The Ormskirk MotorFest was proper classic car fun

APOLOGIES if I brushed past you in Ormskirk the other day in the mad rush to make it to my car on time.

My MG was booked in for three glorious laps of Ormskirk MotorFest glory, and I was about 30 seconds from missing out. Regular readers will know I’ve been an avid supporter of West Lancashire’s motorsport-themed spectacular since its inception – it is, after all, the best possible use for Ormskirk’s one-way system – and that my trusty old MGB GT has for years joined scores of other classic cars in the event’s street parades.

What you probably won’t know, however, is that while the old girl made its usual appearance at last year’s event it was actually too poorly to take part in the parades, thanks to an unfortunate incident involving a sprint circuit, historic race ace Barrie ‘Whizzo’ Williams and a slightly misguided attempt by my colleagues to mend a misfire which went horribly wrong. Having decided that West Lancashire’s petrolheads would prefer not to hear an MG which sounded like an East European tractor, I pulled my classic car out of the parades altogether. That’s the joy of classic car ownership for you!

This year, however, I decided it’d be a crime not to get the MG, with all its rattly bits mended, into the parades around Ormskirk’s one-mile circuit. The only problem was that I somehow had to photograph the parades AND take part in them, which was why as the last of the bubble cars tootled up from Coronation Park towards the Parish Church I was nudging my way through the crowds in the opposite direction, eager to get from my photography spot to the MG in record time. With just seconds to go before the classic car parade eased onto Park Road, I got my pride and joy fired up.

It was great not only to be involved in the most exciting aspect of the MotorFest once again, but also to see how the event’s evolved from that single, full-throttle spark of an idea back in 2010.

The most welcome change was the hugely increased emphasis on safety, with barriers installed right the way along Park Road – there’s never been an accident in the parades, but from the perspective of a driver cruising past thousands of spectators it’s good to know the fans have got some added protection!

The event’s still got its uniquely egalitarian atmosphere, where anyone can come and watch an F1 car charge past the bus station and pay nothing for the privelige, but the addition of the autotests, the car club displays and the emphasis on organisation have helped it mature into something with a slicker, more mature feel. It’s also, given the Government’s decision to legalise what are effectively road racing events on closed public roads, a prime example of the spending power petrolheads bring to town centres when they flock their in their thousands for a car show.

Count me in for next year.

Check out the 3 September issue of Classic Car Weekly for David's full report on this year's Ormskirk MotorFest

Life On Cars takes on the Nürburgring

YET ANOTHER Porsche 911 screamed past as I dived into a tight right-hand corner on the world’s scariest race track.

My passenger was grinning like an overexcited schoolboy, but I couldn’t help but thinking what I was doing was slightly mad. There I was, beginning a lap of the longest, most challenging – you could even argue most dangerous – race track in the entire world, with half of Europe’s BMW M3 owners closing in from behind. What’s more, I wasn’t at the helm of the latest supercar. I was in my own car, a 25-year-old Mazda MX-5 I bought for a grand six months ago, and I was mixing it with 911s, hot Audis, superbikes and even the odd Ferrari or two.

Yet this is exactly why, if you’re a committed petrolhead so into cars you might as well have GTX Magnatec coursing through your veins, you simply HAVE to drive the Nürburgring at least once in your life.

It is, with 13 miles and 73 corners to contend, easily the longest race circuit in the world. The F1 circus abandoned it after Niki Lauda’s horrendous accident – heading to the much shorter, newer and safer Nürburgring Grand Prix circuit next door. It still amazes me that a place deemed too dangerous for F1 is open to just about everyone else, at £20 per no-holds-barred lap.

A friend and I had just fired up the MX-5, stuck it on an overnight ferry, and driven it down from Rotterdam the previous morning, which goes to show that it’s no harder to get to Europe’s motoring playground than it is to get to Cornwall or the Scottish Highlands. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the cars queuing to get onto the track – despite being in deepest Germany – had British registration plates.

As soon as I got onto the track it wasn’t hard to see why so many Brits make this automotive pilgrimage. It is, as long as you keep your wits about you and make sure your car’s up to the job, one of the few places in Europe where you can really put a car through its paces.

I’d love to brag in the pub about doing a blistering lap, but in truth I was overtaken by just about everything, as I had no idea which way the 73 twists and turns went. However, the MX-5 absolutely reveled in it, and revealed depths in its steering and handling I genuinely didn’t know it had.

There’s no logic whatsoever to a 13-mile race track where just about anyone can turn up and have a go, but I loved it anyway. 

It’s a challenging place you underestimate at your peril, but go prepared – and make a foreign holiday of it by taking your own car over – and it’s one of the most spectacular things you can do with a car.

Read more in the 20 August, 2014 edition of Classic Car Weekly

James May's Cars of the People was great motoring TV

IT WAS somewhere in the North Sea where I discovered one of motoring telly’s genuine surprises last night.

Chances are that if I hadn’t have been stuck on a ferry tossing and turning through the waves on my way back from a trip to Holland and Germany, I wouldn’t have flicked on the TV and started watching James May’s newly-launched BBC series about people’s cars. If you haven’t already seen it and fancy tracking it down on iPlayer, it’s called – in a magnificent display of Beeb imagination – James May’s Cars of the People.

Yet despite the unremarkable name, Captain Slow had me hooked; here, after what seems like months of false starts, was a spot of automotive telly I found myself genuinely enjoying. I’m sure not the only car nut who finds his other pet project – an occasional motoring show called Top Gear – has brilliant and tiresomely slapstick moments in roughly equal measure, but almost all of the other shows aimed at us petrolhead types have proven tricky viewing. 

