SO, THIS HAPPENED

NO SOONER HAD THE VOLVO GONE A W124 BENZ APPEARED OUTSIDE THE MBC

At the risk of making Britney Spears look like an amateur; oops, I did it again.

Within – literally – hours of handing over my lovely Volvo 142 to its new owner, I’d shaken hands on this; a 1990 W124 Benz 260E. Not that there was anything major wrong with the Volvo (far from it) but a W124 Benz remains one of my favourite cars of all time. So while the Volvo was rare and gorgeous and had jaws dropping all over town, the Benz is worth a lot less, is vastly more common and doesn’t stop people in their tracks. But it’s also a car that I swore to myself I’d own one of these days. And, a few weeks ago, that day came.

Fellow UC contributor, Phil Lord, is really at fault here. While playing dream garage a few months ago, I’d let slip that should the right W124 fill my cross-hairs, I’d have a lot of trouble resisting the urge to adopt just one more. Sadly, Lord has a good memory so, when he saw this pop up on an online auction site, he dropped me a note to see whether I was as good as my word.

The compounding factor was that I’d only just completed a Variety Club Bash from Melbourne to Cairns the back way in another 260E owned by my rally-driving partner, Watto. And the way that three-decade-old W124 destroyed the miles between points A and B, day after day, convinced me that I’d been right about W124 all along.