Buying a Healey Silverstone as a Young Man

An interview with Sam Nelson on buying a Healey Silverstone as a young man.

Sam Nelson owned several Healey motor cars and was an associate of the Healey family.

Transcript

Sam Nelson: there was a chocolate brown Tickford Healey, which I purchased. And I bought that and drove that for a bit. Now, I suppose all young twenty-one year olds are always looking for cars that go quicker and quicker and quicker and there had been a car going through the middle of Warwick, a Healey Silverstone, a pale blue one. And I saw this and coveted it quite a lot and thought, well, I only saw it on occasions as it went through Warwick. It was clearly coming from Leamington, going through Warwick somewhere… And I happened to be up at The Cape one day when I was talking to the receptionist at the door and she said her boyfriend had got a Silverstone for sale. And, so, I said “Right, I want it”. So, and I don’t remember how we sold the Tickford, but presumably The Cape helped me one way or another and I then got hold of this Silverstone and that, obviously, made me a bit quicker… the Silverstone, obviously, being much lighter was a much quicker motor car. It was very much more spartan because it had the vague apology of a hood, no side screens, but one of the beauties of the whole thing was, because it had the cycle front mud guards, you could watch the suspension work as you drove along, which was great… This gave me a lot more speed.