The First Drive After a Winter Standing Still

A car that is driven wears out. A car that stands still corrodes, perishes and goes stale, and the difference matters because the second list is invisible from the driver's seat. The paint looks the same in April as it did in October. Everything behind it has been quietly changing.

The first drive of the year is when all of that arrives at once, usually somewhere inconvenient. Each item below finds one thing that standing still does: the charge that drained away, the electrical fault underneath it, the fuel that went stale, the rubber that perished, and the cylinder that rusted.

They are in the order you would actually use them, which is also cheapest first. Most cars need the first two and nothing else.

A note on this collection: these are chosen from the failure pattern of a car left over a winter, and from published specifications, not from waking a particular car with each of them to hand. Brakes, steering and structure are outside what any of this covers, and a car that has stood for years needs somebody qualified to look at those. See how we test.

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A maintainer, ideally fitted before the car was parked

First because a flat battery is the single most common outcome of a winter, and the only one on this page that is entirely preventable.

A maintainer is not a charger left plugged in. It holds a float voltage and stops, which is what makes it safe to leave connected for months, and it prevents the sulphation that turns a merely discharged battery into a scrapped one. A classic with a modest parasitic draw and a battery that was not new can manage this in a single season.

If the car is already parked and flat, fit one now anyway. Recovering a battery early is a great deal cheaper than replacing it, and you want the thing on the car before next October rather than after.

What else goes wrong over a winter, and in what order, is the subject of classic car winter storage.

A multimeter, before you conclude it is the battery

Because "it will not start after standing" has at least four causes and they feel identical from the driver's seat.

A meter separates them in minutes. Resting voltage tells you the state of charge. Voltage while cranking tells you whether the battery collapses under load. Voltage with the engine running tells you whether the charging system is doing anything at all — and on an older car with a dynamo or an early alternator, that is a real possibility rather than a formality. Current draw with everything off finds the parasitic drain that flattened it in the first place.

The full sequence, and what each reading rules out, is in a classic's first inspection after long storage.

A clear inline filter, so you can see the fuel

For the problem that is otherwise entirely a matter of guesswork.

Fuel that has stood degrades, and ethanol-blended fuel absorbs water and attacks older rubber while it does. The symptoms — a car that starts and dies, hesitates under load, or runs fine cold and badly hot — get chased through the ignition system for weeks by people who never looked at what was arriving at the carburettor. A transparent filter turns that into something you can simply look at: you see rust, you see water sitting separate from the fuel, and you see whether flow stops.

It is a diagnostic aid rather than a permanent fitment on most cars. Check it is rated for your fuel and route it away from anything hot.

What ethanol does to an older fuel system, and how to put it right, is in reviving a fuel system after ethanol damage.

An inspection mirror for the rubber you cannot see

Because perished hoses and seals fail from the side you are not looking at.

Rubber hardens and cracks fastest where it is warm, still and old, and the underside of a stationary car is where all three meet. A telescoping mirror on a handle gets behind the engine, above the crossmember and along the inside of hose runs — the places where a split shows on the hidden face weeks before it shows on the visible one.

Do this with the engine cold and the car cool. A cooling system that is up to pressure hides a weeping hose that will show itself readily when everything has shrunk overnight.

Which seals perish from standing and which are fine, and what to treat them with, is in rubber seals on a car that barely moves.

A compression tester, when it turns over and will not fire

Last because most cars will not need it, and the ones that do need it before anything else gets touched.

An engine that stood with a valve open has had one cylinder exposed to damp air all winter, and light corrosion on a bore or a valve seat is a real outcome of that. The running symptom is a misfire, and it is indistinguishable from an ignition fault — which is why people replace plugs, leads, points and a coil before testing the thing that would have told them in twenty minutes.

A low reading is not automatically bad news on a car that has just been woken. Repeat the test after some running and some oil circulation before drawing a conclusion.