Use It, Break It, Fix It: A Welsh Mechanic on Keeping Classics on the Road

The worst thing you can do to a classic car is love it too carefully.

Tim Winton has watched it happen enough times to know the pattern. An owner buys the car of a lifetime, tucks it away, and treats every mile as a withdrawal. Two years later it will not start, or it starts and something lets go, and the owner concludes that old cars cannot be trusted.

Winton reaches a different diagnosis. The car was fine. It just stopped being a car.

“These cars were built to be used, and that’s the root of most of the problems I see,” he says. “Leave a classic sitting for two years and things go wrong quietly. Seals dry out, oil settles away from bearings, corrosion creeps in somewhere you can’t see it until it’s already done its damage.”

Then comes the part he has seen play out more than once. “That’s usually how it plays out. The one day you decide to put the grandkids in the back for a proper drive is the day it lets you down, and it’s almost always because it’s been stood rather than driven.”

Winton runs Cambrian Classics, a family workshop on the Ceredigion coast in west Wales, well away from anywhere you would call a hub of the old-car trade. He and his small team keep pre-1980 machinery running for owners across Wales and beyond, and his working method reduces to a phrase he repeats to customers until it sticks.

Use it, break it, fix it. It sounds reckless. It is closer to the opposite.

The Mechanic Who Drives His Own to the Shops

Plenty of people who repair classic cars keep their own under covers. Winton does the opposite, and he does it on purpose.

“I enjoy using my own classics regularly,” he says. “Even for the school run or a shopping trip, I will get out the MGB or the old Mercedes. I don’t just reserve them for club runs on nice days.” The point is not bravado. Driving the car is how he keeps track of it. “This allows you to really get to know your car, and detect changes before they become a big problem.”

That habit is the whole method.

A classic used only for a summer show goes backward the rest of the year, unwatched. A classic used for errands reports what it needs in small increments, while the stakes are low. A dragging brake, a weep from a hose, a charging system falling behind: each shows itself on a five-mile trip, long before it strands you sixty miles from home.

Winton’s counsel to the owner whose car has not turned a wheel in two years is blunt and kind at once.

Ask yourself why. “Is it because you don’t actually enjoy driving it, or because you’re worried it’ll break down on you? If it’s the second one, that’s an easy fix. Get someone to go through it properly, spend whatever needs spending to make it reliable, and then use it.”

He hears the same excuse constantly, and he does not accept it. “I get a lot of customers telling me the steering’s heavy or the brakes aren’t great and putting it down to, well, it’s an old car. Nine times out of ten that’s not just how old cars are, that’s something wrong with this old car.” A well-sorted classic, in his telling, drives far better than most owners expect, because most owners have quietly recalibrated their expectations around faults that a good mechanic would put right.

And if the honest answer is that the owner does not enjoy the car? He says that too. “There are tens of thousands of classics out there, and it’s entirely possible you’d be happier in a different one.” It is not the sales pitch you expect from someone whose income depends on classic cars staying in service.

It is the tell of someone who wants people to drive the things, for the plain pleasure of driving.

I know the feeling from my own garage. I run a 1991 Toyota pickup, no classic beside the cars in Tim’s workshop, but old enough now that his warnings land. Leave it parked too long and it reminds me, exactly the way he describes. The cure is no hardship: point it at a good road. I have done that on a Hemmings Motor Club rally through California wine country, and on quieter Saturdays closer to home.

Where “Use It, Break It, Fix It” Came From

The phrase is not Winton’s invention. He inherited it, and he is careful to say so.

“I was introduced to the concept by my great friend and fellow MG enthusiast, Mike Keeling, who sadly passed away in 2024,” he says. Keeling rallied cars, and he approached reliability the way a competitor has to. “He believed that the best way to create a reliable competition car was to stress test it, find the weakness, and fix it.”

Winton took that racing logic and applied it to road cars, where it lands as reassurance rather than warning. A freshly recommissioned classic, one brought back into service after years of neglect, is not going to be perfect on day one. Expecting perfection is the mistake.

“Particularly after a recommission, there will always be a period of shaking out the little issues. Expect to find faults, and every time you do fix something, you are working towards a car reliable enough to drive to Italy. Every time you fix something, think of it as improving confidence in reliability.” It reframes the whole experience of early ownership. The rattle that appears at 2,000 rpm, the leak that shows up after a long run, the starter that grumbles on a cold morning: these are not evidence that you bought a lemon.

