Sven the Terrible

[dragonflyjewels]

When Al went to work abroad in 2001, I bought Snazzy, my 2litre 480 ES for my daily commute as I needed something reliable. I wasn’t fond of our Golf GTi due to very hard suspension and uncomfortable seats so that got sold. As an ex-pat, Al was only allowed back into the UK for 9 weeks a year, so he got three 3 week leaves. I used to drive down to Heathrow to collect him in Snazzy and he drove us home. Like me, he fell in love with the comfy seats, excellent road manners and very willing engine so by 2008 he’d decided that when he retired he wanted a 2 litre as well. After a bit of research he found information on the 480GT, which he (wrongly) assumed would be more sprightly still and decided he wanted a Racing Green one.
Two years ticked by, with all the advertised GTs in Flame Red – it had been the most popular colour in 1994. Eventually in 2010 a green one popped up on ebay. Looked fairly good in the photos, full mot, located in Waltham on Thames, just down the road from Sunbury where I’d lived for a few years. According to the ad it had full service history, but it was up for auction for just 3 days with a £480 start. I couldn’t get down to see it before the auction ended, but decided to bid a modest amount anyway. I took the view that it could need a good £1000 spent on it and I was willing to pay up to £1500 for a good one. So, I put my measly £500 bid on and no-one else bid for it, leaving me £20 change.
I needed my youngest son to run me down to pick it up, and he wasn’t available for a week. The seller wanted payment straight away, so it was a done deal by the time I saw the car. It was in a pub carpark, where it transpired it had been left when the seller left for his gap year in Australia so I found myself being met by his girlfriend who knew nothing about cars. She handed me the ‘service history’ which turned out to be a wodge of MoT certificates – nice to have but not a bill to be seen and no service book. She clearly didn’t even know what a cambelt was, never mind when it was last changed. Bodywork wasn’t too bad, just a few bits of rust starting at the bottoms of all four wheel arches, usual scuffs on the bumpers plus a minor scrape down one side, and black pinstripes overpainted green on both bumpers. Both rear clusters were cracked with chipped edges, ditto the centre lock panel. Interesting rare optional extra - screws on the sides of the rear bumper. Rusty seat runners and wet, rust stained carpet together with mould on the back seat (left folded down) indicated the usual leaks had probably just been ignored. Not exactly a well cared for car.











note the rare optional extra screws on the back bumper

[dragonflyjewels]

We had lunch in the pub, then checked oil and water before setting off for a petrol station and then home. Nothing worked well, the brakes were sticky and pathetic, gear shift was graunchy and snagging and acceleration was poor (at least it matched the brakes). Handling wasn’t great even after adjusting the tyre pressures but the tyres looked good so suspension was suspect. Clearly a student’s first car. I was very glad I hadn’t paid much for it. Finally arrived home after a painfully slow journey (50 mph felt wildly reckless) and put it away in the garage. Al didn’t retire until 2012, so for 2 years it sat waiting and got used as a cupboard for 480 spares bought from ebay. These included much needed rear clusters which were still occasionally available at what seemed at the time a high price but now would be a bargain. A cover for the rear wiper motor, decent front springs, a battery clamp and rear no plate light fitting plus a stainless steel exhaust came from a breaker, and eventually a rear roller cover for the boot and a drinks-tray armrest. Lots of unobtanium these days.
In 2012, the first stop was our pedantic garage man for a full service, cambelt, fluids and everything else he could find that needed attention, plus of course mot – almost £1000 – I was not too surprised ! A thorough check over had revealed that there was very little left of the rear bumper bar – just a few bits of lace curtain. Luckily the MoT didn’t pick it up. Next was the bodyshop to have all the bits and bobs done and that was another £600 so way over budget. Not realising the 480s were built in Holland, Al called the GT Sven – sorry dc, Racing Green is just NOT a girly colour to us. Anyway Al ended up with what he wanted. At least he thought he had until he drove it. Much to his disappointment it was nowhere near as lively as Snazzy so he decided it needed a de-coke it wasn’t going to get and he started regular Redex treatments. Over the years Sven gradually improved as the rubbish got blasted out the exhaust so Al is much happier with performance now. He still grumbles about being one gear behind me, but as we now know, Snazzy has the earlier red dipstick engine so it’s a different camshaft as well as different pistons and crankshaft. Hardly surprising the performance is not the same. Snazzy takes off much more smartly and overtakes effortlessly in almost any gear, but Sven has the edge at the top of the power band. Not that we’ve ever raced one another of course.

