When it’s a SEAT Marbella, of course.
Back in 1980, SEAT were a small, financially beleaguered Spanish manufacturer who’d spent most of the post-war years turning out copies of models produced by their parent company Fiat. They continued this formula with a copy of the ever-popular Panda, initially sold simply as the SEAT Panda and only later renamed to the Marbella in 1986 after they split from their parent company. At this point it received some mild styling changes at the front and rear, giving it a slightly softer look to the straight-edged Panda, and became available for the first time in the UK. Production continued, remarkably, until 1998 with the last UK models finishing in 1995.
If you went on holiday to Spain in the 1990s, getting your hands on a brightly-coloured Marbella hire car was as standard as sunburn and complaining about the food. The utilitarian little car had a cheap and cheerful charm that it shared with its older brother but the slight styling modifications and gaudy colours gave it a character all of its own. While the Panda evolved over the years with updated engines and suspension, the Marbella stayed with the original layout, using a 903cc engine – which could trace its roots back to the 1960s Fiat 850 – and leaf-sprung rear suspension.
Never a huge seller in the UK, survivor numbers are today fairly low, although extra ones occasionally appear, usually emerging from long-term slumber in the dusty recesses of a garage. There’s even a small following for them on the modification scene.
I first laid eyes on one when searching for my first car back in 2002. It was sat at the back of a local dealer’s yard, an immaculate L-reg example in black with white steel wheels, low mileage and all the signs of having come from a loving home. Unfortunately, while I was entirely sold on the strange, upright little car, it apparently needed a new fuel tank and the dealer couldn’t find one. I ended up settling for a rather less charming Citroen AX – but that’s another story.
It stayed at the back of my mind over the years and eventually a chance visit to eBay whilst away on holiday in Scotland resulted in me winning an auction for a scruffy bright blue J-reg Marbella with a bull bar, a short MOT, less than 50,000 miles on the clock and one owner from new. Only problem was, I really, really didn’t need it, the seller was miles from both my current location and home and he needed it gone ASAP. Enter two heroes from a car forum I frequented, who stepped up to my plea for assistance in retrieving it from the seller’s yard and relocating it to their office car park a few miles down the road, giving me time to return home from my travels and collect it the following weekend.
I had almost no phone signal where I was staying near Inverness, complicating matters still further, but at about 7pm on a Tuesday evening I received a Whatsapp message confirming that the car was now in their custody. Not only that, they’d had a lot of fun picking it up, neither of them having driven a Panda or Marbella before, and they confirmed that overall the little car was an absolute hoot – although not without its issues. To quote the chap who drove it back to their car park: “the brakes are terrifying, bum-clenchingly, OMGWEREALLGONNADIE ineffective. mashing the pedal to the floor elicits a barely perceptible reduction in motion.”
Unperturbed, the following weekend I jumped on a train and met up with him to swap car keys for bottles of alcohol and my eternal gratitude. They’d even found time to pull the front wheels off and investigate the brakes, although nothing obvious had been found. I had a zip around the car park, found all to be reasonably well and with a toot and a wave, hit the road.
What followed was, quite surprisingly, a very uneventful 4 hour drive home. I avoided motorways and stuck to A and B roads as much as possible; I suspect that trip was the longest it had ever made in its life and it had neither the gears nor the power for comfortable motorway cruising.
Early on in the journey, I discovered that the chunky aftermarket floor mats were not helping the braking effort, robbing the pedal of its crucial last inch of travel and thereafter the brakes didn’t cause too much alarm – they could stop the car promptly with a decent shove. In fact, the only two signs that the Marbella was finding sustained 60mph travel in any way straining were a new and copious oil leak from the rocker cover gasket and a large hole which it blew in the rear silencer. Any attempts at being inconspicuous in my boxy little bright blue car were therefore gone as it farted loudly through towns and villages – I managed to resist jumping out of the car whilst stopped in traffic to issue a sternly worded correction when, with the window down, I overheard a passer-by point the car out to his son as a Fiat Panda.
Alas, it wasn’t really meant to be. After arriving home it spent a few weeks sat on the driveway and running around town. I adjusted the aftermarket sunroof hinges to stop a water leak, which the previous owner had tried to sort with duct tape, and gave the car a thorough wash and polish. It made me smile every time I walked past it – the cutesy, angular looks combined with the chunky factory-fit bull bar gave it a mildly comical appearance and the utilitarian interior was charmingly basic and crude but surprisingly comfortable.
Shortly after that, the MOT expired and I took it down to my local old car-friendly garage for an assessment. I knew it needed a braking system rebuild and a small hole welded up but was optimistic it wouldn’t need too much else, the previous history showed it’d never needed much work to pass tests and there weren’t any significant advisories on the last one. Unfortunately, it would seem that the old boy who owned it might have had a good relationship with his tester. After examining it on his lift, I received a text from my mechanic: “I don’t think so mate”.
Although the bodywork had a few crusty spots here and there which had been poorly repaired and there was one rust hole in the driver’s floor which I knew about, the rest looked fine. Alas, when examined closely, my mechanic found a lot of rot in the seams and joins which meant it was going to need a ton of welding to see another year’s ticket – the cost of the rust repairs alone would be way beyond what the car was worth. Combined with the brake issues, which while very cheap and simple to work on were throwing up more and more issues the deeper I dug, sensible heads had to prevail and it eventually got towed away by a collector to be stored in a barn until it got its turn for restoration.
It could have been worse and I still have some hope that it will one day see the road again. I had some fun with it and in other circumstances, maybe I would have thrown the money at it but it didn’t make sense at the time. I still find my finger hovering over the bid button whenever one does appear on my eBay search results so perhaps one day I’ll end up with another brightly coloured example of the little Spanish donkey sat on my driveway.