They are the car showing you its remaining weak points one at a time, on your terms, so you can retire them one at a time. Do that for a season and you reach somewhere most owners never do, a decades-old car you would happily point at a foreign border without a second thought.

“It’s a bit of a change in mindset,” Winton says, “but as most people keep their classics for a reasonable length of time, it’s one that works. I wouldn’t expect to buy a classic and not find any issues that need adjusting.”

Iceland, Jubilee Clips, and a Land Rover That Wouldn’t Quit

Winton is quick to correct a bit of romance about what he does. He is not a rally support mechanic who chases competition cars across Europe with a van full of spares. The road stories come from something more personal.

“We have done a collection of overseas road trips with family members, and I have used my skills accordingly to keep us all on the road,” he says. The tally is not modest. “We have visited 11 countries and clocked up over 15,000 continental miles in vehicles averaging 40 years old.”

The trip he reaches for happened in 2015, on a circuit of Iceland, and it is a small masterclass in fixing what breaks with what you have. His parents-in-law had shipped their 30-year-old Land Rover 110 Defender camper to the island in a container at the start of summer. They drove it through the mountains, forded rivers, and completed a lap of the country, then left it at the airport with the keys under the seat.

His sister-in-law flew out next and repeated the tour. By the time Winton arrived at the tail end of summer with his wife and an old university friend, the Land Rover had absorbed a whole season of abuse.

It made its condition plain immediately.

“The first time I turned the key and started it up in the airport car park, it sounded like the engine was about to drop out. It was banging against the chassis and, when I looked underneath, the engine mountings had undone themselves to the point where the nuts on the mountings were about half a turn from falling off.” He tightened everything down and set off. Halfway around the island, the next problem arrived. Before the trip a local garage had fitted a heat exchanger and reused the old, tired heater hoses without mentioning it. Those hoses now started letting go, one after another, and each failure emptied the cooling system onto the road.

“I trimmed the old broken end off, did another 5 miles and BANG, off it comes again. And again, and again. Obviously each time it split and came off, it dumped all the coolant out, so we needed to refill it.” In much of northern Iceland there is no filling station to refill anything, only wilderness. So they improvised. “There are a lot of mountain streams, so we were hiking back and forth to various rivers with water canisters to top up the radiator again.”

Eventually the spare hose ran out. What Winton did next is the part that has stayed with him. “We had run out of spare hose length, so I found an old off-cut piece of hose, strapped it over the split with jubilee clips like a plaster, and that got us to the end of the trip.” Jubilee clips are what Americans call hose clamps, and using them as a bandage over a burst hose is exactly the field expedient it sounds like. It held.

“Patching ancient hoses with jubilee clips next to geysers spouting boiling mud was a pretty memorable repair,” he says. It also taught him a rule he has never broken since. “That was the last time I drove a vehicle overseas that I hadn’t checked over myself.”

Heat Is What Bites You Abroad

Ask most owners what threatens a classic on a long Continental trip and they will guess dodgy fuel, or sustained high speed on unfamiliar motorways. Winton has run the experiment across a decade of touring, and his answer is neither.

“Daytime heat by far is the biggest thing that can trip people up,” he says. The problem is baked into where these cars grew up. “Particularly if you are from the UK. Our summers here are typically warm at best, not scorching Continental temperatures.” A car that spent its life in Britain’s mild climate has never been asked to cope with what waits south of Paris in July.

The trap is not open road. It is the moment you stop moving.

“Particularly if you drive through a city or get stuck in a traffic jam, the concrete and tarmac hold the heat and the air temperature around you can hit 40°C (104°F) plus. Then the car starts to overheat, then you have to turn the heater on high to cool it down, which is not very popular with the car or the wife.”

Performance engines suffer worst, precisely because they were tuned for cool British air. “This is something I discovered, particularly with performance-tuned cars that generate that extra heat. They may be fine running in the UK, but will start to overheat on the Continent.” And you cannot rehearse it at home, because home never gets hot enough to reveal the fault.

His fixes are practical and mostly free.

Reshape the driving day around the heat. “Plan your driving day to start early, find somewhere nice and shady for a long cool lunch, then do another late afternoon or evening drive.” Once you are south of Paris, split the day in two and let the worst hours pass. Touring in the shoulder seasons sidesteps the problem.

And know where the danger lives, which is not the fast bits. “When travelling at reasonable speed on the motorways it’s actually easier, as the car stays cool while moving. It’s when you get caught in traffic or are waiting at toll points that you get into trouble. So avoid Milan at rush hour, tip based on personal experience.”

