British Comedy Guide

The demise of the tribute vehicle

I was thinking a bit about Margaret Thatcher, since she died. During the reign of Thatcher in the 80's, but perhaps it really took of much earlier, it was quite common to make tribute vehicles, there were quite a few A Team vans, the Bedford CF was best for this. Another popular one was the Starsky and Hutch Gran Torino, red with a white stripe! Unfortunately we didn't have big american V8s so the most popular car for the conversion was, I think, please correct me if you know better, the Vauxhall HB Viva.

If you wanted to prove to your friends, and casual observers alike, that you had very little between your ears, you would repaint your car to look a bit like the TV car, cover the dash etc with fur, jack up the rear springs and fit a larger set of wheels on the back. Having carried out this crime against good taste, it would of course be very difficult to find a young lady, daft enough, or perhaps kind enough, to accompany you on evenings out. This meant that if you were lucky enough to get the girl, you would need to repay her for her kindness by adding to her shame by sticking a sun visor with both of your names, crookedly to the top of the windscreen.

The idea of fitting a larger set of rear wheels to a Vauxhall Viva is somewhat bizarre, and it is difficult to figure out the motivation for such a despicable act. The suspension and steering of a car is carefully designed by the manufacturer to ensure safe handling, one of the most important aspects of this is "caster" or "king pin" angle. Put simply, when you turn the steering from the straight ahead position the front of the car will be marginally raised, too much and the steering is heavy, too little and the car is unstable at speed. Raising the rear and fitting larger wheels reduces the caster angle, making the steering over light and the car unstable at speed, fortunately the practice of fitting a tiny steering wheel (essential at the time) may have mitigated the effect slightly.
Anyway what's happend to these tribute vehicles and has Britain lost something, some of it's colour and character perhaps with their passing?

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