1978 Wartburg Knight review from UK and Ireland

Broken clutch cable - but freewheel meant journey was continued with ease.

Endless water leaks due to shrunken rubber seals.

Needed water pump on purchase.

Clutch plate started to slip - but engine can be lifted out by one person!

With 30psi / 2 bar in all tyres the handling is very sharp - and if you can brave the body roll, it can be driven very fast indeed down country lanes. But not as fast as its older sibling the 311 (1955-66), which has transverse leaf springs and thus no body roll at all! A speeding 311 careering down a country lane looks like an upturned pram on nitrous and is not for the faint hearted!

The engine is a gem, and it is worth spending money on having new bearings fitted to the crank. They are all ball/ roller/ needle bearings and a good engine will run as silently as a Swiss watch. Just don't forget to put oil in the petrol...

The car has a separate chassis, so even if the body gets a little tired, there is no danger of the car folding in the middle... nonetheless, the body is very slow to rust and repairs are necessary only every two to three years, even on my car which is nearly 30 years old and has lived outside in the British climate all its life.

The freewheel is a thing of joy, allowing the car to waft silently down hills; the slight disadvantage here is that at night, the lights drop to a glow-worm like flicker if the tickover is a bit low and the battery a bit geriatric.

The whole front of the car unbolts, allowing the intrepid engineer to unbolt the engine, slide it forwards off the chassis and stagger off down the driveway with it. It weighs somewhat less than two sacks of potatos.

One snag with the car is a rather feeble ignition system which struggles to cope with ticking over on short runs from cold (with some jiggerypokery it can be replaced with three VW Polo electronic units which solve the problem - and also gets rid of the rather unreliable original coils which can lead to an attack of two-cylinderitis)

The other snag is that the East Germans never quite got the hang of making rubber, so engine hoses turn to iron (with no ill effects) and all body seals shrink, giving a throughflow water feature to any car kept outdoors in Britain. This is a minor irritation on balance and to prevent the car steaming up, the windows are left permanently open a crack. This is of no consequence, as the principal antitheft device is the car's image...