For the cooling system itself, he has a hardware trick built around how fans work. An electric cooling fan only switches on once the engine is already hot, while a mechanical fan bolted to the water pump pulls air through the radiator constantly. On something like an early MGB, he pairs them.

“If you have an electric fan, a good tip is to additionally fit a mechanical fan for the trip.” Run both, and the car keeps its composure in the stop-start crawl that would otherwise cook it.

Above all, hold your itinerary loosely. “Don’t be too itinerary-driven. Be prepared to be flexible according to the conditions. It’s no fun losing a day because someone has come down with heatstroke.”

The Pre-Trip Inspection That Ends on the Road

A ruthless pre-trip check, done properly, is the thing that turns a nervous owner into a relaxed one. Winton’s version has two halves, and the second is the one most people skip.

The first half is the workshop, and it is thorough. “I check everything. I would check lights, levels, tyre pressures. I give it a full service. When I’ll be driving across countries on motorways at high revs in high temperatures hour after hour, I want fresh oil in it.”

He goes over every rubber hose for perishing, any brittleness or cracking, the exact failure that stranded the Iceland Land Rover. Tires get particular attention. “Big mileage, high temperature and high speeds mean I want them in good condition. No splits or uneven wear, and a decent depth of tread.”

Then comes the half that separates his method from a checklist. He drives it. Hard, and for real, before it matters.

“Once it’s had that thorough workshop check, it’s time to do some stress testing on the road. I make sure the car has had some good exercise before the trip. A decent length trip to give me confidence that there aren’t any underlying issues waiting to bubble up.” He runs it with the headlights on the whole time, because a long night drive is not the moment to discover a charging system that cannot keep up. “Do this with the lights on, as you need to test the charging system. Lots of places in Europe require you to drive with them on all the time.”

A club run or a two-hour trip to visit family does the job, done without deadline pressure, long before anyone is racing for a ferry.

And he trusts the math of it. Two clean hours earns his confidence in the whole journey.

“Once it’s done two hours of solid driving I trust that it will do 20. Any mechanical failure that occurs after a two-hour stress test run is in the lap of the automotive gods, and you’ve just got to trust the car at that point.”

The Track Day as a Diagnostic Tool

Winton is a believer in track days, and not mainly for the thrill. A circuit loads a car in ways a back road never does, and load is what exposes weakness. It is the same instinct that fills a historic hillclimb weekend, where decades-old cars get worked hard because that is the point of keeping them.

The first lesson a track day teaches, though, is rarely about the car. “Usually the biggest shortcoming for speed on track is the driver, not the car,” he says.

Before anyone blames the machine, they should learn the craft, ideally with instruction. “Learning about how to carry speed well through corners, what a good racing line looks like, controlling the car smoothly, braking at the right place, turning in at the right place. Once you’ve got these nailed, you will see a lot of improvement in your driving.”

Once the driver improves, the car starts telling the truth. “You are driving the car faster than you normally do on the road, albeit in a safer environment. The brakes are going to get worked harder than they ever do on the road. The engine’s going to get worked harder, so any shortcomings in the brakes, cooling system, or anything like that will show themselves.”

It is the same idea as his road stress test, dialed up. Push the car until its weak points show themselves, then fix them.

If a scenic tour and a track day asked for the same preparation, the distinction would not matter. They do not. For the track, brakes move from important to non-negotiable, and Winton points straight at the part owners neglect.

“The rear brakes especially on classic cars, they often don’t get the attention they should. They are hidden within the drum, and wheel cylinders can stick. You may have some oil on the shoes from leaky axle shaft seals.” He has opened enough drums to know how often the basics are wrong. “We have often seen shoes fitted the wrong way around.” Everything gets checked, adjusted, and confirmed, front calipers included.

He also warns that classic brakes have a thermal ceiling that modern drivers forget. “Standard calipers are cast, which hold the heat in. There’s a reason that performance cars have aluminium brake calipers, so it’s easier to overheat pads and calipers.” He speaks from experience here. “I push my car quite hard now on a track day, and have burnt brake pads.”

New drivers are unlikely to reach that point on a first outing, an argument for building up slowly. Tires round out the short list of things that must be right. “They are your point of contact on the tarmac and you are going to put a lot of stress on them.”

What’s on the Ramps Right Now

The best argument for Winton’s philosophy is not anything he says. It is parked in his workshop, and the mix on any given week reads like a cross-section of everything that can go right and wrong with an old car.

