fitted. 

The brakes got new fluid which bought the pedal back to life and a bit of welding around the transmission tunnel and sills sorted out the other issues. I was at this point that I applied for the registration document. The car still looked like a dog but did successfully pass its MOT with no real problems so I knew it was worth keeping and decided to tackle the bodywork. The rear wheelarch got filled and painted and all that underseal was laboriously scraped off and the underlying paint was stripped back to bare metal, primed and painted. Obviously you don’t just go to Halfords and buy rattle cans of Fiat Bianco paint but Honda Polar White turned out to be close enough to get the car good enough to use. A set of Fiat 132 GLS magnesium alloys made it look a bit more sporty and I started driving it to work. A few problems arose with the Marelli distributor but eventually I traced the resulting breakdowns to a dud set of (new!) points. By this time I was working out my notice at the AA having been made redundant after 20 years of loyal service so didn’t mind too much about turning up late for work! 

Job hunting also left me with a bit of time on my hands and the chance discovery of a pair of Dellorto carburettors in the loft had me dismantling the top end of the engine again. An Ebay spree netted a twin carburettor manifold and within a few hours I had a very loud car with lots of flat spots. Fiddling with jet sizes reduced these to the point where the car was again driveable and I managed to trade a few days work for Simon Gunney who needed a Mercedes 190SL stripped to bare metal for a few days free work on the Fiat. During this weekend we sorted out all the minor bodywork faults and resprayed the entire car in Opel white paint.

By the time the car was shiny and the chrome was back on it the Classic and Sportscar Action Day was imminent and I had a hankering to hit the track in something old (as opposed to my Alfa). The 125 got an Ebay exhaust (£20 inc. postage) and went to a local rolling road where the flat spots were eliminated and the engine tweaked up to 99bhp (a whole 9 more than standard!). As part of the test, the car was run up to 7500 rpm, the howl of those carburettors in an enclosed space will live with me forever. No wonder people look around when I overtake them! A repaint on the wheels and a new set of 185/70 tyres saw the car ready for action. 

The car made its full “Club” debut at that C&SC Action Day in 2006, standing proudly alongside Simon Ryle’s 131 Abarth and Tom’s 124 Sport making a nice “set” of twincam models. It drew lots of admiring glances and comments between trips out on the track and since then it’s been along every year, astonishing onlookers and confounding Triumph Stag owners out on the track with its pace. That aside, it’s been to the AROC Cotswolds summer run three times, the Goodwood Revival meeting and served as a backup transport for work recently when the Alfa needed new brakes. It dealt with the 90 mile daily round trip easily even if it was a little noisy and thirsty. It’s had routine maintenance, the oil filter’s the same as the one on an Alfa twincam which is handy, we sell those in work and this means I’ve been able to fit an oil cooler too. Working for an Alfa race car parts company is useful!

I’ve fitted new brake discs all round, it shares these with the Fiat Uno/Panda so they’re only six quid each and another trip to Ebay got me a set of new shock absorbers for both ends at £15 a pair.  Driving the old beast is a real laugh. The engine’s strong, the gearbox is snicky, clutch and brake pedal are nice and light and keeping up with modern traffic is no problem. Steering and brakes are fine on the road (less so on the track!) while the ride quality is good. There’s bags of room inside, the boot’s huge and visibility is so much better than modern cars with those slim pillars. The only downsides are the risible fuel economy (20 mpg-you’ll get only 25 out of a standard car) and noise levels, aerodynamics and window seals have improved immeasurably in the last 40 years.  

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really suit my current needs, I can’t take it to work regularly as it would bankrupt me so it only goes out when the weather’s nice on weekends. So that’s hardly ever then. But I’m keeping it anyway. I love it too much.