Looking much better here, still needs that pesky drl bulb holder sorted out

[dragonflyjewels]

In 2013 we decided to go to the club meeting organised by our president, Daniel who is Dutch and started the club. It was in Gaasterland in the north of the Netherlands, a beautiful holiday area close to the sea with lots of rivers and smart yacht marinas. Driving in convoy was great – the Dutch are very proud of the 480 so we attracted a lot of attention. Getting there was a nightmare – we made the mistake of going round Antwerp’s ring road in the rush hour (or rather rush 3-4 hours). We lost 2 hours there, and a further hour at the scene of an accident on a country road with no possible diversions so we ended up arriving 3 hours late at our guesthouse. We’d planned to arrive around 6 and booked a meal for 7. By 9 o’clock the kitchen was closed so we ended up with snacks from a petrol station. Well worth it though, the weather was lovely, we met some great people and enjoyed the whole weekend.



The following year the meeting was in Eifel, in Germany. Daniel chose a different country each year so that as many members as possible had the chance to go. We took both of our 2 litres to this one, and again, we stayed at a tiny B&B near the hostel where most members were. After we’d parked and gone to our room, I went back to get something from the car and found



At breakfast the next day, we met the two Englishmen who’d come in the 1800. One of them explained that he’d had 480s and was a member of the club but he’d always fancied an 1800. It was immaculate and we were quite envious, but he hated it! Too slow, heavy steering, poor road holding, no good at all for such a long journey. He was thinking of selling it and getting another 480 but I don’t know if he ever did. Another English couple were at the meet in a white Celebration, but I’ve not seen or heard from them since. Their car’s MoT ran out in January 20 so may yet be renewed although fairly extensive rust appeared on the last advisories.



1 Celebration, 1 Collection, Sven and Snazzy

Also at the Eifel meet was another Daniel, this time from Germany. He came in his lime green drift car – a right hand drive 480 with full body kit. Apparently lhd cars are not so good for drifting. I was amused to see he wore a pair of lime green trainers that exactly matched the car.

[MisterH]

Looks like a real adventure you've had there, I take it Sven was well behaved on the adventures? Certainly looks very smart

[dragonflyjewels]

Looks like a real adventure you've had there, I take it Sven was well behaved on the adventures? Certainly looks very smart

Sven has been very good indeed - he has yet to have to be trailered anywhere. Our pedantic garage man may drive us nuts sometimes, but we really appreciate the excellent work he does for us.

[NillerGT]

Thank you Sylvia for the nice and entertaining read!

[dragonflyjewels]

Thank you Sylvia for the nice and entertaining read!

We are only up to 2014 so 6 more years to come

[dragonflyjewels]

In early 2015 our president Daniel posted that he was going on sabbatical so he would not be organising meets but welcomed the idea of members organising them and using the forum to advertise them. German Daniel (with the lime green drift car) posted that he was going to organise a meet on the German/Belgian border, but it wouldn’t be until June 2016. We signed up to go and took Al’s turbo to a youth hostel deep in a forest. It wasn’t until we got there that we realised he’d taken so long to organise it partly because 2016 was the 30th anniversary of the 480 launch, and partly because he’d gone to a huge amount of trouble to make it very special. We were presented with a special clock for our car – he’d done 50 of them



We were also given a little numbered edition model of a 480. Food was all laid on, together with a chilled Bitburger trailer with a selection of beers, soft drinks and water for everyone to help themselves. The biggest surprise was sitting at a table surrounded by club members looking at loads of 480 books/drawings/advertisements etc, none other than our cars’ designer John de Vries.



