FOR MY NEXT TRICK…
CM: I am interested in knowing how somebody ends up owning a car as exotic as the DeLorean, so perhaps you could start by filling in a little of your automotive background?
Gez Medinger: Sure. I've always been into cars, and when I was six or seven years old I memorised the top speed of every car listed in the back of Autocar magazine. So this was my party trick as a small boy in the mid-1980s, to quote from memory something like: 'Ford Orion 1.6i Ghia – 113mph.'
CM: You must have been wicked at Top Trumps?
Gez: Yeah, I memorised all of those too! So I always had this passion around cars, but my first one was nothing exotic, just a humble Volvo 360 GLS. That was my mother's old car. My brother had the 1.4 version which he put into a ditch pretty quickly, but I managed to keep mine the right way up. After that I had a Cavalier 1.8 auto, another car I inherited from a family member. It wasn't very exciting…
CM: I love these cars myself, but a Volvo 360 followed by an automatic Cavalier – I can't imagine they were massive pullers down the pub on a Saturday night.
Gez: No, absolutely not. They were really good at what they were designed to do though, which was scuttling up and down motorways. I ran the Volvo into the ground and it was eventually scrapped, but the Cavalier lasted until my dad crashed it. To be fair, the brakes on it were rubbish, and he got caught out when the traffic in front started to concertina up. Anyway, because he crashed it, I managed to wangle a couple of grand out of him.
“The financial crash of 2008 meant prices of everything were depressed, making it a relatively sensible time to buy a classic car”
I got a four-year old Peugeot 306 XT next. This would have been some time around 2000, so I would have been 21 at the time. I could just about afford to insure the Peugeot,
