‘There Was No Oil Pressure – The Engine Was Full Of Grit'

Tom Horner is only 25 but has already built a surprising collection. Mind you, his shed is bigger than most…

- Nigel Boothman

Tom Horner runs a family business that performs all manner of steel fabrication, engineering, blasting and boat building jobs. This seems to have had two effects on Tom: firstly, a hobby that’s been with him since childhood has been able to overflow now and then into the vast workshop, and secondly, it’s given him a unique sense of perspective: if you’re used to people welding up corroded oil rigs or 40-foot trawlers, fixing a rusty old car doesn’t seem so daunting. That’s not to say Tom has dragged home every old wreck that was offered to him. He’s able to show his reasoning behind every purchase, which makes it all the more surprising that his collection now includes a pre-war taxi, a 280bhp Audi Quattro and a Fordson diesel tractor re-engined with a 9-litre V8… among other things. How did that happen, then?

Ex-tractor fan

Tom has been car-mad all his life, although his first vehicle was an open-topped, off-road single-seater. Well, a tractor actually. He was 16 at the time, and the collecting gene started to express itself straight away.

‘I had six tractors at one point,’ he says. I used to do a lot of steam rallies, but of course you have to tow them to get them there and back. So I started looking at old cars…I’d been keen on newer cars and modern classics, but the first properly old thing I considered was an Austin 7.’

At this point Tom’s daily transport had been a series of recent, rather sporty offerings from the VW-Audi Group. Climbing out of a high-specification turbodiesel and into an Austin 7 made the baby Austin’s shortcomings rather obvious.