Finally, the weather improved over the last few weeks and I've been putting some miles under his belt. The speedo rolled over to 33,000 miles on a lovely spring drive out.
Planning ahead and aware that the annual Autoitalia event was fast approaching on May 4th at the historic Brooklands museum and race track, I checked Bart over carefully for the 80mile or so round trip, getting back from a test run I noted an odd random ticking sound coming from the distributor and at idle the revs would occasionally dip.
I took the distributor cap off and.....
Ah! we seem to be missing the centre bush!
Bits of it found in the distributor after removing it for inspection....
With just a few days to go it was touch and go if I could get a new cap delivered in time, luckily I located a local independent parts store who had two in stock! A quick run over to the store and I bought both, I couldn't refuse the £20 asking price for the pair!
New cap fitted Bart fired up and I headed to the petrol station to fill up....half way through I noticed a growing pool of petrol forming under the car, OMG! What now...I finished up and had a quick look underneath, nothing obvious so I took a slow drive back home. A quick bit of investigation revealed the rubber fuel filler hose from the neck to the tank had seen better days.
Yup, that'll be the problem. Too late to get a replacement and with only half a tank I took the risk that petrol wouldn't spill out and it would be OK for the trip to Brooklands.
Brooklands itself was a great day out, it was bitterly cold despite the outbreaks of sunshine. There where some amazing cars there, Ferraris, Lambos, Maseratis etc and of course tons of Fiats and Alfas. However, there wasn't enough old stuff for me and a touch too much modern bling for my liking so I may not go again.
With the weather rapidly changing and the ominous threat of rain we cut our visit short at lunch time and headed back. On the motorway we ran into a very heavy downpour which wouldn't have been too bad if the roof was still on! We took a risk and had decided to remove it for the trip back! In fact it wasn't too bad, as long as we kept moving forward very little rain entered the cabin, eventually though we decided to stop under a motorway junction and put it back on!