Ormskirk Motorfest preview event revs up

ORMSKIRK'S traders are being invited to go full throttle next week at an event being held to give them a special preview of a motoring spectacular taking place in August.

Aintree Circuit Club said it is inviting representatives of Ormskirk's businesses to come along next Wednesday (March 16) to a preview of the Ormskirk Motorfest, a showcase and parade of classic and racing cars scheduled to take place in the town centre on August 28.

Event Co-ordinator, John Bailie, on behalf of organisers Aintree Circuit Club, said:

"We have been amazed at the incredible interest which the MotorFest has already generated. We'll have historic Grand Prix cars on the streets, along with a wide variety of racing cars and motor cycles, sports, classic and vintage cars and many more.

"This event is sure to bring many visitors to the town, so we're staging this Preview Event to show the Ormskirk business community how it will benefit them, and how they can play their part in ensuring its success".

Last year The Champion revealed that the club was working with the borough council to hold the inaugural event on the August bank holiday weekend, which will combine a display of classic cars in Coronation Park with a parade of sports and racing cars on the town's one-way system.

Martin Forshaw, Portfolio Holder for Planning and Transportation at West Lancashire Borough Council, said the event would help bring nationwide attention to the town, and is keen for locally-based businesses to find out more.

"The West Lancashire Borough, all the town's High Street retailers and other local businesses stand to gain from the exposure that this event will give the town on a prime Bank Holiday weekend, and it's sure to attract media coverage on a local, national, and possibly international level," he said.

"That's why the plans for the MotorFest are being revealed to local businesses as a first priority".

As well as viewing plans for the MotorFest, attendees of the event, being held will be held at The Green Room, Moor Street will be able to view the MG ZR racing car which is regularly driven by Aintree Circuit Club's Chairman Mike Ashcroft.

If you'd like to attend the preview, or participate in the MotorFest event, please contact John Bailie on 07860 255485 or email jb@aintree.org.uk

The Lotus Elise: brilliant once you get into it

IT was at Forton Services that I pondered whether I'd picked the wrong car for the job.

Picture the scene; you've pulled in for a quick break from a long drive north, it's getting dark, and your passenger, who has a bad back, is trying to get out. In any normal car this wouldn't have been a problem, but I wasn't in a normal car. I was in a low-slung Lotus Elise with a letterbox-like aperture to clamber in and out of, and the roof was up. I've never witnessed
frustration like it.

The Elise S is the smallest, friendliest car Lotus make, but that's like buying a cheetah as your new family pet because it's smaller and more docile than a lion or a leopard. It's still going to make a life a little uncomfortable if you try and get on with it on a daily basis.

It is, for starters, mid-engined, which means the performance-tuned Toyota engine sits where the back seats should be, right behind your eardrums, and the space up front where you'd find the engine in your Ford Fiesta is taken up by an enormous radiator. There is a boot, right at the very back of the car, but it's tiny and almost entirely taken up by the roof, which you don't drop down on a sunny day but unclip and roll up, like a tent.

This will at least make the job of getting in, which is difficult even for a supple young reporter with the roof up, a little easier, because you can just step over the sizeable door sill and drop down into the thin, leather-lined plank that passes as a seat. To be fair, it's suprisingly
comfortable once you get in, or at least it will be until you try to pull away and realise the view over your shoulder is not of passing cyclists but of a chunky roll bar. This is particularly fun when you're trying to pull out on a motorway, for instance.

But here's the rub; if you've ended up on a motorway you're not really using this thing properly. Get rid of the passenger - they're only messing up the power to weight ratio anyway - and chuck this thing at any country lane, because on challenging roads this thing flies. For something that musters a mere 134bhp, the Elise is ridiculously rapid, buzzing and fizzing its way through bends with virtually no roll at all. It is, for better or worse, a really big go-kart.

Anyway, that's the warts 'n' all appraisal of the Elise, and why you shouldn't buy one if you've got knackered joints. If you haven't, tune in next week for a full Life On Cars road test to find out why you should.

How much do you want to sit in here?

LIFE, contrary to the cliché, doesn't begin at 40. It begins at 25.

I excitedly reckon this because as of tomorrow it will be exactly twenty five years since I made my first car journey (although whisper it quietly it was in a Volvo 340) on March 1, 1986. There's lots of things that make it, to my mind, an anniversary worth celebrating.

I can, for instance, take out cheaper car insurance. I can rent things that aren't vans. Best of all, it means I can afford to own an old sports car for the first time, which is about to go through its MOT.

Unfortunately, my other half isn't looking forward to March 1 because I'm having another British sports car delivered to the Champion offices. The 2010 Lotus Elise. And I didn't arrange it so I could use it as a birthday treat. Honest.

What you or I see when we see an Elise is the classic sports car of the future, the finely-fettled drivers' tool which saw Lotus reinvent itself as a master of all things lightweight following the flop that was the front-wheel-drive Elan. What my other half sees, on the other hand, is what you see above; two thin, rock hard seats perched low in a noisy car with next to no visibility at all, accessible only once you've scaled those ridiculously wide sills.

