I thought it had been sounding a bit throaty lately. Mid-overtake it happened. ROARRR chink… chink… Oh bugger! That’s what too much use of the loud pedal does to an old car, or the very, very deafeningly LOUD pedal as it had now become. Turned out my MG had spat its new exhaust centre section clean out of the downpipe. I managed to tie it to the gear selector rod with an old bit of wire I had stashed in the boot for just such an occasion leaving only the first four gears selectable for the last couple of miles home, so no real harm has been done.

I must admit I’d taken pity on the Maestro having not driven it since its fleeting visit to North Yorkshire in August. The tax is up soon and by mid-October opportunities to take classics out in the dry are few and far between, so that’s it now. It can stay in the garage until I’ve put aside yet more money for fixing broken BL cars. It has to be said though, D428 has excelled itself this summer. It’s almost the car it should always have been.

There's only one car that these could be destined for...

I’ve got a new set of wheels, but the rest of the car is in Gloucestershire. Allow me to explain. A while ago I struck up an agreement with a friend whereby he’d loan me his Jaguar XJR for a few months, and all I had to do was stump up the cost of sorting it out with a clean MOT. Since I’d always fancied a supercharged XJ on our driveway I could hardly refuse. I’d been watching a tidy sapphire ‘M’ reg on on ebay for a while and it seems there are few more affordable ways of installing 322bhp beneath your right foot these days, but I’d rather keep the money for my holiday this year.

So that’s how I ended up outside an industrial unit near Dagenham on Sunday evening, meeting a man in a van with some wheels. For reasons I haven’t yet grasped, the car’s sitting on a set of Sovereign alloys at the moment and we wanted to restore a bit of originality. Unfortunately good 17 inch XJ-Sport alloys are getting ever more scarce, but it looks like my £195 on ebay has bought me a perfectly usable set. All the tyres are Pirelli P-Zeros with a good 4-5mm tread and no obvious damage, so we might even get away without having to approach any banks over funding for replacements for a while at least.

Now we just need to get them united with the car, then it’s play time.

Fortunately an independent MG Rover specialist in Warwickshire has a more affordable alternative, and I can honestly say I’ve just spent a very enjoyable morning watching my car being serviced. We’re not talking back-street mechanics either, but people who have many years of main dealer experience with Rover cars, international customers and a month-long waiting list, even though they don’t advertise.

Almost before you’ve turned the engine off the car is up in the air and to the casual observer the whole procedure is a bit like watching a Formula 1 pit crew in action – they’ll carry out up to four belt changes in a weekend so it’s all very well rehersed and in my case completed in under three hours. There’s no distant service manager on the phone either. You see everything for yourself as it happens, and to be honest the team at Lates 600 made it all look rather easy. I have to admire anyone who knows their way around a car so well that they can half-empty an engine bay in less time than it would have taken me to remove one of the road wheels.

It seems we’ve found the reason behind the slight lack of power I’ve been experiencing too. Testing showed my power ‘VIS’ motor has failed – more on that in a future instalment. Front tyres and a replacement thermostat are also on the shopping list. I suppose the money’s not much use in the bank at the moment.

It’s a funny business, searching for a new car. Especially if you’re not quite sure what it is you’re looking for. When my father’s 2001 Focus developed a suspension noise that signalled a possible… wait for it… garage bill, it was instantly clear that it had to go. As far as he’s concerned, once a car even hints that it might require any expenditure beyond the annual service, fuel, tax and insurance it becomes a major financial liability.

The dilemma was what to replace it with. It couldn’t be another Focus. Too boring. How about a Volvo C30 or Audi A3? Not impressed, not enough rear vision. The new Scirocco looked like a contender for a while, but not at that price. Then we went through the Golf ‘Blue Motion’ phase, but thankfully Volkswagen’s overpriced eco-car quickly fell out of favour because of its odd gearing. Nothing French would do either.

So in the end we bought a Saab 9-3. Obviously. It’s a 2008 facelift Vector Sport, so essentially Aero trim sans bodykit, wheels and brakes. First impressions (from the passenger seat, so far!) are good. The 150bhp 1.9TiD power unit packs quite a punch and with oodles of lower to mid-range torque available to assist in making respectable progress the car’s no slouch. The lowered sports chassis seemed to be playing its part on Hampshire’s B-roads this afternoon too, poise and stability easily a world apart from the old GM 900 I’m running at the moment. It’s actually quite comfortable too.

As we collected the car from Newbury another thing I was able to reflect on was how painless the whole experience of buying a nearly-new car seems to be these days, especially with the market in its present state. Once you know roughly what you want, it’s just a case of getting on the internet and playing the dealers off against each other until you find the best package – many will discount more heavily than you’d expect. All the Saab agents we dealt with were unfailingly helpful and professional, with none of the kind of arrogance I’ve experienced when dealing with certain MG Rover franchises in times past. In our case a £10k saving on a car under a year old wasn’t a bad result, all things considered. It seems you really can’t lose right now.

I thought a nice way to round off an unusually dry weekend would be to take the Maestro out for a quick run on some of the quiet, unclassified roads near my home while there was still about an hour of useful light to play with. The test route I normally use takes about 35 minutes and it’s a good mixture of tight, narrow corners and fast, straight sections of national speed limit. It’s slightly challenging in an older car you don’t drive every day but often rewarding all the same. Despite not having been out for several weeks the car took it all in its stride, but not without reminding me it really needs a steering & suspension overhaul at the first opportunity. The front end clunks and groans are getting quite unnerving.

