My Life & Cars – Paul Cowland, TV presenter and incorrigible car hoarder
A lifelong passion for all things automotive led Paul Cowland to a presenting career and a wonderfully eclectic car collection
Pick any two vehicles from Paul Cowland’s large and ever-growing collection of cars and you can be reasonably sure that nobody else in the world has that particular pairing. Take the last two added to the stable: Dodge Viper RT/10 and… er, a Vauxhall Frontera. Pre-facelift, naturally. How about a modern Ford Mustang GT rubbing shoulders with a classic Subaru 360 kei car? Maybe someone, somewhere, has both a Mk1 Renault Espace and a Mk2 Golf GTI race car? On second thoughts, maybe not.
The thing is, these unlikely Googlewhack car combos have a chance to form because Cowland never sells anything. They simply amass, filling ever more unit space as if they’re drawn to it, like specs of dust coalescing to eventually form a planet. If you own anything rare and interesting, you should probably avoid driving through Nottinghamshire, in case the gravitational pull starts drawing it in…
> My Life & Cars – Matt Becker, vehicle dynamics wizard
In the finest traditions of man maths, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for Cowland owning, at his estimate, 78 cars. ‘It started about 15 years ago,’ he says. ‘At that point I had seven or eight cars – as I’m sure you’ll agree, a sensible, normal number to have.
‘But it was my Impreza 22B that burned me, I think. I sold it for 27 grand a year after I bought it for 22 grand, which is a decent return. But even then I could see I’d done the wrong thing, letting it go. A few years later they were up to 40 grand, and I felt like an idiot for selling it. So I thought, I’m never doing that again, and I’ve had this hoarding mentality. Unless I have to, I’m never selling a car…’
Knowing the prices 22Bs are now going for, there’s a hint of pain in Cowland’s voice, but it’s amusing to think that not only were they cheaper a few decades ago, but Cowland thought absolutely nothing of modifying his in the finest traditions of the early 2000s – think Morette headlights, Lexus-style tail-lights, an aftermarket wing, new alloy wheels, graphics, exhaust, and more. That thudding sound you can hear is current 22B owners, fresh from paying a quarter of a million quid for one, all falling off their chairs in unison.
Of course, Cowland’s car history goes back a little further than the early 2000s tuning scene. In fact, like most of us, it started from childhood. ‘It was my dad really; I grew up in a car-obsessed household. My dad still has a collection too. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, but he was always into interesting stuff – he had a Mk1 Cavalier, a Mk3 Cortina, all the typical 1970s dad-ness.
‘He would always buy a base model but then he’d spam it up: he’d put wheels on it, foglights, that leather grip around the steering wheel, he’d upgrade the stereo, put pinstripes on… all the stuff dads did in the ’70s! And he’d buy Custom Car and Street Machine. So I just thought that was normal life: the stuff you saw on the pages of those magazines, washing the car every Sunday morning, adding bits to it. It’s why I’m obsessed today with body kits and trinkets and add-ons.’
Driving started early, too. ‘My dad used to let me move his car. Probably in a few places I shouldn’t! But when I was 13, me and a friend down the road went halves on a 50-quid MOT-failure Escort van, which would probably be worth a fortune now, and we’d drive around his field. We’d cycle down to the petrol station on our bikes, get five litres each, put it in the Escort, and just drive in circles until we ran out of petrol.’
The Escort lasted for ‘about a year and a half, and then it disintegrated…’. The first proper car was a Beetle, bought at 16 with the money from summer jobs, ‘and I spent the whole year between 16 and 17 fixing it up, learning to weld, and building up the engine. My dad took us to an airfield and I’d learn to drive it. I had a couple of lessons on my 17th birthday, and then straight through the test.’
He followed that up with another VW, a 1971 Type 3 ‘Squareback’, which he says is still on the road. ‘I’d love to buy it back; it’d be great to do a TV show or YouTube video to buy my second car back, so I’m saving that one for the right day.’
It was probably the next purchase, though, that indirectly led Cowland down the long and convoluted path from car enthusiast to TV presenter when he picked up a cheap Saab 99 while his Beetle was off the road needing work. ‘You get into a car with heated seats and a heater that actually clears the glass, and you can just pile through things, and you think, these are really good. Then I went to work for Saab in 1994 and had a company car, so for the whole of the 1990s I was in Saabs.’
Cowland started off as ‘a junior marketing assistant, but it was a glorified tea boy role, really’ but with a head full of product knowledge he eventually convinced the manager to let him try selling cars. Here a lack of formal sales experience paid off, trading the usual hard sell for a chatty, knowledgeable enthusiasm that unsurprisingly went down well with the punters.
While Cowland was busy selling cars to 1990s architects and dentists, his father was setting up a Saab specialist, and inevitably this was where he ended up – ‘just at the time the whole Fast & Furious thing was kicking off’. As it happened, the Saab dealer also sold Subarus, and while early common-or-garden Imprezas were nothing to write home about, the same couldn’t be said for the Turbo, driven at the time by a certain Scottish rally star. ‘We took one in at the dealer on part exchange,’ says Cowland, ‘and when I drove it, it was just a life-changing moment.’
