Rover engines that (don't quite) go bump in the night

FOLLOWING my poking fun at one BMW’s less than finest moment the other day, I breathed a sigh of relief at not having to deal with a rather more British breakdown before!

My Rover 214SEi might not be the most exciting bit of motoring ever made but it has a special place outside the Simister household because it does all the things the clapped out old sports cars don’t; it always does upwards of 30 to the gallon, it’s quiet, comfy and by and large lives a largely breakdown-free existence.

Considering it cost just £300 it’s definitely been one of my better buys, getting me everywhere from the Scottish borders to Bedfordshire, from the furthest reaches of Snowdonia to the church spires of York. In fact, just last week it managed to make it all the way to a campsite in the Norfolk Broads crammed with camping gear, and get back again. It’s a car that’s earned my respect by doing what it does brilliantly.

Aside from the well-publicised head gasket maladies long suffered by Rovers powered by the company’s K-Series engine, its biggest Achilles heel is that it struggles to start if you leave it standing for days on end in damp conditions. Given this week’s weather forecast and that it refused to play ball when I got back from my trip to Germany last year, I decided to play safe, leave it at my parents’ place and let them look after the old dog for a few days. A better bet than risking it, leaving it in downpours for days on end and then expecting it to miraculously burst into life.

Famous last words, and all that.

It was on the train heading back from Manchester Airport that I got the call. My dad, keen to make sure everything on the Rover was up and running, popped down to the local petrol station, popped a few quid’s worth of petrol in....and then discovered he couldn’t start it. Even the starter motor wouldn’t turn. Zilch. Nothing.

It’s hard enough dealing with a kaput car at the best of times, but when you’re over an hour away on the train and unable to do much to help it becomes that bit more stressful, and the mental images of a peeved-looking parent leaning under an open bonnet rain became too much to take. In desperation I rang Gaz, my long-suffering mate in the mechanic trade, to see if he could drive the five minutes up the road and take a look at the stranded Rover.

Which I’m glad he did. It turned out the reason why my old man, more familiar with cars from the Seventies and Eighties, couldn’t get the Rover going was because he couldn’t get its admittedly unfathomable immobiliser switched off. Naturally, as soon as it was the leather-lined Brit burst into life without so much as a cough. A close call!

I touched the (plastic) wood on the dashboard. My Rover’s back to its reliable old self!

BMW engines that go bump in the night

MIDNIGHT, just outside Cologne.

It's the later side of late and - having landed less than half an hour earlier at Cologne-Bonn Airport, all that's on my mind is reaching my destination as quickly as possible and catching up on some much-needed shut-eye. Luckily, I have the back seat of a BMW 5-Series Touring, a derestricted autobahn and a driver who knows how to make the best of both. The smooth, smart and devastatingly quick way to head for your German home from home.

Or rather it would have been had the Munich machine's temperature gauge not suddenly shot up and steam not started swirling out from beneath its bonnet, miles from anywhere. I don't know much German, but it doesn't take a master linguist to work out what the driver's instant analysis meant. "Auto kaput"...

As we stood in the darkness, perched on the hard shoulder of what basically is Germany's equivalent of the M1, I looked at the sorry-looking executive express and reflected on all the times my own motors had left me stranded in similar situations. The time the otherwise unremarkably reliable Rover, for instance, mysteriously cut out for no obvious reason at all. Or the one where my Mini decided to shed a wheel at 40mph. Or the one where my Mazda broke its propshaft - or rather, I sort of broke it.

In the end, it ended far more smoothly than any of us might have imagined - within half an hour the Beemer was on the back of a truck dispatched by ADAC, Germany's answer to the AA, and we were back on track, headed for our destination. What a destination it was!

The place chosen to mend the unhappy estate wasn't just any mechanic's workplace - it was an oldtimer garage, or classic car specialist in Petrolhead English. Even in the half light of the silly hours of the morning I could see it was packed with classics in near concours condition, with everything from Alfa Giulias and Giuliettas to Fiat 124 Spiders, homegrown favourites like the Volkswagen Beetle and a BMW 2002, and a right-hand-drive V12 E-Type with a curious mix of local German plates and dials still set to miles - rather than kilometres - an hour.

In the space of an hour I'd seen two very different extremes of German motoring, and finally made it to bed at about 2am shattered but surprisingly enlightened for the experience.

It just goes to show you not all of those clichés about German reliability are true...

The problem with Pub Satnav

THE problem with most breakdown recovery crews, as I've discovered whenever a car of mine conks out, is that they aren't real ale enthusiasts.

This isn't about advocating drinking and driving, which is a stupid idea, but more about confused people in RAC and AA call centres not understanding how my internal satnav works, which leads to all sorts of confusion whenever I'm trying to get someone to come and rescue me. I am, I hate to admit it, someone who navigates almost entirely by pubs.

I realised this the other day, when I had to whizz between various points in West Lancashire on a list of Champion errands. I wasn't going from Ormskirk to Birkdale at all. I was driving from the Five Ways, past the Saracen's Head, towards The Crown. Depressing, isn't it?

Yet I know loads of people, particularly the ones in the biking fraternity, who seem to navigate using just popular drinking spots, even if it's ones they never actually frequent themselves. It's something my Champion colleague Jim Sharpe touched on a couple of months ago, when he suggested entire areas, like Old Roan, become so synonymous with a pub that they actually end up borrowing their names, but I'm going further than that. I'm talking about an entire network of internal TomToms preprogrammed with the names and exact location of pubs.

Take Burscough. To get there, I turn left at the Morris Dancers, head past the Heaton's Bridge, left by the Beaufort Hotel, and then towards either The Slipway or The Ship. If, like me, you have Pub Satnav preinstalled then you'll know exactly which set of roads I mean. But give me the directions in road names and numbers and I'm lost. Literally.

It's a great system for all sorts of reasons - you're never short of somewhere to stop for lunch, for instance - right up until the point when you have to give directions to someone who isn't an expert at Pub Satnav. That's how I ended up on the phone to a breakdown call centre in the middle of nowhere last month, struggling to get them to the B6261. That's where the Shap Wells Hotel is, but they didn't understand.

Do you suffer from Pub Satnav? I'd love to know, if you send in your thoughts to the usual Champion address at 166 Lord Street in Southport.

Which is just around the corner from The Guesthouse, incidentally.