At the pre-war end sits a 1936 Talbot Ten, in for a leaking cylinder head gasket on its side-valve engine. “Coolant was getting into the cylinders and running down the outside of the block, so the head’s come off, new gasket going in, and we’re relining all the brake shoes while we’re in there.”

The Talbot had barely been used because of those faults, the loop Winton tries to break. Fix the reasons a car stays parked, and it can go back to being driven.

Nearby is an Austin-Healey Sprite, the wide-eyed first-generation car that Britain calls a Frogeye and America calls a Bugeye, the kind of small, light roadster whose spirit still runs through Mazda’s thinking on the next MX-5 Miata. It came back from a full restoration with the personality knocked out of it. “The sporty camshaft that had gone in was actually working against the car, too aggressive for how it’s driven day to day, so we’re swapping it for a standard cam.”

A hotter cam looks good on paper and makes a road car worse to live with. Build the car you use, not the one that sounds impressive.

Then there is the car that makes the whole case by itself. A Triumph TR7, showing just 11,000 miles, came in with a knock from a big-end bearing. Low mileage should mean a healthy engine. Here it means the reverse.

The cause is instructive. “It’s been stood and started up now and again without being warmed through properly, so the oil system was never fully primed and it’s run a bearing.” A car driven properly for 11,000 miles would likely be fine. This one was started cold, run for a minute, and shut off again, over and over across years of storage, until it ran a bearing without ever going anywhere.

The two-years-parked problem in its purest form.

The rest of the bench fills in the range. An MGB that spent roughly 15 years off the road is getting the full treatment, new tires, new brake hoses, every fluid changed, “to turn it back into a car you can rely on daily rather than admire from a distance.” A VW Beetle is having a corroded frame head replaced. A fuel-injected Midget running a 1.8-liter twin-cam Rover K-Series engine is back after chewing through a high-pressure fuel pump far too quickly, so the team has re-engineered how its pump, swirl pot, and plumbing work together.

The Place Itself

Cambrian Classics is a family business in the fullest sense, and the workshop has the texture to prove it. Ask Winton what the place smells like on a working Tuesday and he does not reach for atmosphere. He tells you about the Beetle.

“Right now it smells like petrol, if I’m honest. We’ve got a Beetle in with a leaking fuel tank, so it’s a bit whiffy at the moment.” The rest of the time the scent shifts with the metal on the ramps. “The pre-war cars, and the bigger old Rovers, have that earthy, musty smell of old leather and wool headlining. A late MGB barely smells of anything by comparison. It’s all vinyl and plastic by then. Most days it’s some combination of petrol, gear oil, and tea.”

It is quieter than an outsider might picture, too. “We’re not revving engines all day. It’s mostly the gentle click of ratchets and spanners, the odd bit of welding going on in the corner. And usually a cat demanding attention whenever it decides the humans have been ignoring it long enough.”

The path to the Ceredigion coast was not a straight one. Winton grew up in Kent, in the southeast of England, then went to Aberystwyth University to read International Politics, which he cheerfully calls “a far cry from classic car mechanics.” He met his wife, Clare, there, fell for the area, and stayed.

Work for a politics graduate with no experience was thin on the ground, but practicality ran in the family. “I come from a family of mechanics and engineers, so practicality is in the blood.” His first job was on the desk at the local Renault garage, where he learned something that has shaped the business as much as any spanner. “One of the most important things I learned during my customer-facing role in the motor trade is the importance of communication and understanding people’s expectations.”

The business grew faster than the plan. Early customers were mostly MG owners Winton already knew through the club. He and Clare had also bought two classic VW T2 campervans, meaning to refurbish and rent them out for extra income. The repair side took off so fast the campers never earned a penny. “We quickly realised we were not going to be able to manage the campers, and we sold them without ever hiring them out.”

What surprised him was how much hidden classic-car ownership the thinly populated region concealed, and how far people would travel to reach a mechanic they trusted. “Classic car owners will travel for trust,” he says. Some now bring their cars over from Ireland on the ferry.

The team shares an ethos more than a specialty. Jeremy Evans, the senior technician, is a pre-war obsessive who has hand-built bodies and restored more vintage cars than Winton can count, and the two enjoy troubleshooting a diagnosis together.

Joel Greenbank, a 19-year-old apprentice, daily-drives the MGB he is slowly restoring, owns a Porsche 924, and, in Winton’s words, “is definitely beginning his classic car addiction.” Eilir, once Winton’s boss at the motor factors, drops in for welding and fabrication. Clare handles the books, the VAT returns, and the transport, fitted around the arrival of the couple’s second daughter earlier this year. Their six-year-old has been recruited onto polishing duty. “The five-month-old still needs some practice.”

