EP43: The Capri That Got Away; Nissan is Dying Ozzy is Dead

In this episode Jon recalls his mixed emotions about Ozzy Osbourne and the glam rock scene of the 1980s, his nostalgic relationships with certain cars, including a specific Ford Capri he regretted not purchasing, and his early jobs selling aerial photographs door-to-door. He delves into his appreciation for bands like Black Sabbath and discusses heavy metal’s evolution. Shifting topics, he talks about the future of major car manufacturers, particularly expressing skepticism regarding Nissan’s survival amid increasing competition from Chinese car makers and the rise of electric vehicles. He contrasts Nissan’s approach with Toyota and Honda’s strategic moves, lamenting a potential loss in Japanese automotive creativity.

Notes

Jon Summers is the Motoring Historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider. On his show he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, motoring travel.

Capri 3.0 S image
Black Sabbath – Sweet Leaf
Reflections on Ozzy Osbourne’s Passing
Venom and the Invention of Black Metal
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath / Hawkwind – Levitation
The 90s novelty of the aerial photo
J’s Cortina Crusader
Bodie’s Capri 3.0 S
On door to door sales
The Bugatti Trust at the foot of Prescott Speed Hill Climb
Lemmy vs. Ozzy
Nissan is Dying. You saw it before with Austin-Rover
Mexico: no longer the Nissan stronghold it once was
Toyota vs Honda, like Chevy vs. Ford.
Nissan: the most collected Japanese marque
Skyline: something uniquely Japanese
S14 / Silvia
240Z
350Z
R31
R32
Kenmeri Skyline

Transcript

[00:00:00] John Summers is the motoring historian. He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept sports bike rider hailing from California. He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable. On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.

Well, sadly we can’t, can we ’cause of copyright, but obviously, well not obviously, ’cause you might be listening to this at any point in time, but Aussie recently died, the Prince of Darkness. The face of heavy metal. I can’t believe the number of people who’ve paid tribute to him. I want to pay tribute to him because the number of people who’ve paid tribute to him, because when I liked heavy metal in the [00:01:00] eighties, metal guys all thought he was a bit of a clown.

He’d like gone to LA and you know, was managed by that terrible woman, Sharon, and all right, bark at the moon was good and over the mountain was good, but didn’t have metal, didn’t have the crossover appeal here. That it did there just didn’t get played on the radio ’cause of the Freddy dirty B, b, C, so people didn’t like it.

So what a bag of shit that was basically. But that isn’t why I started talking about this, uh, podcast. This, that isn’t why, why I started recording this. No, sir. I recorded this because I wanted to lay down some ideas. This, uh, where my mind had had run on from, uh, from Ozzy. I never really got that into Sabbath.

Club nights, people will play paranoid, but I always found the early Sabbath stuff too slow. Remember, this was this period where I was enjoying Judas Priest and dio and getting into Metallica and Slayer. And [00:02:00] Slayer were the fastest and the most extreme thing that there was out there. Really. I mean, sure there was kind of then.

You know what I mean? They always were kind of what they are now. It was a bit like, are these guys real or are these guys Spinal Tap? They’re like midway in between, aren’t they? Venom? I love you Venom, and I get how you birthed Black Metal. That’s a whole separate story. Listeners, if you don’t know that one about how Black metal was born out of Venom’s black metal song.

Which was not really written very seriously and they were more like a punk band who couldn’t really play their instruments. And it’s ironic that these Swedish black metals who’ve developed the genre since have actually often been quite accomplished musicians. I don’t get black metal, so you won’t get any of that on, uh, with me.

But Sabbath, I first got into them when I had a cassette that had Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. On it and I listened to that cassette, which the other side was Haw Wind’s Levitation, which are both great albums and I love both [00:03:00] of them to this day. And I feel like both of them, I could just go backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards in that blue Cortina crusader that I had as a calf for, for my work that summer, I was selling aerial photographs.

Door to door in the Worcester countryside. Isn’t that so old fashioned? People thought it was a novelty to be able to look at their houses from a plane. And if you persuaded them convincingly enough, they part with money at the doorstep for a framed photo. The clothes involved stepping into the door and framing the photo in people’s, you know, living rooms or hallways.

On a Sunday afternoon or Monday afternoon or or whenever they were home. Really looking back, an interesting job in many ways. But in my Cortina, I listened to Sabbath a lot and I fell in love with Sabbath. So I was listening to Sabbath when in this particular incident took place, which was that my blue Ford Cortina.