He speaks excellent English so Al and I spent quite a bit of time chatting to him over the course of the weekend. Whilst there, we were invited to the French 480 Club’s annual meet being held in Normandy in the September. It wasn’t far from a ferry port and John had told us he would be there so we decided to take both of our 2 litres. The club member who organised it, Olivier, was quite enchanted by the notion of not one but two English cars arriving by sea – he even offered to come and meet us at the port the night before so he could lead us to our hotel in a pretty seaside town called Etretat. On the Saturday morning he had arranged special permission for us to line our cars up on the promenade and leave them on display whilst we had lunch nearby. Sven caused a great stir as the whacky GT interior wasn’t used in any of the continental cars. We had crowds of enthusiastic club members around Sven taking photos as word spread of the rare interior. Snazzy’s asymmetric Yokohamas came under close scrutiny as well so once I’d confirmed the road holding was even better than her previous Bridgestones quite a few Frenchmen were taking photos of the tread pattern and details. John kindly signed both our glovebox lids and he and his wife posed for photos between our cars, so it was quite a photoshoot – great fun even if we were late for lunch. Thoughtfully, Olivier had set aside a table for the English speakers, so we found ourselves with Belgian and Dutch owners as well as John and Janny



The most surprising thing about this meet happened the same morning. Most members were staying at a hostel a few miles away from Etretat. They had set off in convoy, but one was late as he’d forgotten something and had to go back for it. As he approached the turning for Etretat, another 480 driver spotted him (‘haven’t seen another 480 in years’ scenario) and tagged along behind. Our member thought it was another member but it wasn’t! The stranger was local, so he knew the road into Etretat didn’t go anywhere else except back out the other side and onto the same main road, so he had visions of parking in the Etretat carpark and getting to chat to a fellow owner. He was totally blown away to find himself driving onto the forbidden promenade to join a row of some 30 480s, then meeting the designer and being invited to lunch with us all.

[jamescarruthers]

The most surprising thing about this meet happened the same morning. Most members were staying at a hostel a few miles away from Etretat. They had set off in convoy, but one was late as he’d forgotten something and had to go back for it. As he approached the turning for Etretat, another 480 driver spotted him (‘haven’t seen another 480 in years’ scenario) and tagged along behind. Our member thought it was another member but it wasn’t! The stranger was local, so he knew the road into Etretat didn’t go anywhere else except back out the other side and onto the same main road, so he had visions of parking in the Etretat carpark and getting to chat to a fellow owner. He was totally blown away to find himself driving onto the forbidden promenade to join a row of some 30 480s, then meeting the designer and being invited to lunch with us all.

I absolutely love this bit of the story!

[dragonflyjewels]

I absolutely love this bit of the story!

So did I when they told me what had happened !

[jifflemon]

although the bit of the story I want to know, is how much trouble he got into when he returned home!

"You REALLY expect me to believe that there was 30 of your stupid car in town and that the designer of it was there too? Come on, tell me what's her name and how long have been seeing her? Where's the number of that divorce lawyer......"

[dragonflyjewels]

[dragonflyjewels]

In 2017, I spotted a GT on ebay ‘for restoration’ at £250 Buy it Now – no MoT of course and very poor bodywork. It was in Birmingham, which is a fair trek from Norfolk but I wanted Vesa wheels for my turbo, Lily, and the passenger seat leather for repairs to Sven’s driver’s bolster which by then had a hole in it. Plus of course a pile of other useful spares. We hired a car trailer and went off to collect it. The full story is on Lily’s Transformation thread here so I won’t repeat it all here.
We took Junk’s front passenger seat and Sven’s driver’s seat to the trimmers and they made an excellent job of transferring sections to make one good cover out of two – you’d never know it had been off the seat.



