help with teambuilding among its inexperienced workforce. In fact, build quality was so bad that there was another factory set up in the States just to fix the imported DeLoreans’ shoddy panel fit and various electrical snags before they were palmed off to customers. Despite this the car remained a temperamental beast and breakdowns were common; even the novelty of gull-wing doors soon wore off on its US owners ... presumably because Americans found it tricky at the drive-thru to snatch their supersized Big Macs through its tiny cut-out windows. \r\n\r\nLuckily, for John DeLorean, in the early ‘80s most Yanks had little first-hand experience of fine handling sports cars; wafty muscle cars were still in vogue and many actually spec’d the slow-witted 3-speed auto in their DMC-12s. Nevertheless, the car was slated in the American motoring press - interestingly, no British journalists were ever allowed to roadtest the factory cars. In fact, performance was so disappointing that in Back to the Future Parts II and III the technicians shoehorned air-cooled flat-6 Porsche lumps into the two cars used for filming scenes where the OUTATIME DeLorean needed a proper turn of speed. \r\n\r\nThe rest of John DeLorean’s sorry story involves cocaine smugglers, misappropriated government grants and rumours of meddling from the IRA. When DMC finally went bust in late 1982 2,500 jobs, and £70 million purloined from the British tax payer, were lost. £10 million was never accounted for; Colin Chapman, who had consulted on the project, was implicated in the scandal and could have been facing ten years porridge had he not died of a heart attack before the dodgy dealings were discovered. \r\n\r\nAn estimated 9,000 DMC-12s were built before the bailiffs were called in and everything was sold off (it’s thought that the huge body dies that stamped out the stainless panels ended up as net weights on a deep sea fishing trawler). The very last DeLorean, built in 1983 from remaining spare parts, was a hideous gold plated special edition with matching wheels and a tan brown interior - expect to see this on the American version of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding sometime in the future. \r\n\r\nWith even the newest DeLoreans now well past their 30th birthday Car Club 18-30 waves a cheery goodbye to the dreadful DMC-12. Badly built, under-powered and over-priced - if they really were capable of time travel then I would happily send every single one back to August 79 AD and park them in a field somewhere near Pompeii.