I get the impression that in a glass-sided building somewhere in Canary Wharf a boardroom’s worth of overpaid telly executives have cottoned onto the fact that classic cars are hot property, and between them opened the floodgates for a whole of slew of motoring TV shows over the past few months. We had Philip Glenister do a great job with For The Love Of Cars, but I couldn’t help wincing when an old Series One Land Rover was restored to such an eat-your-dinner-off-it level of cleanliness that it’ll never see a farm track again, and then auctioned for an eye watering £41,000. We’ve also had AC/DC rocker Brian Johnson pontificating about his favourite supercars in Cars That Rock, but the worst television call by far was whichever idiot gave Classic Car Rescue a second series. 

That’s why, after a bellyful of obviously scripted motoring mishaps and shows which give off the impression all old cars are handcrafted from unobtainium, it was so refreshing to see James May talking sensibly about the cars your mum and dad used to drive. I switched off at the end of the show having learned some genuine nuggets of pub fact gold about the Fiat 124, and been reminded why the Trabant was so bad that thousands of East Germans happily headed straight towards a crooning David Hasselhoff in a simultaneous lunge for motoring freedom. In fact, the only letdown was resorting to some cheap Top Gear laughs by dropping a Lada from a helicopter for laughs, but James May’s Cars of the People had me hooked

.

Even though I’m firmly back on terra firma now, I’ll definitely be tuning in this Sunday for the next episode.

Road resurfacing is an annoying but effective way to slow drivers down

IT WAS the ping-ping of my Mazda’s paintwork being repeatedly bombarded which made me realise it. Sefton’s powers-that-be have inadvertently won the war on speed!

I can’t have been the only motorist left last week in the peculiar position of struggling to keep within a 20mph speed limit but unwilling to venture above the pace of any half-decent cyclist on the Formby Bypass. A strategy of having every major road resurfaced almost simultaneously turned seeing friends and family into a game of rat-running roadworks and crawling along temporary surfaces, listening to the crackle of my MX-5’s surfaces being chinked and chipped away by the stones being chucked up.

It is, of course, better than the alternative – a North West criss-crossed with roads so badly potholed they’re suitable only for the Lunar Rovers last deployed on NASA’s Moon missions. However, I still pondered which clot had signed off resurfacing the Coastal Road in Ainsdale, stretches of the Formby Bypass, Altcar Road in Formby, and several of Southport’s more important thoroughfares almost simultaneously. Surely redoing ALL of them wasn’t a particularly bright idea?

Then it hit me. The combined threat of destroying the paintwork on your pride and joy and skidding to a fiery death if you drove one of these resurfaced roads at speed had succeeded in reducing the average pace – even on a dual carriageway – to the sort of speeds I normally do on my mountain bike. The roadworks have succeeded where that favourite strategy of the Speed Kills lobby – 20mph speed limits – failed.

Not convinced? Well, nationwide research by the Institute of Advanced Motorists into the effects of dropping 30mph limits by a third showed that the number of accidents actually went up by over a quarter, with less severe accidents increasing by 17%. Logically, you’d reason that the nation’s go-faster drivers are utterly unmoved by a lower speed limit, but I bet they’d think twice about ruining the optional metallic paint on their Audi A4s.

I’m sure I can’t be the only person a bit peeved with the policy of redoing roads with noisy, slow, paint-removing substances en-masse, but you can’t deny it got even the most ardent of speed freaks to back off for a change.

The conclusion’s a simple one. A rubbish road is a safe one.

Life On Cars is five years old!

 

IT'S great to reflect that Life On Cars is now five years old* and - by some stroke of luck - is still going from strength to strength.

Since its humble beginings with a broken-down Mini back in 2009 there have been hundreds of show reviews, test drives, comment pieces and features - and, of course, it's still a regular fixture each week in the pages of The Champion newspaper.

In an idea not-at-all-inspired by Chris Evans' seven-themed displays at the CarFest events, I've decided the best way to mark the anniversary is by looking back at five of the best 'fives' from five years of Life On Cars.

Click on each to find out more about each of these memorable motoring moments...

Five.... unforgettable drives

1) Blackpool Illuminations in a Mini
2) The Buttertubs Pass in Suzuki Swift Sport
3) The New Forest in a Jaguar XK150 (pictured)
4) Derbyshire Dales in a Lotus Evora S
5) North Wales in a Mazda MX-5

Five.... shows you won’t want to miss

1) Lydiate Classic Car Show
2) Cholmondely Pageant of Power
3) Lakes Charity Classic Car Show
4) Goodwood Revival
5) Ormskirk MotorFest

Five.... fantastic Life On Cars moments

1) Raising much-needed cash for charity (pictured)
2) Seeing Life On Cars printed in a national motoring publication
3) Winning a national award
4) Landing a job at Classic Car Weekly
5) Getting printed in The Champion

Five.... moments we’d rather forget

1) Taking an MGB at Curborough - and not doing it much good (pictured)
2) The Volkswagen XL1 being accidentally referred to as a Vauxhall in print
3) Selling the Mini and the Renault 5 within a week of each other
4) The Mondeo’s premature demise
5) Spinning my first MX-5

Five.... greatest cars we’ve tested

1) Ford Fiesta (2009)
2) Honda CR-Z (2010)
3) Citroen DS3 Racing (2011)
4) Morgan Threewheeler (2012, pictured)
5) Suzuki SC100 (2013)

For all these reviews, plus dozens of other road tests, visit the Fire Up The... section.


*Or rather it was five years old last week, but I might have been away on holiday on the big day. Oops!