Sweet Healey dreams & memories

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Sure you must have noticed that many Austin Healey materials were being posted recently. One brochure picture brought back vivid memories. We drove a Healey 100 only once. Just a few months before finding our Amilcar. This must have been in 1999. Over the phone the seller claimed that the car still was in its orginal paint, except for one rearwing die to a small mishap in the seventies. He found the LHD car in Canada and now it was in Holland. WE made an appointment and early at a summer evening I saw the mat-pale red 100 - I think it was a 1956 - with top down, window up.

Nowadays any 100 on the market will be shown with the windscreen down to show the difference with the 3 litre. Back then the crude 4 cylinder was seen as a slightly lesser car than the 3 litre.  I made a small test run and found that the car runnig nicely but in need of about everything. This condition was not reflected in the price of course.

 The 40,000 Dutch Guilders asked was massive money back then. Still he had a point. In the 16 years since I have never seen a car in similar cosmetic original condition.  The paint of the top of the left drivers door was rubbed of gently by the thousands of movements of the left arms and left sleeves of earlier owners ejoying summer drives with the arm leaning out. The bare metal, the edges of the primer beneath, the red top coat looked like the the soft beaches of a Healey lake seen from high above.  Sheer Healey art. The car should have gone to the Healey Museum, not too far from where I had my first Healey ride. 

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