About the same time that my wife became pregnant with our daughter, I suddenly came to the grim realisation that we owned too many cars. We were renting a house in the inner west of Sydney and the neighbours were starting to complain about the number of parking spaces we were occupying.
She was driving a 1989 Alfa 164; I had a '72 Spider. Then there was also the old Alfetta GTV I had recently bought with club racing visions in my head. The Alfetta was a wreck. Not smashed, but rusted and with a totally worn drivetrain. It ran, but wouldn't go far under its own power. The 164 was in pretty good condition, so we decided to keep it for the time being. That meant that I had to choose between the Spider and the GTV.
I was facing the classic situation of "in comes the baby, out goes the sports car". Frankly, I couldn't believe it. Sure, there are numerous ads in the Saturday papers from sweat-beaded fathers who have fallen into the same situation, but I just figured I'd be smarter and be able to weasel out of it. The Spider was an integral part of how I defined myself; it attracted attention and admiring glances, puffed out my ego, told the world I was affluent and stylish. I couldn't let all that disappear and be just another shopping mall-crawling Dad in a Simpsons T-shirt and a sensible sedan.
I swallowed my ego, one hand on my wife's bulging belly and the other on my pounding head. The Spider had to go. A Spider is a great little car - if a little old fashioned to drive - but the best thing is that it's hard to lose money on them. Unlike every other car I've bought, Spiders hold their value very well. I sold it to a mechanic who fixed its problems and quickly resold it at a vast profit. I didn't care; I just needed the cash. I didn't even turn around to take another look at it as I walked away.
With the Spider gone, I was still left with a transport problem: my wife needed a car, but so did I. There was no alternative - the GTV, crumbling in the garage, had to be transformed into useable transport in six months. Fine - except to make the car useable there was about 12 months worth of weekend work that needed to be done! I didn't have the money to pay someone to do it, but I had a workshop manual. At this stage a more sensible soul would have got rid of the GTV and bought a Corolla...
There's an entire book waiting to be written about how much work I put into that car to get it registerable. I soon found that it was in an appalling state, from poorly wired electricals to completely unserviceable brakes. Both the front and back windows had to come out to fix rust problems, and the engine needed to be lifted to replace all the engine mounts. I scoured the trading post for wrecked Alfas, attempting to find four unrusted headlights, pristine body panels, unmangled wiring - you get the picture. When the GTV was finished, it didn't look much better than when I started, but at least it drove OK. The engine was a little smoky but the timing chain adjusted without problems so I let it alone. But as with any maintenance job - as opposed to a restoration - it was difficult to extract any satisfaction from the work.
I missed the Spider and the weird wiggling and kicking in my wife's belly was starting to feel like an actual baby, one that I wasn't sure we were even capable of looking after. When you look at them, all of those baby books are very similar to workshop manuals. A workshop manual procedure always sounds easy on the pages, but it never describes the bodily contortions or impossible-to-remove fasteners that inevitably accompany any mechanical work. It's one thing to know in theory that babies just need to be dry, fed and burped and they will be happy. But the books don't mention that sometimes the little darlings need to cry for hours in the middle of the night for no discernible reason. I can't remember a time in my life when my fingernails were shorter (or greasier for that matter).
Thankfully, a happy ending was just around the corner. An Alfa Spider doesn't giggle, or learn to crawl by itself. They don't smile, give you a kiss or are happy to see you.
The Alfetta, switched from racing fantasy to the harsh reality of daily commuter, only broke down once in two years (dud coil, I should have changed it but I was too stingy). It's now my favourite car, albeit a little slow. An Alfetta is a better car to drive than a Spider, even if it doesn't look like it. The ego deflation - though painful at the time - has re-ignited an appreciation for how cars work and how they drive, rather than how they look...
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