Evaan KherajCar and Driver
From the September 2021 issue of Car and Driver.
Harjeet S. Kalsi has created an anomaly. Defying the model’s reputation for horrendous reliability, his 1982 Aston Martin Lagonda runs flawlessly. It has for almost two decades.
As a young boy, Kalsi came across a magazine road test of the Lagonda, and the car wedged in his mind like an earworm. He was 30 years old before he encountered one in person, on a trip to Kuwait. He purchased the next Lagonda he saw—a Series 2 car with bespoke pearlescent paint. When Kalsi bought it, the engine blew clouds of black smoke, desert heat had destroyed the interior, half the instrument panel didn’t work, and the seat electrics were broken. He had it shipped from Kuwait to Canada anyway and drove it home to Surrey, British Columbia, from the local docks. “The seat was stuck all the way forward,” says the six-foot-two Kalsi. “It turned what should have been a dream drive into basically a nightmare.”
Evaan KherajCar and Driver
Kalsi, an electrical engineer by training, rolled up his sleeves. “I remember having it all torn apart, and I hadn’t found some alien technology,” he says. “That was the reputation, but the mythical Lagonda was actually just a car.”
Kalsi built an octopus-like device to measure the intake vacuum of the 5.3-liter V-8. He tuned the four Weber carburetors precisely. He repaired the finicky Javelina LED dashboard, replaced the Lagonda’s ridiculous number of relays, and restored the hacked wiring harnesses. He learned leather upholstery to redo the interior and fiberglass repair to save the badly damaged front and rear bumper valances.
He has since used those self-taught skills to restore other cars, including a Citroën CX, a Studebaker Avanti, and a Peugeot 604. He has also expanded into producing hard-to-find parts for classic cars and has just finished testing replacements for the Lagonda’s light and horn relays, a weak point he discovered during his restoration two decades ago.
Many people told Kalsi that his Lagonda would never run reliably. But Kalsi is a man of quiet confidence. “I wasn’t afraid of it,” he says. “I figured, if a thing is handmade, then why shouldn’t I be able to do it?”
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