A larger workshop up the road is next, which will bring more ramps, room for full restorations, and eventually classic-car storage in the original building. For a business built on the idea that these cars should be driven rather than hidden, it is a fitting kind of growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should you drive a classic car?

Tim Winton recommends driving a classic at least once a month, even if it is only a short run to the shops. Regular use keeps seals moist, circulates oil back around the bearings, and lets you notice small faults before they become expensive ones. A car that sits for months or years deteriorates quietly and is far more likely to fail when you finally want to use it.

Is it bad to let a classic car sit for a long time?

Yes. According to Winton, a classic left standing for a couple of years develops problems you cannot see: dried-out seals, oil drained away from bearings, and hidden corrosion. He points to a Triumph TR7 in his workshop with only 11,000 miles that spun a bearing, not from use but from being started cold and shut off repeatedly during storage without ever being warmed through.

What is the “use it, break it, fix it” approach to classic cars?

It is a reliability method Winton learned from rally driver Mike Keeling. You drive the car, allow its weak points to surface one at a time, and fix each fault as it appears. Over a season, this converges on a genuinely dependable car. The idea reframes the small problems a recommissioned classic throws up as normal shakedown rather than signs of a bad purchase.

What fails most often on a classic car during a road trip?

Winton points to perished rubber hoses and cooling problems as frequent culprits, along with brakes and tires that were marginal before the trip started. His Iceland breakdown came from old heater hoses that a garage had reused, which burst repeatedly and drained the coolant. A thorough pre-trip inspection targets exactly these items.

Do classic cars overheat in hot weather?

They can, especially cars built for cooler climates and driven into Continental heat. Winton says daytime heat is the single biggest thing that trips up touring owners, more than fuel quality or high speeds. Air temperatures in city traffic can reach 104°F, and performance-tuned engines that run fine in Britain often overheat abroad. The danger is worst in stop-start traffic, not at speed.

How do you prepare a classic car for a long trip?

Winton starts with a full service: fresh oil, all fluids and levels, lights, tire pressures, and a careful check of every rubber hose for cracking. Then he stress-tests the car on the road for about two hours, driving with the headlights on to confirm the charging system, before he trusts it for a long journey. He treats the road test as half the inspection, not an optional extra.

Are track days bad for a classic car?

Not if the car is properly prepared. Winton values track days as a diagnostic tool because the extra load reveals weaknesses in brakes and cooling that never show up on a Sunday drive. The non-negotiables are brakes in top condition, including the often-neglected rear drums, and tires that are not too old or unevenly worn. New drivers rarely push hard enough to hurt the car on a first outing.

What should you check on the brakes of a classic car?

Winton pays special attention to rear brakes, which hide inside the drums and get overlooked. Wheel cylinders can stick, axle seals can leak oil onto the shoes, and he has often found shoes fitted the wrong way around. He also notes that the cast calipers on many classics hold heat, so they overheat more easily than the aluminum units on modern performance cars.

What is Cambrian Classics?

Cambrian Classics is a family-run classic car repair and servicing business on the Ceredigion coast in west Wales, founded by Tim Winton. It specializes in pre-1980 cars, including pre-war and vintage vehicles, and is a recommended garage for both the MG Owners’ Club and Just Kampers. The team works on marques including MG, Austin-Healey, Triumph, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, and Volkswagen.

Should you buy a classic car you’re afraid to drive?

Winton’s answer is to fix the fear or change the car. If you avoid driving a classic because you worry it will break down, have it gone through properly and made reliable, then use it. If you simply do not enjoy driving it, he suggests that is worth listening to, and that you might be happier in a different classic altogether. Either way, a car you never drive is not serving its purpose.

Tim Winton answered these questions in a written interview arranged through Cambrian Classics. No vehicle was provided for this article. Photographs were supplied by Cambrian Classics.

Michael Kahn

Michael Kahn is the writer, photographer, and publisher behind The Weekly Driver. He cares about how cars drive and what they're like to own. He covers automobile industry news, car shows and events, and new car reviews. The reviews come from behind the wheel: day trips that favor back routes, treating a good meal as half the reason to go. He directs and produces the visual media, matching each car to a setting and mood that fit it. When he's not reviewing new cars, Michael races paddleboards, camels, and ostriches, along with the occasional exotic car on the racetrack, and has driven in every state and country visited.

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