Car enthusiast Olly Cracknell is excited and can’t wait to get going after admitting he’s ditched it Wales this summer left its mark on him.
While Aaron Wainwright and Tommy Reffell, his back-row colleagues in Sunday’s home clash with Saracens, added to their Nations Championship tally, Cracknell was overlooked by head coach Steve Tandy in July, despite making a Six Nations appearance a few months earlier.
“I was in the first team but then I wasn’t selected for the tour, so obviously that was disappointing,” said the 32-year-old, who has made 87 appearances for Leicester Since joining the club in 2022.
“It gives me some energy for this year, some fire in me to work and try to get back into the team.
“To be honest, my performances at the end of last season here were a bit off, so I just want to get back to the best possible way. That’s how I got into the team, playing my best rugby. And that’s how I got into the team.
“You’re always trying to find that form, or whatever it is, and that’s what I have to do to get back.”
Rather than on tour Argentina and South Africa with Wales, the five-time international spent the summer enjoying the purchase of a much sought-after Mercedes W123 from the 1980s.
Ask Cracknell about rugby and he’ll give you a decent answer, but when his latest classic purchase is mentioned, the conversation has a lot more miles on the clock.
“When it comes to buying a new car, I always look at this car, it’s a Mercedes W123. For the last 10 years I’ve always looked at it and thought, ‘that car is good’. But then I think it’s not practical, it’s 1985, it would be funny to buy that,” he explained for fear of before apologizing,’ he explained.
“But this time my previous car had weakened so much, I thought if I don’t do it now, I never will. There’s a guy in Swansea, who runs ‘W123 World’, so I got in touch with him.”
“They’re quite hard to find, I went and looked at a few but the rust is really ruining them and this guy said a few months after that, there’s one on the Isle of Wight. So me and the girl went there.
“When I test drove it, it was a perfect day, the sun was going down and I was on this military road and I bought it.
“I love that car because it’s known as one of the most durable cars of all time,” he added.
“When it was designed, the mechanics got a blank check for every part because they wanted a car that would last, and that almost put Mercedes out of business, obviously, because sales of the new version, the W124, were really low because the 123 was still so strong.
“I could talk about it all day. I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a petrolhead, but I love cars and I’m particularly obsessed with this car.”
“And I love driving, and I love roads. I find it’s quite a fun way to explore. I have this map of AZ, where I’ve marked all the best roads to drive, and I’ll go and mark some of them on the weekend. I find it quite a relaxing thing.”
Cracknell wasn’t sure how his new bike would go down with his teammates, but he went around the airport with a few of them on the back and club captain Olly Cracknell was taken for a spin.
“I was a bit nervous about bringing it in. I called my girlfriend the day before pre-season, saying, ‘I don’t think I can take it, guys might think I’m too flashy’. She said, ‘1985 will think you’re flashy.’
Flash is not how you would describe Cracknell as a player. He enjoys playing Hanro Liebenberg in Tigers – carrying and punching people hard.
Of all the PREM players who played as many minutes as him or more in 2025/26, only Henry Pollock averaged more carries per 80 minutes than his figure of 17.7.
Some of those hard yards and collisions took their toll, with the back-rower suffering a couple of concussions towards the end of the campaign. But now all is well and he hopes to return, as well as the spring seats in his prized engine.
“For me it always comes back to the way I train. The physical training and the physical push is really important,” he said.
“You go through your career and there are people walking around in training, and then the day of the game comes and they run into it. But I’m like most people, I’ll play as I train.”
“So it was a big thing for me to get back into pre-season and make it through the season because it’s such a long season. I feel like it’s going to be a really exciting season; there’s so much going on. It feels like rugby as a whole is really building.”