MY LIFE IN CARS
John Watson
When I was young, our family car was…
A Packard. My father was a motor trader so we had lots of different cars. He’d buy the cars in Glasgow and bring them back to sell in Belfast. I remember the Packards best in the 1950s. Big, lazy, straight eight engines. They were magnificent cars. I always liked them.
The first car I owned was…
A BMW Isetta three-wheeled ‘bubble car’, inset right, when I was 16, using a motorcycle licence. I reckoned I held the lap record on the 45-mile trip to school from Belfast to Armagh. My first on four wheels was a tuned-up 850 Mini, with twin SU carburettors, in 1963. Then came an Austin-Healey Sprite.