Bangernomics
John rescues a family friend… all the way back from Ireland
Cost-neutral motoring from the PC team, including a 106 from Ireland.
John Simister
My daughter Alona learned to drive in this 1999 Peugeot 106 1.1 Zest. I bought it for her, unseen, on ebay in 2004 for £2000. Alona calls it – him – François, and has never wanted another car during her 15-year ownership. It has seen her through university, flat moves, work, play. I have fixed things sometimes, worn brakes mainly, and it has been serviced properly. Then, last October, Alona and boyfriend Rob set off for a year in Canada. What would happen to the Peugeot?
Alona announced that they were going to drive it to Bandon, in Ireland’s south-west, where Rob comes from and leave the 106 with his parents, under cover, and fly to Nova Scotia from nearby Cork airport. Trouble is, I didn’t much like the idea of that brilliant little Peugeot being left in exile so, some eight months after the car had originally been parked up, my wife Deborah and I caught the Ryanair flight from Luton airport to Cork with the aim of having ourselves a little adventure.
The Peugeot’s inactive months had not been spent under cover, so large pine needles and other botanic detritus now populated every crevice, and a plant was growing in the base of the left-hand A-pillar. It seemed to be running fine, though, and the brakes hadn’t seized, even if the front discs did squeal a bit. Tyre pressures were still good, too.
With the bulk of the vegetable matter extracted, we left Bandon and headed a few miles down the road to Ballinascarthy. Why? Because that’s where Henry Ford’s family came from, and there’s a life-size sculpture of a Model T, in stainless steel, by the road to celebrate that fact. Deborah and I sat in it, imagining the world being put on wheels as encouraged by the adjacent plaque.
Later, we joined the N20 to Limerick, then drove north-west to Ennis for our first overnight stop. It’s a pretty and prosperous town, with great pubs and eateries, plus a fine statue of Daniel O’connell, a key figure in the Irish independence movement who campaigned, successfully, in the early 19th century for Irish catholics to be allowed to sit in the British parliament. The next morning, we headed north to The Burren, an extraordinary landscape of hills and barren, stratified rock, before looping past Galway and on through Connemara to the Renvyle peninsula, passing the memorial to Alcock and Brown, the first transatlantic aviators.
At Renvyle, in the Maol Reidh Hotel, we feasted on seafood and Smithwick’s beer, saw the sun set over the sea and readied ourselves for the next day’s run
to Enniskillen across the border to the north-east, in County Fermanagh. The first part of the route took us on a continuation of the N59 that had proved so wild the previous day, with a huge landscape dwarfing the plucky Peugeot as we snuck past the occasional tour bus and powered through the bends and valleys.
The Peugeot was running with its usual spirit, smooth and revvy with every one of its 60 horses fighting fit. Today’s ‘small’ cars aren’t really small at all, but this one genuinely is. My Fiat 500 Twinair is about the same length and quite a lot taller, but the 106 has significantly more space for both passengers and luggage. It’s a proper four-seater, as my daughter and three friends proved on a camping holiday as soon as A-levels ended. And it’s such an engagingly nippy car, light enough not to need power steering, always entertaining and, by today’s standards, remarkably low.
On the border
We crossed the border at Belcoo, where the Republic’s N16 becomes Northern Ireland’s A4. Apart from a sign reminding us that the speed limit was now in mph rather than km/h there was nothing to mark the border. But that nothing is everything to Ireland in 2019. Back in 1979, when I first visited Ireland, there would have been a checkpoint, a watchtower and soldiers here. The change since the Good Friday Agreement has been extraordinary, with hundreds of little backroads re-opened and a sense of Ireland as an entity with North and South interdependent.
We stayed the night in Enniskillen, headed briefly south the next day to cross beautiful Lough Erne over a bridge the same colour as the Peugeot, then rejoined the A4 further east towards Belfast. At Dungannon it morphed into the M1, which took us right up to the city centre with the Titanic exhibition looming over the docks. Out the other side along the north coast of County Down, past the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum where there’s a small celebration of Northern Ireland’s tractor magnate and four-wheel drive protagonist Harry Ferguson, soon we arrived at Helen’s Bay to stay
with old friends. Two days later we were on the way south to Dublin, and on down to Rosslare harbour and our ferry crossing on the Stena Nordiga. A couple of calm hours later we were in Fishguard; the 106 was safely back on the British mainland.
The Peugeot has long suffered from a fuel gauge unable to show more than two-thirds, meaning it can’t be trusted, so we were filling up more often than really necessary and sometimes adding embarrassingly little fuel. It seems that mpg in the high 40s is another of the 106’s useful attributes.
That was especially pleasing when, on the Welsh side travelling from Fishguard towards the M4, we filled up at the roundabout before the motorway’s start point with the most expensive petrol I have ever bought. We’re used to overpriced fuel at motorway service areas, but this wasn’t even on the motorway. It’s a scandal, frankly, but at least the Peugeot, once again, swallowed little.
Once home in Herts, I could ready the 106 for that imminent MOT. First, all three wipers; we could hardly see a thing in the Irish rain, so shot were the blades. Next, the passenger door mirror, which had long lost its adjustability. A new one was just £14 on ebay – a pattern part, but it’s fine.
Cleaning detail
A thorough clean, outside, inside and under the bonnet, made the Peugeot presentable again, but there had long been some bubbles of rust in the seam between the left rear inner wing and the boot floor, caused ironically by mud accumulation behind the wheelarch liner. It looked worse than I remembered, and worse again once I had poked, prodded and made a long, thin hole about eight inches long. It was within a foot of some rear suspension mounts, so I expected a fail when I took the 106 to my local old-car-friendly garage, Lingard Motors in Berkhamsted, for the MOT.
I was right. It needed two new front tyres, too, the old ones having worn to excess on their inner edges for reasons as yet unknown. Mechanic Tom did a neat welded repair to the rust, which I will spray in Shannon Green in the boot when I get a chance, and with two Uniroyal Rain Experts the Pug was fit for another year.
The whole episode has cost much more than the car is worth, but that’s hardly the point. We all love it, and who’s to say that another bought for, say, £500 wouldn’t need a whole lot of things doing to it that this one does not? Alona and Rob, briefly back from Canada, were delighted, and a great little car lives on.