While I was at the side of the road taking the picture above an oncoming Alfa 33 stopped dead, turned around and pulled in behind. It turned out the driver was an ex-Maestro 1.3 owner, taking his Alfa out for a quick run after completing some work. We spent about five minutes chatting about the ins and outs of both cars before going our separate ways.

This kind of exchange is becoming more the routine now, whether I’m stopped at a filling station or just trying to buy a tax disc at the post office counter. It usually begins with “I haven’t seen one of those for years!” and continues with fond reminiscences of a past Maestro experience.

A couple of years ago nobody turned a blind eye. Maestro drivers were public enemy number one. If you dared venture onto the roads in one it seemed to spark aggression in even the most passive of drivers. Admitting to owning one was akin to admitting a drug habit.

Has anyone else noticed this change lately? To me it’s one of the little things that sets a classic apart from a banger.

Trouble is, instead of the Maestro I’m now driving a modern Rover crammed with every possible extravagance. It’s so refined it’s actually pretty boring to be brutally honest. When I get into the MG I want to be transported back in time… with a bang! So I’ve started to remove one or two of the non-standard additions beginning with the later grey centre console that was very prone to cracking in favour of the car’s original smaller item. Almost famously it used to have the digital instrumentation and trip computer from an early MG Maestro, great for novelty value but I never did quite get it working accurately. There were mixed reactions when I replaced it with the standard dials and I’m still in two minds over whether or not it belongs in this car.

It’s quite a novelty having to wind windows down on warm days (manually!) or adjust the seat position by pulling a bar upwards and making determined shuffling motions to persuade it in the right direction. As more and more toys become standard on even the most basic cars it’s little things like these that are already becoming a part of the whole retro experience. Not a sat nav unit in sight.

I’ll rule the Maestro out straightaway, it’s worth more to me than it’ll ever be to anyone else and I just couldn’t bear to part with it… ever. It’s a similar story with the ministerial Rover 800 Sterling. A decade old it’s hardly worth a fortune but it is a supremely comfortable machine that fits me like a tailor made suit. I’ve enjoyed my brief flirt with Allegro ownership to the point of wanting another but it’s moving on and the space on my driveway is now filled by a rather dull and indestructible Saab 900 I acquired on this year’s “Staples2Naples”. The sensible thing to do would be to use it as a winter hack but if the truth be told, I’m already pretty bored with it. Sadly the car’s worth less than the petrol in the tank.

So does anybody want a Triumph? You can’t imagine how much I don’t want to do this, the Spitfire’s a beautiful car and one I feel privileged to own. Unfortunately it’s far too good to take out in anything other than fine weather so it’s a static exhibit most of the year and that’s just a waste.

Here’s something worth thinking about, though. In one clumsy moment this evening I dropped a plastic seat belt buckle from just a small height onto a ratchet resting on the floor of the car. It didn’t just crack, it virtually exploded. Bits of shattered plastic and springs all over the place – what a mess! Looking around the car there’s not only the trademark crack in the dashboard but minor cracks in other bits of plastic trim too. Clearly the plastic trim in Maestros (and there’s lots of it) can become extremely brittle with age. That’s not a problem while it’s easy to find replacements, but I can see it causing many of us headaches in the future!

This early return to the road has also given me the opportunity to have a few problems sorted out including the front tyre bald on its inner edge, caused as I suspected by tracking that was right off the scale. The journey to work in the mornings has certainly been different, too. An urgent growl replaces the Rover’s hum on the motorway, and you do need to think a little more carefully about what you’re doing. I want to be gentle but it’s hard not to be lured to exploit the car’s performance where the road allows – probably much to the surprise of many a rep-mobile.

Having just had my modern car returned I’m not missing the comedy central locking, frosty starts without a heater or having to turn the radio up loud to overcome the road noise. No, what I’m missing is the colossal £60 an hour charged by my local auto electrician. I’d be happy to bet that’s one expense those of you running an ’80s car every day are very unlikely to encounter!

It never rains but it pours. The Maestro’s annual visit to the MOT centre always falls perilously close to the BMC/BL weekend in Peterborough. In recent years this minor complication hasn’t really worried me in the way you might expect it to because the car seems to have a habit of going straight through. Except this year where in the course of 5300 miles since the last test, faulty tail lights and a front suspension top mount were marked for attention. My local garage is one of those that offer a free re-test within seven days and to avoid risking the car not being ready in time I decided to let them get on with the repairs, simple as they were, because the chances of me finding time to take a look at it myself in that period looked about as likely as an encounter with the ‘Magic Roundabout’ in Hemel Hempstead ending with a fully intact no claims bonus (try it if you don’t believe me!).

So there I was having collected the car, congratulating myself on having all this years MOT tests, road tax payments and insurance premiums safely out of the way when all of a sudden, a kerb stone sprung from out of nowhere and savaged £85 worth of Goodyear tyre. Some of the narrow, wooded back lanes out here are full of hidden dangers like this and as the picture shows, the tyre itself is well and truly beyond repair. Having moved the car to safety in a nearby side road to change the wheel, it occurred to me how useless the can of emergency tyre repair foam sometimes included with modern cars (read: Rover 75) in place of a spare wheel would be in a similar situation. Needless to say it’s off to the local tyre specialist tomorrow for a replacement Goodyear. It won’t be cheap but for motorway work, a part-worn spare of unknown age isn’t something I’m going to rely on. Have you checked yours recently?