Chitty-Chitty Badenoch!
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It's Chitty-Chitty Badenoch!
Kingussie has seen some remarkable vehicles in its day, with annual processions of vintage cars, lorries and motorbikes, but Thursday (15) was a bit special, with the first visit of a big noise in motoring history.
The big noise came from the rhythmic back-firing of the handsome visitor’s “14.5 cylinder, straight six” engine.
After years of painstaking, loving reconstruction the car is the pride and joy of Essex farmer John Harrison.
“I’ve got many beauties in my collection, from Jags to Aston Martins and even a steam-driven lorry” he told the Strathy, “but they don’t compare with this.”
He patted the beautiful bonnet of his 1917 La France Roadster, which had been produced at Elmira in New York with the very latest 40-gallon tank and chain-driven rear wheels - all four of the car’s wheels crafted with lacquered wooden spokes and not looking a day over 97.
He was escorting his Scottish wife Catherine to her mother Christina MacDougall’s place in Nairn and couldn’t resist a lunch stop at Kingussie’s Duke of Gordon Hotel.
Over a hearty meal he confessed: “I’ve taken every bolt, nut and screw off the Roadster and rebuilt her totally. I’ve had her longer than I care to remember but I do know the actual work took just over four years.”
The arable farmer would not be drawn on how much his crop of vintage motors had set him back, and when we asked how many gallons the Roadster did to the mile he prodded his home-made brass dipstick into the tank and whispered: “Pass. I’m not saying because the wife’s too close!”
Yet Mrs Harrison, donning her special goggles, confessed that she loved her husband’s passion for the cars.
“I love this one too, even though it could do with a roof, or a windscreen. We’ve driven 500 miles so far and when it rains you don’t just get wet, you get really wet. And you really need these goggles, with all the flies which come at you!”
It was the first time the couple had travelled up in the exquisitely-restored La France and she was looking forward to seeing her mother’s reaction to it.
In Kingussie, certainly, it went like a bomb. Sounded like one, anyway!
