I’ve recently bought another old car, and I’m really enjoying travelling a path I recognise from my youth. This car’s not really for me, of course – it’s part of a parental scheme to save young minds from computer games, girls and strong drink, as well as make that introduction to the glories of skinned knuckles, oily black anti-social hands, and hours of waiting for the AA to arrive. I am quietly confident the scheme won’t work, and I’ll get to play with the car (a Bugatti Brescia). At least for a while…

For many years I thought my father one of the most selfless men when it came to supporting his son’s motoring dreams. I remember the day he went off with my mum to tow home a 1927 Austin Seven. I was unable to assist since I was still on L-plates. In what would now be called ‘quality time’ we set about the inevitable overhaul of the brakes. New cams, springs, liners, rivets and cables – result negligible.

I say ‘we’ rather loosely. My dad, I now realise, was actually rather happier when I passed my test and could borrow the Austin 1100, so that he could get on without interruption and ensure the job was done properly. It’s hard to retain affection for that favourite son as an assistant mechanic when said son still believes in the benefits of Araldite as a means of securing an exhaust manifold stud, rather than using a tap and die.

Actually I made a number of mechanical faux pas around that time. It may be why this particular car seems to have disappeared without trace. It’s probably in some form of a mechanical witness protection programme, shuddering at the thought of falling into my hands again.

There was the awkward moment when I assembled the rear axle the wrong way around, and engineered three reverse gears and one (rather low) forward one. Then the prop shaft fell off on the A3 – well, how was I to know that there was a reason for all those fancy drilled bolts with split pins through them? And the odd overheating problem when frost blew out the very clever plug that had been designed specifically to help people like me who had forgotten to add anti-freeze when the temperature dropped. As the engine warmed, the entire coolant dribbled neatly away. Not easy to find another plug on a Saturday morning, and very hard to construct a substitute, even with the help of epoxy resins...

Now of course I have a set of Snap-On toolboxes that are only marginally smaller than a nice bungalow, or one of those vending vans that loiter outside garages like drug dealers outside the school gates. It’s a shame my mechanical expertise hasn’t grown with the accumulation of kit. I do seem able to dismantle increasingly elaborate cars; it’s just the reassembly that still foxes me.

I usually examine the editor’s list of subjects for the magazine and find myself unable to think of anything to comment on, but this month is positively bursting with stuff. I’m a great fan of the work of Russell Brockbank, not only for the humour, but also for the fact that he could draw a vintage Bentley or a Type 35 Bugatti better than anyone else I’ve ever come across.

It was some years before I realised that he was responsible for a number of the great drawings in Speed magazine. The superior element of the mag was the ads at the back – for less than £4500 you could have had not just one nice Bugatti, but 16 of the damned things, half of which were Grand Prix cars. Read and weep.

And information that Martin Birrane has commissioned a book on Lola is great news. Although anyone interested in motor racing will know the marque well, it’s not so familiar to the general public. Despite Lola now being one of the UK’s most successful current car makers, there are probably more replicas of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the road.

My own experience of Lola includes a 212 (lovely) and a couple of T70 IIIBs (alarming, but among the best-looking race cars ever), and I still have a T297 that Martin and I raced at Le Mans in 1980. I suppose it’s a genuine case of ‘he liked the cars so much he bought the company’.

This particular car started life as some much earlier model, and ran in innumerable long-distance races, first with Guy Edwards and then Dorset Racing. Somewhere in the late ’70s it came up against a regulation that insisted that cars be of recent manufacture. Entrant and manufacturer neatly solved this problem by means of a new chassis plate with a new designation and a new date. The car then went on to compete in another two Le Mans 24-hour races, with class podiums in both years, and the index of performance in 1979. Now that’s what I call customer service.