There are only two vehicles that I remember with great fondness: The Second Can (the first one was too flawed for my ultimate automotive accolade) and my Fiat X1/9. If there was one car that seemed to have been designed and built just for me, it was the Fiat. It wasn't just me that it appealed to, either. Two good friends would temporarily exchange cars with me when I needed more than two seats, and they enjoyed the Fiat so much that they sold their Volvo and bought a two-seater. Sadly, they fell to the lure of The Dark Side, which became significant later.
When I found that The Can had to go home, I already knew what would fill its place. A combination of tax breaks, a temporary distortion in exchange rates and the use of hard (foreign) currency made some cars remarkably cheap, under certain circumstances. There were a few cars that seemed attractive but, given that I planned on keeping The Can, the obvious choice of a Spanish-built Land Rover with a camper conversion didn't make sense. How about an AlfaSud Sprint? Seemed good, except for a couple of niggling problems: The back seat didn't fold down (What were they thinking?) which made a nonsense of the hatchback, and it was built by Alfa Romeo -- even worse, it was built in a factory in Southern Italy that was having problems bolting cars together well enough to get out of the door even by Alfa Romeo's generous standards of quality control. How about a Lancia Monte Carlo, then? A bit too expensive, and a bit too complicated.
And so I bought a new, red Fiat X1/9 1500cc -- the only new car I've ever bought. When I went to the dealer it was sitting alongside another one, priced US$100 higher, that had odd-looking side marker lights. "How about that one?", I asked. It was a North American specification version. More lights, and a little slower because of the emission equipment. No air conditioning. "Well," I thought (Foreshadowing: I was about to make a mistake!) "What possible reason could there be to pay more for one that's almost as good?" I took delivery of the Italian specification car two weeks later (bureaucracy was, perhaps still is, an art form in Spain, and two weeks to register a new car was a little under the average) and couldn't have been happier with my new little red Italian sports car.
Let me tell you about it: The X1/9 is a small car, but not particularly light because it was built to meet American safety standards that were never implemented because most manufacturers said they were too difficult to meet, although I suspect that "difficult" here is actually an unusual spelling of "expensive". The passenger cabin is small. At about 5ft 10in I had the driver's seat fully back, it's just wide enough and there isn't a lot of spare headroom with the top on. There is very little spare space anywhere in the cabin except for a little stowage room behind the seats. The engine is between the passenger compartment and the rear wheels ,with a full-width hinged cover above it that looks Really Cool.
A surprise is that there is actually quite a reasonable amount of room for Stuff in the two trunks. Neither of them is particularly large, but between them I found I could carry enough for a two-week ski vacation for two people with ease. Take the cabin top off, though, and the X1/9 really shines: First of all, the top is tough hard plastic -- no leaks, dents, tears, noise, ballooning or other aspects of soft tops. Secondly, you're protected from the elements by the fixed rear window and the side windows. And in my experience, it is easier to take the top off and stow it under the front hood than it is to fold and stow a soft top (and much faster and easier to close it up again). So, for me, the X1/9 had all the advantages of both hard and soft tops without the disadvantages.
I found the car extremely comfortable. Everything is to hand and (perhaps surprisingly for an Italian car) the controls were all both accessible and logically placed. The only weirdness that I remember is that the tachometer moved counter-clockwise, but even that made some sense because it put the region that is of most interest into the most obvious position. Oh, and the horn button fell off. Constantly. I eventually glued it on permanently.
I found myself making lots of weekend trips in this car simply because it was so nice to travel in. Which finally brought me in touch with the low end of the Spanish roadside hotel industry ("Where's the switch for the light in my room?" "There isn't one." "How do I switch the light on, then?" "No, I mean there's no light!". Mostly unused through the week (I went to work by bus or bicycle), the X1/9 was a pleasure to drive on weekends.
Agile? Oh, yes! This was a car at home on the mountain roads of Spain. Come into a rising curve, open the throttle and the rear wheels settled in to push round as if it were on rails. Delightful. And this is the only car I've ever driven that actually needed a tach: Normally they're just for show, but this engine came on song and felt quite happy to keep pushing past the red line.
Have you noticed something that I haven't said? I haven't said that it was fast. Because it wasn't. Oh, sure, it could (and did) cruise at well over 100 mph on the Autopista/Autobahn/Autoroute/Motorway without serious effort, but that wasn't really what it was best at. I don't think that it was ever intended to be fast, how could it be with just a 1500cc engine and plenty of weight?
Given the reputation that Italian cars have for melting in the rain, I decided to try and give the X1/9 some protection from rust. So in England I bought a couple of gallons of a substance called Waxoyl which is (surprise!) a sort of waxy oil. Or perhaps an oily wax -- I'm not sure. Either way, it's an incredibly tenacious substance that is said to cling for years to any surface that it's applied to (it's what they use on North Sea oil rigs). It even smells good (like silicone polish). A gallon of that stuff distributed around the underbody would surely keep the Rust Monster away.
