1996 Fiat Bravo

 

picture sourced from 

This is the same color as mine and ironically this one ended up in a wreckers yard too

I don't know who the wee fauline is, but my Bravo never looked this good

With the payments from Black Beauty (Citroen AX Gti), I got to drive away in a brand new Fiat Bravo 1.4. It was "lilac" blue, very light blue, almost gray, not a definitive color, the kind of color you can never make your mind up about.

It lacked the raw power of the Gti, but the creature comforts were a thousand fold improved. I could now talk to the person in the passenger seat and the radio was built into the car and worked.

I put a pair of DTM style wheels on her, had the bumpers and mirrors color coded and that made her look a lot more sporty, nothing like the full Arbath kit, but sexy all the same. The calmer nature of the car, seemed to calm me down too, I didn't drive quite so hard.

There were no real problems with the Bravo except that when I put it in reverse the horn honked. The dealership in Sligo had to completely rewire it at no cost to me.

I took her on a road trip to Edinburgh in Scotland and it was a pleasure to drive on the motorways and really fun on the small cross country Scottish roads.

I went off to College later that year and everyone in the house would use the Bravo, it was the perfect car for sharing. My sister put a scratch up the side of it and my mother ran the oil almost bone dry, but neither of their abuses amounted to squat compared to my brother Derek's experience.

I came home from college and Derek and the dogs met me at the front of the house as I came walking up the lane.

"I've got good news and bad news for you. Which do you want first?"

"I'll take the good news first" I said naively.

"Well, your air bags work and the bad news is your car doesn't"

Lots of explicative followed and total disbelief.

Derek had borrowed the car to got to Dublin with his girlfriend and on the way home in County Cavan, they went flying off the road, down a steep field and smashed into a tree. The car was totaled.

They towed it to a wrecker's yard in Inver and it was sold for as scrap. I saw it a year later all fixed up in Letterkenny and I felt a tingle of want in me, I even had the spare key on my keyring still. But she was gone, she was someone else' trouble now. Derek was a bollocks, but at least he wasn't killed or maybe I should have killed him.

Here's an appropriate video of a Bravo in a field