Jeremy Taylor

My love affair with American cars and all things American started at a very early age and looking back at my earliest sketches they all look like drawings of 1959 Cadillacs with huge fins. To me it was more than just the cars, it was the whole lifestyle experience. Images of the Pacific Coast Highway, surfers, palm trees, Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, perfect weather, it all looked a lot better than a cold grey day here in the UK.

Then there were the movies: Bullitt, Vanishing Point, American Graffiti, to name just three, and when you combined these with the TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard, this all added to the American interest and got me hooked. The icing on the cake was their cars; for me it was always about the Sixties and Seventies, huge and chrome-laden Lincolns and Cadillacs, as well as the muscle cars of the era, like the Challengers, Mustangs and the Trans-Am. I made it my mission to own as many American cars as possible and over the last 35 years I’ve had quite a few.

1979 Pontiac Trans Am

My first American car was a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am with a manual transmission, bright red with a black interior - it looked fantastic. I bought the car from a couple who looked like they had just come off the set of a rock video. When I went to fetch it from Hull, I could not stop smiling. The car gave me my very first chance to work on an engine. Faced with a noisy hydraulic lifter and a possible huge repair bill, I armed myself with a Chiltons repair manual, a toolbox, and did the job myself. I vividly remember labelling and numbering all the emission pipes and hoses, because I knew that I’d have no idea where they would go back to later.

It was a great car but to be honest, at the time I thought it would have been much nicer as an automatic; the clutch was really heavy and the gear change a bit agricultural, but this gave it a proper muscle car feel and to this day this is the car I still have the fondest memories