We also got the trimmers to transfer the good leather off the broken backing card from Sven’s passenger door onto the card from Junk’s (his leather was badly scuffed and scraped) Once given a good soak in leather conditioner, the crease practically disappeared. While it was off I just had to do something about this



So out with the Copydex



Al hadn’t been able to get the last rusted bolt out of the seat runners, so this was next



The next time Sven was in for servicing, Mr Pedantic freed off the last bolts for us, so I was going to get Al to transfer Junk's carpet into Sven because of all the nasty rust stains around the seat runners. Sadly, he managed to spill paint all over Junk's rear footwell and totally ruined the carpet. My rust removing chemical will take off light rust in seconds and a quick rinse is fine. However, heavy rusting eats into the fibres and by the time the remover has been on long enough to take the stain off it’s also bleached the colour – no prizes for guessing how I know - Sven’s original boot carpet is still in our garage with a large pale pink patch where the rust was.

[dragonflyjewels]

2017 was the year Al and I started organising mini meets – Snazzy was minus seats which were at the trimmers, and Lily was in the bodyshop for the start of the year so I was using Al’s turbo and he took Sven to both of our meets. Here he is, middle one of 3 green GTs, dc's to the left and Jaster's on the right.



Lily was on the road by September so the turbos went to the French meet to be signed by John de Vries and Sven had a well earned rest.
Come 2018 I finally laid hands on a usable rear bumper bar which had been patched up with lots of welding. We had it blasted and powder coated and did the front one as well whilst we were at it. Surprisingly, the MoT tester never picked up the condition of the old rear one (lace curtains which dissolved when touched rather than having to be removed), although he did fail Snazzy one year on hers which was nowhere near so bad. Same test station as well.


The French club’s meet was way down in the south that year, in the Rhone Valley - too far to take 2 cars and very hot so we booked to take Sven as he’s the only one with aircon. Disaster struck about a month before when the condensor sprang a bad leak but Junk came to the rescue again. After a rather painful bill for the transplant we had a pleasantly cool trip.
Sven is somewhere in the middle of this lot:

The club president is a keen photographer and took this shot:

On one of our excursions Al actually got warm enough to strip to a tee shirt and someone spotted this

He often wears it to our meetings but as he’s always wrapped up in at least one sweatshirt in the UK I doubt anyone here has seen it !

The French meets are organised by a different member each year so they are always in the area the organiser lives in. They follow the same format, but the organiser has a small ‘souvenir budget’ to spend as they wish. On this occasion the budget went on a trophy for the furthest distance travelled, which Sven won by a narrow margin. Our friends from Belgium came a close second. I was very pleased to bring this home:

Stylish isn’t it. Trouble is it’s quite big so it doesn't fit on Sven's dashboard and I can’t exactly use it as a vase lol
Funnily enough, Sven had also won furthest distance travelled at a VEC meet in Worcestershire the year before and was presented with this

Decidedly NOT stylish….but typically English. It went to Sven rather than Eva purely because he was parked further down our lane when we set off !

[dragonflyjewels]

When I was planning our trip to the Rhone Valley meet, I decided it was a good opportunity to visit my daughter in Mannheim, Germany. Plotting the route from the meet to Mannheim, I was looking for things to do and places to stay along the way. The biggest town our route went through was Mulhouse – never heard of it but I looked to see if there was anything of interest there. I thought I might find a pretty village for lunch or a small castle ruin or something to while away an hour or two. How wrong can you be – only the biggest motor museum in the world ! Also a big train museum, so I booked two nights in a hotel just round the corner so that we could spend a day at each, and they certainly kept us engrossed !
The main hall in the motor museum was vast – it took quite a long time to walk down each aisle looking at the cars on one side only, then equally long coming back looking at the other side. There must have been at least 10 aisles. We discovered all sorts of treasures, and many weird one-offs.



Made by Paul Arzens, this extraordinary 1938 offering is called La Baleine (The Whale) and to the right of it is the Cosmic Egg, an electric car from 1942. Was this the inspiration for the post-war ‘bubble cars’ I wonder.

They have the biggest collection of Bugattis anywhere, including the Bugatti Heritage Museum. However, what really intrigued me was this beauty from 1936:



Gorgeous Alfa with pop-up headlights !

