The first car I ever owned was a silver Renault Fuego 1.4TL. I had passed my driving test two years earlier, but had not until then been able to afford a car. My then fiancée and I were students in Nottingham at the time, and we quite fancied living in Warwickshire after we were married. So one day in January 1990 we went on the train to Coventry, and then the bus to Kenilworth to check out house prices, etc. It was a horrible wet day, and the house prices in the local paper were way above what we could afford, and we were quite depressed at going back to Nottingham on public transport in the pouring rain.
Out of interest, we turned to the cars page in the paper, and there it was ... a silver Renault Fuego! We went to see it, and despite the vendor saying that we should come back in daylight and dry weather, I insisted on buying it and driving it away there and then!
It was a really smart looking car, but it did have quite a few mechanical problems during the time we had it, and it cost us quite a lot of money.
The biggest problem occurred later in the summer, when I was teaching my fiancée to drive in it, and she drove it SMACK into a tree! It was quite a distressing moment, but we had it repaired, using parts from a scrap yard, and we kept the car for another six months, during which we still got married!
By the following year, I was a respectable married man, and a teacher, and the Fuego was becoming too expensive. So with regret, I made the final transition to respectability and replaced the Fuego with the ultimate middle class, middle aged car - a Vauxhall Cavalier!
As homage to a great car, I publish here a small selection of photos.
Send me your comments and Fuego stories!
The first car I ever owned was a silver Renault Fuego 1.4TL. I had passed my driving test two years earlier, but had not until then been able to afford a car. My then fiancée and I were students in Nottingham at the time, and we quite fancied living in Warwickshire after we were married. So one day in January 1990 we went on the train to Coventry, and then the bus to Kenilworth to check out house prices, etc. It was a horrible wet day, and the house prices in the local paper were way above what we could afford, and we were quite depressed at going back to Nottingham on public transport in the pouring rain.
