NIGEL BOOTHMAN

Winter driving can be challenging, picturesque and fun – why do so few of us take our classics out at this time of the year?

At the risk of kicking off a page in a RollsRoyce and Bentley magazine with mention of another marque, one of the things I enjoy about a Scottish winter is the chance to drive my old Alvis in the snow. It’s a 1923 open tourer with narrow artillery wheels and fourinch-wide tyres, so it digs into the white stuff very nicely, and with a combination of relatively low weight, low gearing, high ground clearance and decent torque, gets around effortlessly amongst the slithering moderns with their traction control and vast low-profile tyres. Any vintage Rolls-Royce or Bentley would be just as satisfactory, though perhaps less nimble if you went up the scale to a Phantom II or a 6 ½ -litre Bentley. I even crept about on fresh snow in our Silver Shadow project car (see page 86), which does less well; much more weight, automatic transmission and fat Avon radials going against it. But with appropriate tyres it would be fine –just see what the chaps with a similar car accomplished on the Peking to Paris Rally in our previous issue. There is an elephant in the room, however, and its name is road salt. Snow does no more harm to car bodywork than rain, and rather less than dead leaves and road muck, as it melts away rather getting stuck in various rust traps. But the white salt solution that covers every car after an outing on our winter roads really does speed up corrosion on exposed areas. Only on exposed areas, though…it’s not battery acid and it won’t destroy the paint, nor indeed do much harm under the car if we simply rinse it off again. Five minutes with a pressure washer and you’re safe enough – especially if the garage has a dehumidifier. Honestly, we’re missing out. Taxing a car only from April to October is a sad state of affairs. If the Veterans can stand a London to Brighton run in November and all manner of classics can tackle winter events like the Monte-Carlo Historique, we can manage lunch at a country pub on a frosty February Saturday. Polishing the old girl up again is half the fun, anyway.

Finally, a complete tangent: while preparing this issue of the magazine, I found a newspaper article about a W. Bentley. This was Wilson Alwyn Bentley of Vermont, USA, rather than Walter Owen Bentley of Cricklewood and elsewhere, and Wilson’s obsession was not motor cars but snowflakes. Over 47 successive winters from 1885 he took 5381 photographs of snowflakes – all beautiful, every one unique. An album of 355 of these prints has now been digitised by the Natural History Museum in London and they can be viewed online at nhm.ac.uk – search for Bentley Snowflakes.