"My parents were a bit thrown at first," says Rich Gelder, who has had five of Austin Rover's workmanlike creations pass through his hands in the last two years. "It was a case of `Why do you want all these rusting heaps outside the house?' But they have become more open to it in the past couple of years."
At 19, Gelder, from Unsworth, Bury, is not just an enthusiastic member of the Maestro and Montego Owners Club, he is the publicity officer, charged with spreading the joys of the fag-end of Austin Rover's output to the wider world.
"You do get lots of people coming up and saying `I've not seen one of those for ages'. You get more people saying that than you do the snide comments, although you do get that too. But it's all in good humour, really." While others spent their gap year backpacking across Asia, Gelder has travelled the country attending classic car meets and meeting like-minded Maestro and Montego enthusiasts in his year off between studies at Holy Cross College, Bury, and the start of a university course in transport and logistics.
Unlike the pampered, pristine collectors' items which grace some club members' garages, Gelder's Maestro has also been used as daily transport to get him to and from a job at Tesco in Prestwich.
Asked where this passion stemmed from, he replies: "I can't place it at a particular point. It might just come from cars my dad has owned in the past. It's really odd, because no-one else in the family is as passionate about cars as me.
"When I was young we had a couple of older Rovers, but he lost the following for British cars. Now he drives Saabs.
"I find the whole history of Leyland and Rover very interesting. The Maestro and the Montego (made from 1983 onwards) were the last of the old Leyland cars. I think they were the last wholly British-designed and built mass-produced car. It was around this time that it was sold off by the government.
"Enthusiasts see the period leading up to the 1990s as when the company turned the corner. There were lots of cars they were producing with Honda at the time which were very good."
After turning several more corners, however, MG Rover came up against brick wall earlier this year when a joint venture with Shanghai Automative failed to come off. "It was a sad end to a long story," says Gelder.
GELDER'S first purchase was a £300 Maestro. Then followed a genuine curiosity - an R-reg Ledbury Maestro, which is now his main vehicle. "There were 600 or so of them," he explains. "They were built around the time Rover were finishing production in 1994. There was a batch of them which were left-hand drive, due to go for export, but they never left the country. So a company in Ledbury, Herefordshire, bought them and converted them around 1998 and sold them on."
Other of his purchases include a B-red Austin Montego - awaiting a new engine - an even older Austin Metro, which Gelder passed to his gran, and a third share in an M-reg Montego.
Gelder's club boasts 300 members, and there are hundreds of other aficionados, many of them young, he says. Maestro lovers cheerfully overlook what one motoring website describes as "tin shed construction" and an "antediluvian" 1.3 engine which made the car "surprisingly horrible to drive - worse than you would ever have imagined."
Gelder says: "They have a tendency to rust but not in structural areas, so they do survive relatively well. Some are still used day to day.
"You do find the stereotypical old people who have had them from new and are giving up driving, so they keep coming out of the woodwork."
