My Passion With Matt Smith

My passion for cars, classic cars in particular, comes from my dad.

He was a car salesman when I was really young and I was fascinated by cars and being around them. I particularly loved VW vans from a very young age but never thought I would own one. My current love affair with them started when my wife Karen and I backpacked around Spain and on a campsite I got talking to an old guy about travelling.

He had a VW campervan. He was talking to me and I was thinking, this is the way to travel, so much better than lugging a tent in 40 degrees.

Those two things – my love of cars and of travel just came together in the VW van.

So I decided to use a dealer to import a van from America and drove down to Bristol to meet it at the boat, paid the deposit, and sent it to a garage in Paignton to make sure it was roadworthy.

On my 25th birthday, we got the train to Paignton to drive the van back to Doncaster.

But fate had other ideas, we set off in the mother of all thunderstorms and then broke down just outside of Chichester.

So my birthday evening was spent on the side of the motorway in pouring rain with smoke billowing out of a vehicle I’d just spent my life savings on.

I eventually got it back to Doncaster on a low loader, stripped it down and to top everything off found a black widow spider in the engine, which took everything to a new level of terror, ringing arachnid specialists for advice on how to kill a black widow... if you ever find yourself in that situation, you need strong fly spray!

I restored every nut and bolt over the next four years until it was perfect.

Then the 2007 floods came and the unit it was stored in for the refit was flooded and it was a complete write-off.

I got the insurance cheque for it one morning and went to bank it at lunchtime. At the same time I was on the phone to a guy about another one I’d seen on an internet forum.

That evening we drove to Preston to have a look and I ended up paying a deposit down there and then spent before the cheque had even cleared.

I still have this van and we go all over in it – Cornwall, Devon, Whitby, Derbyshire, Northumbria... It’s a 1959 split screen camper, with a few extras: it’s very low and has a heavily modified engine, gearbox and brakes. It gets a lot of attention as it looks like it’s just been driven out of a pond, but its rock solid and I love it.

It was owned by a convent in California previously and has biblical script on the side.

It’s a passage from the Bible: “In the world you will have affliction but take courage, I have overcome the world.”

People love it or hate it, like Marmite, but really – how can you not love that?