We were living in Marvin at the time. When I was on my way to, to a location, I remember I was pulling [00:04:00] out of a T junction and I pulled right. Pulled out to the left, rather as I got into my carriageway and took second, the shifter just came off in my hand. Like literally it was like waving around in my hand.

I can’t remember whether the car was in first gear or in second gear, but by the way, luckily we were on a downhill, so I just dipped the clutch and rolled down the hill and rolled to a standstill as luck would have it at a gas station and garage using as the end of the story, but it’s not. The point of the story is what happened next, which was that the garage man offered to repair the car.

I had been perusing the yard, which is as so often with country garages had cars that had been hit on the road hanging out in them. Now one car that was parked towards the back was a red Ford Capri, three liter ST plater. If memory served, that would make it a [00:05:00] 78 or 79, but certainly. Right in that area.

Now it was red. Had it been black, probably this would’ve gone another way. Had it been white, probably this would’ve gone another way, but because it was red, when the Garage man said to me, do you wanna trade your Cortina on that Capri? I can’t remember what he said it needed, but he was like, you know that and some money, and you could walk outta here with the Capri and leave the Cortina with me.

The continue wasn’t a good car, by the way. I’ll insert a picture of it. It was a tired example, eh, when, when I shamefully I couldn’t part with it and my dad took it to an auction and uh, some gypsies paid 30 pounds. For it. So you can tell what kind of car it was. I mean, it was like the had before I had it, that was the one where it had the carburetor was held together with a carpentry screw.

So on the way home from purchasing it in Ponti front, it couldn’t climb a hill because it couldn’t open the second Venturi on the carburetor, as I’ve observed before. I don’t know why I didn’t just go to a scrap [00:06:00] yard and buy another carretta. I mean, it could have taken it off as easy as, but that really goes to show, I mean, I’m not a great mechanic now, but it really goes to show.

What an absolutely hopeless mechanic I was. So I turned the guy down and said, no, I will not take. That Capri three liter s with the wheels that I really like, and that S stripe down the side just like Bodhi silver car in the professionals. But red never did like red that much. I remember looking at the car and thinking to myself, I really want to do this.

But I’m gonna be too deeply in the hole financially because the job I was doing was a commission only sales job. So obviously I wasn’t gonna earn any money that day because the shift lever had come off in my hand ina, you know, you couldn’t spend that too many days where you weren’t selling anything and you couldn’t be desperate with the selling ’cause then you definitely weren’t gonna sell anything.

This is a complete aside. One day I went to a village, and in the village there [00:07:00] was a Bugatti museum. Little did I know it was Chelsea Walsh. Little did I know it was the Bugatti Society. However, the bloke who was in there got talking to me, and although they weren’t open, I went in so long before. The Pebble beach here long before I ever knew about anything other than, well, I dunno, whatever I was excited about when I was a whipper snapper of 21 Capri three liters and Subaru and Prezis, and it was before motorcycles, I should say at at that time.

But I remember at that time being blown away by the craftsmanship of the Bugatti Straight Ape. I remember leaving being like. I get it. Like I totally, I went away with my mind being blown, feeling like this was the best day at work ever, even though I’d not earned a penny, because I just probably tried to sell this bloke an aerial photograph of the bottom of Chelsea Wall Shore.

I can’t even remember which hill climb it is. [00:08:00] Yeah, so I didn’t take the Capri three liter SI bitterly regret not taking the Capri three liter s now at the, uh, age of 51. I recently saw one cross the auction block and it made me think of the car. It was not long after Ozzy himself had passed, and I was like, you know, I still wanna say right.

He, he was a showman, but it was really lemmy. That was the spirit of rock and roll. It was really lemmy. I think I’m gonna leave it there. Actually I’m not. ’cause that’s only 10 minutes, isn’t it? So I’m gonna pivot onto my second thought. I don’t think Nissan’s gonna make it. It’s hard to say. I really can’t see a world in which Nissan’s going to make it.

I think they are going to go the way that Austin Rover went. Either quickly or slowly, but I just can’t see a way of them surviving what’s [00:09:00] happening at the moment. Toyota have been very wise to spot this move to hybrid. Everyone else is scurrying back to making gas motors as fast as as they can so that they do.

At Christmas time, I did that pod where I talked about how I’d been to Mexico and how in Mexico City it was like invasion of the Chinese car makers and motorcycle makers. And the motorcycle makers seemed particularly well established and I didn’t really dig into them too much, you may recall. But the car makers I looked at closely enough to, to realize that there were four makers and each one of them had introduced a range of models.

