Not a car, but a bike
I was the ripe old age of 16 - I'd had a motorbike before, well, a Puch Maxi 50cc when I was 8 that I used to trot around the garden on.
All the cool kids at school were getting 50cc bikes, and of course, I too wanted some of that. I couldn't be doing with the 30mph crap though, so when the chance came up to purchase a second hand Honda Wetdream 250cc for £100 quid, I jumped at the chance. I say I, but I mean we. I couldn't afford the grand sum of 100 quid, so I went halves with a mate of mine from school. Quite an odd affair really, we bought it from a copper who simply said "Are either of you two old enough to even ride this thing...?" We both, sheepishly replied in the affirmative. He shook his head and said, "You didn't buy it from me, ok?"

As the new proud owners, we took it back to my house and were giving our new acquisition a good clean and polish, when Daz (mentioned in other QoTW) turned up.
"What's that you two have got there then?"
"New motorbike."
"Oh yeah. So...can I have a go then, or what?"
"yeah, ok."

Daz jumped on and said, "Ok...what do I do?"
"What do you mean, 'What do I do?'"
"What do I do, how do I make it go forward?"
etc...

So, I started it up, showed him where the clutch was, how to put it in gear and most importantly, where the brakes were.
He was precariously balancing on it, and gingerly riding up the road, with the pair of us holding the back bars and running alongside. When he wanted to turn around, he'd get off, I'd get on and turn it around for him and point him in the right direction.
After a few goes of this, he grew bored.
"You got a bash-'at?"
"Yeah."
"Go and get it then, I want to drive round the block and up the road a bit."

We got the bash-'at.

Daz rode off up the road.

After about 20 mins of waiting we got a little bored, so walked to the local Chinese takeaway and got some chips, as we strolled across the carpark to the takeaway we heard the most almighty bang.
"Ha, there goes Daz", says my mate.
"Ha ha, yeah, right." Says I.

We get our chips and go back to the garage. A few minutes after we'd eaten them, a whiter-than-white Daz comes running into the garage, crash-helmet in hand screaming, "Help. Help."

God only knows what our faces must have looked like, but it turns out Daz really did need help. He'd smashed the bike into the front of a Vauxhall Cavalier so hard that he'd pushed it into a Toyota Celica behind it and broken all it's lights as well as completely caved the front of the first car in.
He'd luckily been thrown over both cars (how bloody fast was he going???) and had landed on someone's front lawn. He'd got up, tried to push the bike away in a hurry - leaving it in gear, he couldn't understand why it wouldn't move when he pushed it; such was his inexperience.
We three ran back to where the bike was and miraculously, no-one had even budged from watching Eastenders and we had a clear getaway.
We took the bike back to the garage and all three of us set about it with spanners and screwdrivers - "It couldn't have been us Ossifer, this bike is in bits..."
I eventually had the forks fixed (they were bent to nearly right angles), but the bike never handled properly again, and indeed ended up with my thigh being cracked one day when I turned the corner, but the bike didn't...but that's another story, involving a friend of my dad's and, unsurprisingly, Daz. Again.

Daz never rode another bike, and still hasn't.

My dad, being of that persuasion, got the job of putting both the damaged cars back in working order. I only recently told him that happened (some 20 years after the event), and demanded my commission.
(dchurch bah, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 20:05, Reply)