The class of 1994 was brilliant for car classifieds

SO THE Champion's 18 this week. Your favourite local paper can, among other things, legally get the drinks in without worrying about being asked for its ID by the bloke behind the bar.

I've been celebrating the anniversary by working away on the special birthday supplement you'll find delivered with this week's edition - a task which meant trawling through the thousands of papers we've put out over the years, to uncover all those juicy front page splashes hidden away in our secretive and extensive archives.

It's a pity then I ended up hooked on a rather different bit of Champion history - the car classifieds. If, like me, you're one of those weirdos who still finds the Auto Trader strangely absorbing (and I don't mean the coarse, inky paper it's printed on either), then you'd love looking through the secondhand bargains Champ readers were prepared to flog you all those years ago.

Yes, it's true that when the first ever Champion was published the number one single was Mariah Carey's tragically bad cover of Without You, but I would have put up with that to buy a clean Capri Ghia for £550. The same car today, now considered a bit of classic, is four or five times that. You could take your pick from a host of very tidy original Minis for between £500 and £600, and - if you weren't that desperate to get anywhere in a hurry - a slightly ropey Citroen 2CV with eight months' MOT was yours for £250. If only there was a way of somehow transporting these then-unwanted motors from 1994 to 2012, because all these old stagers are very sought after these days.

Even more annoyingly cheap were 1994's brand new arrivals. Would sir be tempted, for instance, by a lovely Alfa 155, which in The Champion's first week was yours for just £13,577? The same money these days would struggle to get you into a mid-range (and much smaller) MiTo. I know the class of 1994 were only just being introduced to electric windows and airbags, but they still got a lot more for their money then you do now. You could also experience the thrills of driving a Fiat Coupe or a Volkswagen Corrado without having to peel the boiled sweets out of the ashtrays. Then again, if you'd ventured into a Ford showroom at the time there's a very good chance you'd have ended up lumbered with an Escort.

So to celebrate The Champion's big anniversary I've decided things were better in the good old days. Maybe I'll think differently in 18 years' time...

And the new arrival is...

RELAX. It's a Rover.

The long-gone Longbridge concern's old ad slogan couldn't have rung more true the first time I gave the latest arrival on the Life On Cars fleet its first proper run, heading for home up the M57. Sporty this £300, 1995 Rover 214 isn't, despite it coming in a rather fetching shade of British Racing Green. If there's one word to sum up this icon of Hyacinth Bucket motoring it's... comfortable.

Thanks to it being winter I've only actually driven it in the dark so far, hence the car you see above not being the exact one sat outside, but already it's impressing me with its plush trimmings and soothing suspension. I like the tasteful - if restrained - styling, both inside and out, and the way the revvy Rover K-Series engine seems to mate perfectly with the Honda heritage in the engineering. I like the half-leather seats and the (plastic) wood trimming, and the way it comes loaded with things like electric windows and an immobiliser that works. And my mates love the fact that - for the first time ever - I'm driving something with five doors!

Where the Renault, with its flyweight engineering and suspiciously powerful engine, was a hot hatch in disguise, the regal old Rover's much more grown up, but there's lots to like about it. On wet, nasty November nights, it's nice to step into something that soothes your brow as you head home.

I'm so relaxed, in fact, that I haven't even bothered to ask the obvious questions yet. Is the notoriously fickle K-Series engine going to blow a head gasket? Are the strangely solid-looking sills hiding a lifetime of rot? And - most worryingly - is my choice of a Rover as my latest purchase meaning I'm about to prematurely celebrate my fiftieth birthday?

All, I'm sure, will be revealed in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: No more reading the manual for me, thanks to a Top Gear tuition video in all things Rover 200! Cue a very 1989 looking Chris Goffey...

Au revoir, Renault 5!

A MOMENT'S reflection for the most reliable car I've ever owned, which finally reached the end of the road today.

Regular readers might remember how excited I got when I paid just £100 - the price of a first class rail ticket - for a Renault 5 earlier this year. Since then it's been as far north as Dumfries, as far south as London and along some of the country's most challenging roads in between, and in 11 months and just two oil changes it has never broken down.

Unfortunately, even two weekends' worth of welding wasn't enough to stop it failing its MOT earlier this week, and the news was far worse than I'd feared. To repair the rot beneath the front wings would take weeks and cost far more than the old girl's worth, so after 16 years and 123,000 miles it's finally reached the end of its working life. As sad it seems, she's off to the scrapyard.

