Turns out he was onto something longterm as well, as the current enthusiasm for Imps on the scene demonstrates.
One time he went too far up a banked verge on a single-track country lane after a lorry unexpectedly appeared, and he rolled it onto its roof… and he just climbed out, pushed it back onto its wheels and drove off again. You could park it in a supermarket trolley bay and climb out of the opening rear window. It had a hole in the exhaust so it sounded like a race car, and you could run it for a week on a fiver’s worth of four-star. A bog-standard 1975 model, it was rusty and a bit smelly and an obvious target for ridicule… except that, as it turned out, he had the coolest ride in the school car park. No, Pete bought a Hillman Imp, and was widely mocked for it. Your reporter had just turned seventeen and bought a Vauxhall Nova all my friends either had Novas, Peugeot 205s, Ford Fiestas or Renault 5s – mid-eighties hatchbacks were what everyone drove. It’s about the 1990s, the time of New Labour, the Britpop wars, fluorescent shell-suits, and Baddiel & Skinner erroneously suggesting that football was coming home. Gather round, little ones, and let me tell you a tale.
It doesn’t take much to make an Imp look cool, but the owner of this one has chucked everything at it anyway… and made it cooler than any Imp we could have dreamt up.