Somehow crooked!
12/30/2025
The Rover 2000TC has a crooked radio and the sticker of the modern battery manufacturer in the engine compartment. The fact that this Rover exists at all - find one, even in the UK the original version of the P6 is no longer to be found on every corner - was reason enough for us to portray the car. What a pleasure to drive the first "European Car of the Year" from 1964 and to share this joy in the form of an article!
I don't care about crooked radios and old stickers on cars if the owner has a good soul and the car has character, is rare and generally stands out from the crowd as a British car. But does a crooked radio really significantly reduce the value of a "technical monument"? Until now, I thought that the Zollverein colliery, the Albula line of the Rhaetian Railway or the Suez Canal were technical monuments.
I see a Rover P6 as a cultural asset on wheels, with its entire cumulative history, right down to the fact that one of its owners, even the current one, has fitted it with a radio. Whether crooked or straight, he will have had his reasons for doing so.
I can remember the first - and last - time I went to a Citroën DS meeting. That was 30 years ago. As soon as I arrived, an expert marched in my direction. Instead of being pleased that a 25-year-old at the time was interested in a car that was almost as old, he criticized the fact that my 1973 DS 23IE Pallas came with chrome steel-edged front indicators and headlight surrounds. But the fine frames lacked the corresponding locks, the connectors that prevent the ends from standing up at some point. I assume these were fitted because of the brushes on the washing lines. With a swelling chest, my counterpart told me how my car was not original here and there and how he, the expert, had had his car restored for a lot of money.
A connecting piece conceals the joint in the frame around the headlight glass
I remember just as well that I had no desire whatsoever to look at his great car. I only mentioned that I had just changed an engine mount on my goddess myself, of course the one on the side where the torque is supported against the frame extension, somewhere under the exhaust manifold on the right. Then I mentioned that I had bought the chrome steel frames for the headlights as NOS for a lot of money, because I didn't like the gray plastic surrounds, they would become brittle in UV light and the chrome on the original indicators, which was vaporized from behind, would flake off after a few years. That's why I would have taken the latter made of chrome steel, as far as I knew at the time only installed at the very beginning of the model-maintained DS from 1967, as new parts from my authorized dealer - for free! "Take them with you, nobody else needs them anyway..."
And the little connectors, they look like little tears, as I thought at the time. A foreign body, I just didn't like them and deliberately left them out.
Of course, I am not immune to a certain rejection of the "machinations" and outrages of other classic car owners. As I've described here before, I find oriental carpets in cars terrible and whitewall tires on youngtimers are a joke. But the worst thing about any classic car meeting is people who trash other people's cars. That's why I - normally, but not here - just keep my mouth shut.
In serious cases, it always helps me to find some love for the offender, to recognize that his car still exists and drives at all, and to raise awareness that there could be a reason for everything. Oh, I forgot about that: My daughter's Studebaker has front GRP fenders and a tire size too small! What an outrage!
