Nicely Sprightly

Andy Johnson has owned his Frogeye for 40 years. In that time it has been worked on extensively, but any changes have since had plenty of time to bed down so that today it is still sparkling, but with the kind of gentle patina that money can’t buy.

You see a lot of Sprites these days that have been restored, uprated, refurbished or whatever, but you don’t see many that look like they’ve aged slowly. I’ve had mine for 40 years and it has certainly been refurbished, but I like to think it doesn’t look new and sterile.

Mine is a 1960 car which I bought in 1977. At that point it had only had one previous owner, a Jeremy Patterson from Winchester. SJA is a Stockport County Borough Council registration, so quite how it ended up in Winchester I don’t know. Jeremy was an antiques dealer and must have looked after the Sprite reasonably well because 17 years was quite a long life for a cheap little sports car in those days. In that time he’d had the seats covered in leather, so now they have had at least 40 years to develop some patina.

I fell in love with Sprites because my sister and brother-in-law had a couple of Frogeyes. I did an apprenticeship as a tool maker at a diesel engine factory, Mirrlees Blackstone in Stamford, working on engines for trains that weighed about 17 tons. I finished my apprenticeship in 1975, and bought the Sprite two years later, just when I started travelling extensively in the UK and abroad for work. (Not in the Sprite though, as that was bought as a toy.)

Jeremy had given the Sprite a good quality respray so it looked very good cosmetically, but underneath the suspension was absolutely shot and it was in quite a poor way. I drove it home from Winchester on a dank October day, and it was not the pleasurable experience I had pictured. It was raining and the wipers were slow, the Frogeye had a heater but no demister (that was considered an optional extra by BMC!), the engine wasn’t ticking over properly... I made it back to Lincolnshire, put the Sprite in my garage and left it there for a few weeks.