In an exhibition hall at the back was a large collection of Porsche cars, in total blackness apart from a magnificent and very unusual chandelier over each car. They were on loan from a chandelier museum and I have to admit I promptly lost interest in the cars - Porsche design has never really appealed to me anyway but the lights were drop-dead gorgeous.
After that, we were about to leave thinking we’d seen it all but I noticed another door we hadn’t been through, and there we found the real treasures. All in very low lighting were the truly most valuable cars, all dating back to the first part of the 20th century, and in pride of place on a raised dias was Ettore Bugatti’s own magnificent Royale.



The sheer size of this has to be seen to be appreciated – it is HUGE !

[dragonflyjewels]

In 2019, we had some of the paintwork tidied up by our long-time bodyshop who are very reasonably priced, and the wheels got refurbed so Sven was looking very smart when we went to the French club meet. This was another one down in the south, so the aircon was greatly appreciated.
The meeting centred on an old hilltop village called Chilhac – I hadn’t realised the south of France used to be volcanic millennia ago, and is now littered with these hills which are actually long-dead volcanoes. Chilhac has tiny narrow streets so most of the properties have been turned into gites for the tourists, whilst the villagers live in newer properties with wider streets further down in the valley



We had a very pleasant ensuite room in one of the gites, and a small hall with a kitchen was rented by the club for breakfasts. Everywhere we went for meals, we kept seeing 2 nuns in a 2CV – it turned out to be a wind-up, one was the sister of the organiser and the other was her actress friend.





The French meets always start with a picnic somewhere scenic Friday lunchtime. Everyone is asked to take a contribution of either food or drink and preferably something typical of the area they live in. Mostly it’s cheeses and cold meats with loads of French bread – yummy! After the picnic we were due to drive about 20 miles to Chilhac but they set us a competition for along the way – find as few roads or houses as possible, whose numbers add up to 480 and take selfies next to the signs. There was a tie breaker (guess the weight of a very rusty rear bumper bar before and after welding). We came second to our Belgian friends - we were driving in convoy with them so we both had the same two numbers and they won the tiebreaker. However, driving home after the meet on Sunday afternoon, I spotted the D480 on the map and couldn’t resist the detour to take this:



We stayed the night in a small guesthouse which was a very old converted monastery building in a narrow side street. The wide oak staircase was just lovely, and our room had an enormous oak beam which probably started life as part of a ship. We’d been able to park right outside the front door and when I looked out of the window I found we had a novel view of Sven.

[dragonflyjewels]

In the spring of 2020 Sven spent some time in storage with the top of the carcoon draped over him. The base was easy enough to fold flat and put back in the box, but the top was a nightmare. Not only an awkward shape, but it’s 2 layers of slippy plastic which both wanted to go in different directions. I spent a good half hour crawling round on the floor trying to fold it neatly then gave up when it dawned on me that a 480 was the perfect place to store it. It’s rather too big, but I didn’t want to just bundle it up and I certainly couldn’t see it going back in the box. Every time we swapped the cars over, another 480 'wore' it.

Due to lockdown and other restrictions, we had the 480s on the road very little, just one at a time for a month so they could at least do a bit of mileage to keep things moving. Being classed as ‘old’, I started off with a grocery delivery but then changed to click and collect so the cars could at least do a weekly 26 mile round trip. With no meetings and the Volvo 600 cancelled, along with our planned holiday in Wales as well as the French meet, 2020 threatened to be a boring year. Thankfully, the pandemic didn’t affect our finances too much and the setting up of the rescue group was a welcome diversion so we count ourselves very lucky. Our new extension has had considerably more work done on the interior than it would have done and I’ve started revamping the garden as well so we certainly haven’t been bored. Occasional trips to the 480 Sanctuary aka Jeff’s house have been greatly appreciated. We had a day at the beach in August when Snazzy was greatly admired by a traffic warden – it was a lovely day out which we remember with great appreciation. Surprising how much more we appreciate simple things when all the usual events and holidays don’t happen.
In July Al was spotted driving Sven on facebook – interestingly it was members of the French club who first identified the car as ours.