I won't miss the clattery old engine or spartan interior but I already miss lots of things about it, including its ridiculously spacious interior and its surprisingly sporty handling. But most of all I'll miss it as a bargain buy; £100 for almost a year's worth of malady-free motoring is going to be hard to beat.

Not that it won't stop me trying, of course, and today I've been down to Liverpool to draft in its replacement.

I won't reveal exactly what the newest Life On Cars bargain basement car is but I will reveal some tantalising clues; it's a hatchback with a bigger boot than the tiny Renault's, it's got five doors rather than three, it's packed with Japanese technology but it's been proudly made in a British factory.

Oh, and it cost just £300, meaning I can now climb up the ladder into the opulent world of immobilisers, electric windows and half leather seats. All will be revealed tomorrow...

Mud, madness and the birthday of a British icon

HERE'S a date you probably haven't got scrawled into your diary - this week, believe it or not, is Jaguar's 75th birthday.

So far, the Coventry company's survived The Blitz, the ravages of several recessions and even the worst British Leyland can throw at it, which a couple of Life On Cars-reading mates and I thought was worth celebrating. Until we saw the mud.

The idea was brilliant; take a rotten Jag with a touch too many miles on the clock to a dirt track in Prestatyn, put up against a field of more mundane motors in a six-hour endurance race, and watch it win with style. Admittedly, the 19-year-old XJ40 we'd picked wasn't one of the Big Cat's proudest moments, but it's still a car from a company with seven Le Mans wins, a string of rally victories and a slightly successful F1 team to its name. We couldn't lose.

Unfortunately, the race took place on the same drenched day Southport's Air Show got cancelled, meaning the track was a quagmire of squelch and mud even Range Rover owners would think twice about tackling. The race commentator, sat snugly in his caravan, put in perfectly as the field of Micras, Polos and Escorts raced past; we were driving 3.2 litres of pure wheelspin.

I never thought I'd say this, but the Jag was just too big and too powerful, and with no grip we spent most of the time powersliding pointlessly as cars your mum used for the school run ten years ago tore ahead. We were losing, but because we were in a Jag, we were losing with style.

Our muddy outing is about as far from Jaguar's string of Le Mans as you can possibly imagine, but I loved every minute of each chaotic lap, made more terrifying still because the steering wheel seemed to have little to no influence over where the big Jag was heading. It was a rubbish and yet utterly brilliant addition to Jaguar's proud motorsport pedigree.

And here's the best bit; unlike the cocky whippersnappers who laughed every time their machines lapped ours, the Jag actually crossed the finish line, even if it was sliding sideways at walking pace. We might have been a long way off winning but we did the entire event, to quote an old Jag ad slogan, with grace, space and pace. A fitting tribute to the Big Cat, then.

The maker of Britain's most beautiful cars is 75 years old, and we found a smashing way to mark the occasion. Literally.

Yes, you can still buy classic sports cars for £200

ANYONE who remembers what happened when I spent £100 on a set of wheels might want to look away now, because I've just doubled the stakes.

Regular readers might recall the Renault 5 I managed to blag for the price of a train ticket earlier this year, and I got lucky because - aside from a broken heater which makes West Lancashire permenantly feel like the West Indies - the ancient hatchback's become one of the most reliable things I've ever owned.

But even I couldn't believe myself when I spent twice what it cost on an old sports car that's spent the last ten years of its life stuck inside a garage in Cumbria. Yep, I've just bought an MGB that doesn't work.

Like the original Mini that's always at the top of this column, it's from an era when strikes at British Leyland dotted the TV news bulletins every day and as a result anything that came out of MG's Abingdon factory around that time is going to be crushingly unreliable.

In normal circumstances I wouldn't even bother with the MGB because I've never particularly liked it, but this one's different.

Eagle-eyed readers are going to spot that it's the far more stylish MGB GT, and swaps the soft top for a swoopy bit of steel roofline, the gorgeous Rostyle steel wheels and something called a Webasto sunroof, which is basically a clever bit of folding canvas which looks like it cost about 30p as an optional extra. Other features unique to this particular version are doors way overdue a replacement, decade-old engine oil and brakes which are seized solid. Not quite the £200 bargain buy I was expecting, then?

Of course it is - it's a classic sports car for the price of a long weekend on the continent, and it's got a solid shell and stashes of paperwork thrown in. As a commuter car it's failed already because it's broken, but as something I can imagine swanning around Southport in next year it's packed with potential.

The MGB roadster, the open-top one you always see at classic car shows, has been hogged by CAMRA members desperate to drive them to quaint village pubs you only ever see on Heartbeat, but the B GT is better because its somehow more subtle in its style.

It's The Shadows rather than Cliff Richard.