Going back to the future of the DeLorean

Our motoring writer David Clayton finds the years slipping away as he goes in search of a ‘time travelling’ car.

- David Clayton

WHEN I STARTED writing about classic cars it was the early 1980s, so inevitably my subject matter was 42-year-old vehicles and the motoring memories from that time. There was plenty of nostalgic mileage in the cars I remember seeing on the roads when I was a lad.

However, I had to re-set myself when searching for a DeLorean to write about. What am I doing, I kept asking myself? Then I did the maths. The car saw the light of day in the early 1980s, so the fabled ‘Back to the Future’ time machine is 40 years old now, and we’re 40 years on from when I started my trips down motoring’s memory lane, for goodness sake!

I put out a few feelers around these parts for what was, after all, a shortlived, controversial phenomenon of our motoring past. I found a DeLorean owner on the Norfolk/ Suffolk border, near Harleston, with an unusual tale to tell about his love for the car. But more of that later.

The futuristic vehicle was the brainchild of John DeLorean, who’d been a high-flying executive for General Motors in America. He had the reputation for being an innovative thinker and having broken away from GM, came up with his own concept of a mid-engine futuristic sports car to challenge the European Porsches and Ferraris.