Big Mike OUR MAN ON THE INSIDE SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE CAR BUSINESS
Who is Big Mike? Well, that would be telling. What we can say is he’s had more than 40 years in the car trade so has probably forgotten more about it than we’re likely to know. 22 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
COMMENT
Valuable advice taken to heart should avoid surgery for car and me
I
’m always one to help a damsel in distress, especially when said damsel is not only pleasant on the eye but also a good customer of mine. So when a lovely young lass called Jayne, a twice-purchaser from Big Mike’s Motors and a local A&E nurse, appeared on my forecourt in distress last week because the Mini she’d bought from me a couple of months earlier was making a nasty noise and she was almost late for her shift, I did what any good car dealer would do in the circumstances and chucked her the nearest set of keys so she could continue on her merry way. Like everyone (at least I hope), I absolutely cherish our emergency services and have the utmost respect for anyone who puts themselves on the front line, especially in these weird and challenging times, so my number one priority was to get her to work, and my number two priority was to have a proper look at the Mini to determine what might be wrong with it, and – indeed – determine if there was any liability on my part. I like to help damsels in distress, but I don’t like them starting a warranty action against me or taking me to the small claims court. I’m not that much of a soft touch. Anyway, with Jayne happily saving the lives of the great unwashed from behind the wheel of the 2004 Jaguar X-Type I’ve been smoking around in (it was part-exchanged with two-thirds of a tank), I took the Mini into my workshop – which is more of a shed full of hand tools at the back of the lot, but it sounds posh – to see if I could find anything obvious. And I did. As soon as I started it up, it sounded like a family of skeletons at a disco. The familiar click-clock-clack of an engine as dry as my sense of humour or a minor Arab state was so loud that it was obvious what was wrong. She had suggested to me that a friend had pointed to the ‘710’ thing under the bonnet as a likely cause, but I had no idea what she meant by the ‘710’ thing – until I turned the number upside down, and that was long after my diagnosis. Two litres of 10w40 later and the Mini sounded like it should, and with no lasting damage – or at least I hope not. So I called Jayne to give her the good news and told her that if she called by on her way back from work, I’d give her the results of the health check on her car and some useful advice on how to avoid such a stressful moment in the future. Later that afternoon, she returned my Jaguar as clean and sparkly as a hospital ward, which was the very last thing I expected her to do. But she’s that kind of person. The type that we really need more of in this world so we start to respect each other more, along with each other’s property, opinions and beliefs. But it’s probably for the best not to get me started on that. Because she’s such a lovely person, I felt terrible reading her a fatherly riot act on vehicle maintenance. I explained that the clue with the ‘710’ thingy was to turn it the other way up, and reiterated a phrase my old man taught me when I was a kid: ‘Only a dipstick ignores their dipstick’. I showed her how to check the oil, and while at it the coolant level, the tyre pressures and how to spot warning signs of imminent problems, such as where to look for spots of potion number 710 seeping out of the block, or white deposits on radiator hoses that suggested they were about to let go. I should add, these were not issues on her car – supplied by a reputable Midlands purveyor of fine previously cherished automobiles – but on a PX-toclear Hyundai Amica that was residing in Poo Corner: the part of my pitch where I keep the cars that are one MOT or 710 change away from the scrapyard, and which I frequently farm out to local takeaway outlets in exchange for curry vouchers in lieu of cash. I pointed out that all of these precautions would save her from having to subject her car to major surgery in the future, to which she nodded sagely, accepted she’d been a bit slack
She had suggested to me that a friend had pointed to the ‘710’ thing under the bonnet as a likely cause, but I had no idea what she meant by the ‘710’ thing – until I turned the number upside down.
