Operation Reckless Purchase

1969 Lincoln Continental

Buying a 1969 Lincoln Continental at auction isn’t something to do on a whim, although Ed and Neil Gazzard did and now don’t regret it a bit…

- Mike Renaut

Ed Gazzard and his brother, Neil, now happily share this1969 Lincoln Continental, but originally they hadn’t really planned on buying it. “I’d been looking for a Cadillac from 1969 or ’70,” remembers Ed, “but when I saw this Lincoln advertised I just thought ‘that’s brilliant’. It was at a Brightwells’ auction in Hereford and scheduled to sell with no reserve one Wednesday lunchtime. I told Neil that we’d kick ourselves if we didn’t bid and then it sold for next to nothing, so I travelled up. It’d looked better in the photos. I didn’t even know if it ran properly and the catalogue description said it needed recommissioning. I didn’t fancy tackling it alone, so Neil and I decided to share the car.”

“We fell for it because of those suicide doors, to be honest,” admits Neil. “We won it on our last bid – we wouldn’t have gone any higher for it.” It wasn’t a total leap of faith since Neil had previously owned some American cars. “I had a 1978 Monte Carlo that I paid £400 for and then an ex-United States Air Force Dodge D200 truck – that was a monster, nothing in the way of brakes, but good for pulling trees down…” Ed had owned a 1990 Cadillac Brougham: “It had the 5.7-litre LT1 engine, with 190bhp. It was very usable and did motorway speeds easily. It was sold because the Champagne colour started to turn pink…”