1948-1998 —When we say we have experience, we mean it! Moss Motors Ltd. is known as the world’s largest and oldest supplier of parts for classic British sports cars, but it didn’t start out that way. As a matter of fact, it really didn’t start out as a parts business at all. If Alan Moss had bought a Ford…
Of all the specialist British car makers of the 1950s, the TVR Company of Blackpool, Lancashire, had the most intimate relationship with America. In fact, the company’s early survival was due primarily to one Ray Saidel, who was the proprietor of the Merrimack Street Garage in Manchester, New Hampshire. Ray’s father opened the garage in…
This year, I spent part of May and most of June on the east coast, first as a judge at the ever-more-enjoyable Greenwich Concours d’Elegance. Best of Show went to a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith convertible owned by well-known collector Noel Thompson. This choice pleased me particularly because it featured a massive yet rakish one-off…
Much more fun than writing an article is the process of defending it after the fact. How could I, a paid professional, so utterly butcher the spelling of Snoqualmie Pass? My good friend Jim Pesta called and told me about the time he had an experience like mine driving top down in the rain with…
The Mini didn’t make nearly the impression in the United States that it did in Europe, mainly because the idea of tiny cars competing with Detroit iron on the freeways didn’t sound like too safe a proposition. However, on the narrower main roads and tiny lanes of European towns and cities, the Mini quickly won…
When I encountered Moss Motoring‘s editor Ken Smith at the 1996 Triumphest at Big Bear Lake in 1996, he kindly suggested that I might try conveying some impressions of the British sports car scene here in the U.K. in a series of articles for the magazine, maybe with particular reference to Triumph TRs, my own…
When my ’68 Jaguar XKE needed a new clock battery, which is a small mercury cell 1.5 volt, I was informed that the EPA had banned the sale and disposal of mercury cells in California! Determined to have a working clock in the Jag, I modified the circuit, grind two pieces of insulated wire, approximately…
I suppose any 19-year-old college student in the late ’60s sporting his favorite pair of Dingo boots would have been upset to find them unexpectedly ruined while sitting in Western Civ class. A little investigating found the culprit to be my 1964 MGB with a leaking master cylinder. Brake fluid had found its way through…
This hobby is a cyclical one. Over the winter, when cars are safely stowed away from the cold, we go into a form of hibernation. The busy summer of the previous year has passed, Christmas flew by, and before we know it, spring once again has blossomed before our eyes. Here at Moss, right around the…
There she was: a 1979 MG Midget at a yard sale on the corner of Solar Road, where my fiancé Ed lived south of Montrose, Colorado. With her bright yellow paint, black top, bumpers and tires, she looked like a giant bumble bee touching down in the middle of used clothes, pots, pans, dishes, and old…