So out I went to the abandoned drive-in movie theater next to my apartment with the Waxoyl, a sprayer and a bundle of old newspapers.
The drive-in was an interesting place, in itself. It had opened soon after the the death of Francisco Franco (the most successful of the fascist dictators from the 1930s, he controlled Spain from 1939 until his death in November of 1975) but was a little ahead of the social climate. Although eagerly-awaited and wildly popular, the drive-in had only been open for two days when the conservative Roman Catholic establishment grasped all the implications of being able to watch a movie from the privacy of your own car and they had it closed down post-haste.
Anyway, under the car I went, dragging the tube from my sprayer, and soon had the underbody coated. Next job was to get Waxoyl into the box sections. Some of them had little rubber access plugs in the access holes. If they had what looked like drain plugs then they were likely to receive water, so I gave them an extra-thorough spraying. Then I found an unusually-shaped one. The odd thing was that this box section felt huge inside. I kept feeding in the spray tube and pumping away until this thing had a whole bunch of Waxoyl in it. "Just a moment, what am I under?" I began to feel uneasy about this and worked out where I was under the car. "Okay... That's the engine, so this is behind it... and behind the engine is...". Oops! It couldn't be that... Could it? Oh, no! I crawled out from under the car and opened the rear trunk. A wave of pleasantly silicone-scented air rose to greet me. %$#@! I'd just thoroughly Waxolyled the inside of the rear trunk, along with the contents.
You'd find it difficult to believe how hard it is to remove Waxoyl. Wipe it: It moves aside and you can almost hear the GLOP! as the surface repairs itself. This stuff is GREAT!. Almost impossible to move it around, let alone remove it. At least, it's great if it's in the right place. It took months to get all visible traces of that stuff from the inside of the trunk, and the scent remained until the final goodbye. At least the inside of the trunk wasn't going to rust.
One weekend I made a journey to a small village in the mountains of North West Spain with a companion whose father had been born there, and who was related to a large proportion of the villagers. It felt like an Italian movie: The gleaming red sports car burbling up the narrow, rutted dirt road and parking in the cobbled village square, the only other vehicle there was an ancient farm tractor. The one sign of life was a cat lurking in a shadow. Silence. The church bell chimed. More silence. The sound of the car doors closing echoed off the stones of the surrounding buildings. Slowly, in a window, a face looks out. Recognition? A woman slowly walks out of a door and looks our way. Recognition! A call of greeting, and suddenly people are pouring out of all the houses, all hugging and talking at once.
I think that it was the same weekend when I stayed at the old Hospital in Santiago de Compostela. Pilgrims have been coming here since the Cathedral, next to the Hospital, was built about 1,000 years ago. They come from all over the world, many on foot from the farthest corners of Europe), but although I had come from the End of the World (Finisterre) it was by car. The Hospital is nothing to do with being sick, it was built to extend hospitality to pilgrims, and is now a very nice hotel. I drove up to the Guardia Civil on duty at the at the entrance to the square, and was waved through to the hotel. Entering the Cathedral, next door, it was clear that people really do come here from many places: Each of the many confessionals has a faded sign over the door telling you which languages the father confessor in it can use. Even in those days when the Iron Curtain still divided Europe I saw every language that I could think of from West of the Urals, and some from further East.
I felt much at home in Spain, and was saddened when I was told one Thursday that my job was complete and I was expected in Minneapolis MN the next Tuesday to begin a class. It was a long drive back through a rain-soaked France to England, where the Fiat spent a summer resting.
Things changed radically that summer, and by the time I returned, I knew that I would be returning to the USA to live. The only problem was that the Fiat couldn't go. Remember the two Red X1/9s at the dealer in Madrid? Now I knew what the reason could be to pay more for one almost as good -- to meet North American specifications. The cost of conversion was prohibitive.
This was where thing started to get strange. The two friends who had loaned me their Volvo when I needed more than two seats in Madrid had fallen in love with the Fiat, but had fallen victim to The Dark Side,. They had found a Special Deal on a North American specification two-seater, but it wasn't a Fiat X1/9... It was a Triumph TR7. Hard to believe, but true. To be fair, it was probably one of the very best TR7s in existence, from the last year of production before British Leyland's implosion. The exterior looked tastefully nice (unlike the TR7 that I destroyed in Holland) and even the interior was acceptable by 1970s standards (a fairly restrained plaid). It had a soft top, with a detachable hard top. (Detachable, that is, if you had a couple of strong friends handy and space to store it in the garage.) My friends diffidently suggested that I might like to consider exchanging cars, and taking their USA-legal TR7 with me.
It was a sad day when we met in London, just a few days before I was to leave for the USA, and I said goodbye to my X1/9. There were tears in my eyes as I drove away in the TR7, and even all these years later I remember my last glimpse of that lovely little Fiat's paintwork glistening in the rain.