ZIGGY'S NO BANGER!

Good friends Paul Herbert and Chris Harding bought this Mk2 Spitfire in 2014 to use on a Banger Rally. Six years on they’ve still got the Triumph, and it is running better than ever.

PAUL HERBERT: This all started because Chris had decided he wanted to do a banger rally, and he’d been badgering me about it for years.

CHRIS HARDING: I’m into motorbikes, and I’ve always fancied doing something like the Paris-Dakar, (but not the serious one!). Unfortunately, just when we reached an age where financially we could consider trips like that, they stopped holding it because of troubles in north Africa. I thought I’d missed my chance, but then European Banger Rallies started to become popular. The idea of these is generally that you buy a car for peanuts, drive it somewhere interesting and then chuck it in a skip. I saw a rally advertised that ended up in Monte Carlo and thought it sounded like fun. Initially we felt that if we were going to do it, we should look at something like a Jaguar XJS soft top and do it in style. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that while you could buy one within budget, the cost of parts and repairs could be astronomical. So Paul came up with the idea of a Spitfire – it was British, it was a classic and it had a chassis rather than a monocoque which hopefully meant it would not dissolve into a pile of rust en route, particularly given the price bracket in which we were hunting.

PH: Chris and I have known each other since we were teenagers as we grew up in the same area. My family had always owned Triumphs. I’m not entirely sure how we ended up deciding on a Spitfire because we did look at loads of stuff, but I was keen on it being a British.

CH: My bike background is almost 100% Triumph, but this interest didn’t necessarily transfer across to the cars and initially I wouldn’t have cared if we’d bought a Ford Capri, it really wasn’t an issue, I just wanted to do the event.