Cortina Lotus, SMP505F, Kington, Herefordshire HR5 c23/01/16

They were the first words that sprang to my mind. This thread is getting a little too active at the moment. Hope this one gets found.

my god this is nuts the amount of cars going missing

Crikey 6 in 7 weeks Thats grim

Lets not speculate eh , it does not matter either way , someone has lost there hard earned pride and joy .


I really really think practical classics should do some sort of feature on classic theft , it beyond ridiculous now and we only hear about a small part of it i guess .

Yeah I know, it's just hard to believe that there's even the slightest chance it could be "one of the 6".

IIRC PC did do a feature of sorts when their Granada Ghia got pinched years back.
So much publicity was raised the car became to hot to handle and it was eventually recovered.
It wasn't stolen to race either........................

I wonder if people are using the banger rally as a bit of a cover. A car like this would be identifiable surely if it was taken for something like that.
I reckon this car has been known about and people will be concentrating on banger racers while this car is off to be ringed.

I think its beyond pointing fingers now, look at the issetta bubble car, the citroen van, theres a whole variety of cars going missing, wether they are being ringed or stripped of parts, or both, or neither, its now about protecting everyone elses classics, which probably means literaly chaining them to the ground. Garages and security fences just arnt good enough.

The Granada - which was damn near perfect in every way - did get raced, but a couple of years later. I was in it the night it got pinched, and we were being followed to the restaurant I was sure and I wanted to pull the rotor arm out, but the consensus was I was being paranoid.

To be fair, lots of racers called us up to tell us who had it and where it was, and it wasn't their fault the police didn't have any interest in recovering it and arresting people. A policeman once told me to my face that cars are generally insured and if they are not they should be and the theft of them is not something they'll waste their time on.

I found it particularly frustrating as I had spent a long time convincing my editor to let me run a feature on historic stock car racing and a build up of a Pop all from bits people were throwing away, and to generally change PC's coverage of racing. Stealing his car kind of put an end to that and I sold off all the bits...

I did suggest PC gave away a set of letter and number punches and encouraged everyone to mark their cars in a secret place so that they could be identified if raced, but that would again rely on it moving slightly higher up the list of police priorities.