Ms SKYLARK AND HER BUICK

One day in 1979, Jette Elizabeth was sitting in her little flat in Copenhagen when she heard a car outside. Intrigued by the incomparable sound of a big rumbling V8, she looked out and spied someone parking a Buick Skylark. 'I loved that noise, and thought how nice it would be to hear that sound from my own car,' she says. 'I knew there and then that I just had to have my own V8. I was simply bitten by the bug and there was no going back.'

As a trainee laboratory assistant, however, Jette Elizabeth did not have that much money. In fact, she had very little money at all. Nevertheless, by the following year she had scraped together just about enough to get in the game, so she took the plunge and bought her first American car. It was, of course, a Buick Skylark, this one of 1964 vintage. However, buying it was one thing, but finding the money to pay for maintenance was another problem.

'My boyfriend at that time had a little garage where he worked on his cars, so I used to go along and watch him,' she