So when he went to work at his father’s Saab specialist, they quickly turned it into a Subaru specialist. This was TSL Motorsport, the name you’d later see plastered across the sides of Cowland’s 22-grand 22B, and the change in direction perfectly coincided with the massive and growing interest in Subaru’s performance cars. ‘People were coming from all over Europe to have their Subarus tuned there – we sold a lot of exhausts, remaps, wheels, and suspension upgrades.’
TSL used the 22B as a kind of shop window for what it could do, but cleverly the pair didn’t do anything to the car that wasn’t reversible, so while its appearance might have made you wince, rest assured it looked just as Subaru intended when Cowland sold it on. ‘But everyone wanted to feature it,’ he recalls. ‘Wheel companies sponsored us and displayed the car on their stands at shows. It was an incredible bit of marketing.’
It was the tuning scene, too, that laid the groundwork for Cowland’s media career. ‘I used to build a lot of show cars, and I’d reach out to the likes of Toyota or Eibach and ask them if they’d like to be involved. I’d promise them shows and features, and then I started writing for a few of the magazines, and then do PR for some of these companies. Then one day a TV company called one of the magazine publishers, asking if they knew anyone with industry experience, and apparently my name came up a couple of times.
‘I also used to do the PR for Santa Pod and had the idea of a magazine format show, with these little two- or three-minute segments on different cars and on the racing. I started producing that, but one day they asked me to do a piece to camera, just to help with a voiceover with no intention of using it. But they ended up just using it as-was, and when my name came up at these magazines, someone at Eurosport saw it, someone at Discovery saw it, and they thought, “yeah, this guy’s okay…”’
Since that moment, around 15 years ago, Cowland has gone on to present shows such as Turbo Pickers, Salvage Hunters: Classic Cars (along with fellow VW nut Drew Pritchard), and Motor Pickers (with car restorer Helen Stanley). It’s possibly no coincidence that the rapid expansion of his car collection started around the same time as the TV career, though there’s very little rhyme or reason to what Cowland picks up. As you’ll have noticed by now, it’s closer to a kind of real-world Hot Wheels collection than the usual box-ticking supercar line-up.
The difficult bit is deciding which Hot Wheels car to roll around the floor. ‘It totally depends on what kind of mood I’m in – it’s a bit like asking, what made you choose that T-shirt today? Sometimes it might just be because the T-shirt is clean and at the front of the wardrobe, other times it might be because it looks cool. And I have no fashion sense, so I dress with cars…’
It’s probably just as well that Cowland can choose which car to take based on gut feeling, since there’s not even the excuse of most of the collection sitting on jack-stands or stripped to a bare shell. Almost all of them run and drive, and they’re all insured too. The sheer number is a bigger barrier: ‘If a car’s got an MOT and petrol and it’s at the front, I’ll take that rather than the one I really want that’s ten cars back.’ His busy schedule can get in the way, too, with nearly non-stop television work six days a week over the past five years. ‘It’s the juxtaposition of what I do,’ he says. ‘If you’re busy at work it’s great for the bank balance, but you’ve got no time to enjoy the cars.’
Inevitably, the newest cars become a distraction too, with both that Viper and the Frontera currently occupying Cowland’s thoughts. ‘The Frontera is one-owner, 27,000 miles, and it’s got the 2.4-litre petrol, which is basically the Manta engine. It’s probably the best one left.
‘With the Viper, I think I got hold of an imported copy of Road & Track back in the day, when the concept car came out. Chrysler was amazing at the time – they were putting out all these crazy concept cars and then actually building them just like the concept. So I’ve always wanted one. And these RT/10s are so stupid and impractical – no door handles, no roof, no locks. I’d love to have been in the product meeting. When sensible, rational-thinking car manufacturers build something irrational, that’s pretty amazing.’
Still, there are rational cars in the toybox too. One of Cowland’s current favourites, and ‘perhaps the most complete and wonderful car I own, that I’ll never sell’, is a Riviera Blue Porsche 997 GTS. Naturally it’s a manual, and Cowland praises the original owner for ticking all the boxes he’d have ticked if buying it new himself. ‘It’s got the diff in it, it’s got the carbon pack. Every time I sit in that car it just feels very, very special. I’m lucky to own a flat-nose 911 too, and the 997s still feel more like those older Porsches to me.’
Talking with Cowland, it’s difficult not to become infected by his enthusiasm. Almost no make or model is off-limits, and he can make a case for just about anything being interesting in some way. And if that car happens to have a low price tag, then it’s worth a punt just for the curiosity value. Sometimes an unloved car just needs saving.
‘You speak to people, particularly on the internet, who just hate certain cars. They’ll say, I’m never driving one of those, they’re dreadful. But I can find something to celebrate and embrace with almost any car. I’m like an old lady with cats, bringing them home even if they’re on one leg, with one eye…’
This story was first featured in evo issue 316.
