Man Maths: Fiat X1/9

So I fired up its throaty 1.5-litre engine, aimed it up and road and… well, not very much, as it turns out. My first and, I’m afraid, most enduring impression of the X1/9 on the move was just how startlingly slow it was. I can remember revving the valves out of it waiting for it to ‘come on cam’, but it never did. It just made ever more noise with zero correlation in the glacial rate of acceleration.

It turned out that grip levels were quite impressive but, when I tried to provoke a tail slide coming out of a tight corner, I got only understeer, panicked, hit the brakes and damn near threw the thing in the Grand Union Canal. Dawn, in the staggeringly unlikely event you ever get to see this, I may have failed to mention that bit at the time.

The next time I drove one was as an almost fledged motoring journalist. By now, all the Fiat badges had disappeared, replaced by Bertone logos representing the company that designed and built it and, if I was faintly disappointed by Dawn’s, it was as nothing compared to how I felt about the car once I had at least some idea of what I was doing behind the wheel. It just felt ancient, a car living beyond its time, grimly awaiting the chop. The strange thing is, just about the only thing I really enjoyed was the chassis balance, so it’s possible my unscheduled adventures in Leicestershire said more about driver than car.

So why do I feel so much warmer about them now? I’m not really a ‘project car’ kind of person – I like cars that work from the off – but in the X1/9’s case, I might make an exception. I really like the look of the rarer early cars before they got big bumpers, and if you replaced the then standard 1.3-litre motor with the 1.5 (which plenty have) and warmed it up a bit, had a play with the suspension to eliminate pitch forward roll-induced oversteer and put some still skinny but decent modern tyres on it, I think there could be a really fun car trying to get out. And if you’ve always yearned for a mid-engined, open Italian two-seater – and who among us has not? – it’ll be the cheapest you’ll ever buy.

Not that they’re that cheap any more, and if you find one that is, take great care. Turns out this Italian runabout designed in the 1970s is somewhat susceptible to tin rot – who would ever have thought it? – and you’ll probably be looking at a £15,000 bill for a genuinely nice car with no horror stories lurking in its structure. You can pay a tiny fraction for an apparently functioning car, but I really wouldn’t.

Do I want an X1/9 myself? Probably not. But were I half my age and looking for a nice starter classic, I think you could do a great deal worse.