And largely it was Nissan and Volkswagen’s lunch that was being eaten because Mexico used to be Nissan Centras left, right and center. All the taxi camps used to be, and they weren’t. I was, I was shocked at, uh, you know, so, so that made me think, gosh, Nissan, what your strategy gonna gonna be [00:10:00] going forward?

Just a, a word on that. Toyota are Japan’s largest. Car Baker Honda a second. So much as in the way that you see GM being more conservative than Ford. You know Ford Do the aluminum pickup truck Ford do the turbo V six pickup truck. The Ford truck offers. Better value. The Chevy is a more 5.3 small block goes on for hundreds of thousands of miles, or at least the old ones did.

So that’s the, the reputation. You know, these are, uh, the slightly different positioning between the two of them. And, and certainly in terms of driving dynamics, you know, Hondas traditionally were always a little bit sharper to drive than Toyotas, you know, uh, ACORD certainly of 20 years ago. A little bit better than Camry’s and civics were definitely better than Corollas and, and the reliability, you know, it was there or thereabouts, wasn’t it?

’cause certainly Honda made a great engine, but you know, the paint wasn’t all there. But I, I’m falling down a rat [00:11:00] hole of comparing those two makers. The point is, Nissan’s not in the conversation. That’s the the point here that once they were, and now they’re not. And it’s crazy because any collectible Japanese car event, you go to be my guest.

Tell me if I’m wrong. I reckon half the Japanese collectible cars are Nissans, not Toyotas, not Hondas, but Nissans. So that means that if they do go away, or if they become, you know, a badge engineered BYD or a sub-brand of Toyota or something like that, if that does happen, we’ve lost the best of the Japanese in terms of creativity.

So let’s stop and think about that where we are with that. Look, the skyline was the first time a Japanese car had. Done something that couldn’t be found as a [00:12:00] reference point in something that had existed in Europe or America before. So by that I, I mean that sure, the skyline looked at what the Porsche Turbo was doing and said, let’s be better than that.

But it was also different from that, wasn’t it? It was also had its own kind of swagger and, and that’s why they call them Godzilla. They’re right to, it meant that, you know, they came from Japan and dominated, I think, but to me it always felt like here was a expression of something purely Japanese. But with Nissan, it’s deeper than that, isn’t it?

It’s the S fourteens. The Sylvia’s. What you might have got is Nissan two hundreds in your market, or as one eighties. They came with different noses and tails on them and different engines and wheels and trims and all of that. But the point is. The S 14 platform, the Sylvia platform is the basis of more drift cars than, than any other.

[00:13:00] It’s, uh, truly it’s the escort mark two ad drift, isn’t it? Let’s frame it like that. There’s the Z cars as well, isn’t there? There’s the, the two 40 Z, which yes, you can say, you know, it’s a bit like a Jaguar type and a bit like a Ford Mustang, or, no, that was the Sika. That was like the Ford Mustang. But no, the point is that Japanese thing it, it brought the best of what Jaguar were doing to a package that was very affordable and reliable and reach people that couldn’t have otherwise accessed and enjoyed that kind of straight six grand touring car.

Mark Gamy, who’s not on the pod now bloody well, should be really more than a hundred thousand miles, 150,000 miles. And in Nissan three 50 Z still got the same clutch and he’s gamy so you’d know like, you know, he’s not been that gentle with it. There were a lot of motorway miles there, but there were also a couple of nerve berg ring.

Track days in there, a couple of other track days, you know, in uh, uh, circuits around England and the company. [00:14:00] Car Miles was through the winter, salt roads, original cloud, all original body panels. He did ding a wheel on it once when he span it. We talked about that on another pod. But yeah, there is a breadth and depth to what Nissan did.

The Z 31 300 zx, the Z 32, 300 zx, that twin Turbo one. I personally feel like of all Japanese collector cars, everyone knows the koska skyline. I like the Ken Mary one. I like them because I knew them from rallying when it was like the 180 SSS or something like that. That’s what they called them. I didn’t realize that they did.

Uh, skyline. Race version of it. I have an exquisite Japanese model of one that’s on goal. What an a base, which is like knockoff, American racing talk thrust, kind of, or what we would call min, like kind of not talk thrust, mini like kind [00:15:00] of wheels. I’ll include a photo of, of that car. Sincerely, hope I’m wrong.

But I feel like I’ve been here before and I feel like I wanted to hold up my hand and say, Nissan, the engine’s on fire and the plane is diving for the ground. And I, I can’t see you guys dealing with this Chinese ev invasion. These guys, they’re just gonna eat your lunch and, and I just don’t see anywhere for you guys to run.

Sorry. Thank you. Drive through.

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