I keep trying to explain to her that sports cars like this - and the even less comfortable Caterham Seven, which I've also squeezed myself into on a couple of occasions - are supposed to be raw and cramped, which she's accepted on the strict proviso that I pay for the osteopath she visits afterwards. Perhaps the only answer is to persuade Lotus to launch a "passenger version" of the Elise, with the driver's side stripped out for thrills and performance and the passenger's retrimmed luxuriously for frills and pampering.

The prospect of an Elise, two conveniently-booked days off and some nice weather is enough to send me into a bout of childish excitement, which is why by the time this week's Champion drops though your letterbox I'll be blasting the Toyota-engined screamer along a mountain pass in the Lake District.

For me, it'll be seat-of-the-pants thrills. For my long-suffering other half, it'll be a pain in the backside.

Anything we can do, the Italians can do with more style

FASHION, food, fine art and prime ministerial sex scandals. Yup, the Italians do just about everything not only better, but more stylishly than we Brits can.

It's the same for cars, because they've had a hand in shaping more cars than you'd probably imagine. Ever owned an original Golf, a Peugeot 406 Coupe, a Lotus Esprit or a Daewoo Matiz and wondered why they're strangely good looking? It's because they've all been sculpted by the automotive artists of Italy, even though the manufacturers in most cases would rather you didn't know about it. All cars with a flair you can't get from any other country, and that's before I get onto the endless procession of Ferraris, Fiats and Alfas.

Take Turin-based Bertone, which last week launched a tantalisingly tempting glimpse of what the next Jaguar X-Type should look like. Anyone who read my article on the old E-Type last week will already know I like my Jags, but the stunning B99 concept car couldn't have been further from the Mondeo-in-drag X-Type if it tried. It's just a shame you'll never see one at your local dealer.

Some show cars, like the Audi TT, do make it from motorshow to motorway almost unchanged, but they're the exception rather than the rule. It's much more likely you'll get something like the Porsche Boxster, which looked a bit like an Art Deco spaceship when it was first shown off in 1993, but what we actually got three years later was completely watered down.

The B99, if anything, reminds me of the Series 3 XJ6 from the late Seventies, which is what happens when you give an already elegant executive saloon to the Italians to play with. It's like sticking James Bond in an Armani dinner jacket - English, obviously, but with a hint of delicate Italian flair.

It's just a shame I reckon Jaguar - a company with a long and proud history of not putting concept cars into production - probably won't make it. Pity really, because they've not really got an excuse not to.

We as as species have longed cracked the conumdrum of making cars work properly, which frees our talented engineers and designers up to stop so many of them looking so derivative. If we can get Italy, the most stylish nation on Earth, to help us out, then we should.

Life's too short to drive a boring car.

Prepare to fire up the... MG 6

AN ICONIC name from Britain's motoring past is making a comeback - and no, it's not the old sports car currently in the Life On Cars garage either.

The MG 6 is the first all new car from MG, now in Chinese ownership, since the MGF sports car of 1995, but the latest model's a five-door hatchback which the company's hoping will bring a bit of upmarket cachet to the small car sector.

“This is a milestone day for the iconic MG brand and for the UK automotive industry. MG has begun the international launch of an all new model that has been designed and engineered here in the UK, for the global automotive market.”

“Currently we only build and sell the mid-engined MG TF sports car here in the UK, but we can now look forward to expanding the range of MG products,” Guy Jones, Sales and Marketing Director for MG Motor UK said.

MG is a fondly remembered name with British car lovers, and is best remembered for its MGA and MGB sports cars of the Fifties and Sixties, the MG Metro and Maestro hot hatches of the 1980s and more recently for taking on Mazda's MX-5 with its mid-engined MGF.

But the company, as part of MG Rover Group, went into administration in 2005 and is now owned by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Cooperation, who revived the badge on the MG 7, a revised and sportier version of the Rover 75, and the the MG TF, the latest version of the longstanding sports car. The Rover name, which was passed onto Ford by previous licence holders BMW, is now owned by Tata as part of its Jaguar Land Rover group.

The new model, a distant relation to the old Rover 75, is currently built by MG's owners in China but will be made in the UK later this year, and is powered by heavily updated versions of Rover's K-Series engines. The 6 is also expected to be followed by a smaller supermini, the MG 3, later this year.

It's a brave move into a tough market for MG's owners, but with a prestigious badge and patriotic appeal on its side the company might just pull it off.

On its way soon...

THE Life On Cars magazine is back!

Regular readers might have been getting a bit bored with seeing adverts for Issue Three of Life On Cars which - despite being dated as a 2011 issue - was a bit of a festive special, celebrating the best cars of last year.

Well almost, with the most I can reveal at the moment of the forthcoming fourth issue being this preview of the front cover. The whole thing will be available to read on here by the end of the month. But with 2011 in full swing and months of warm, petrolhead-friendly weather on the way, it's the right time for the next issue.

If the magazine's anything as good as the gorgeous E-Type cover - which I reckon is my best design effort yet, beating even the jigsaw look of the Car of the Year edition - it should be as much of a cracker to read as it is for me to make it. Fingers crossed!

If you're not familiar with the original three issues, which were published last July, last October and last December, click here or visit the Magazine section.

Life On Cars now on ChampRadio

IT'S here! It's now! It's got jingles and an American chap doing voiceovers! The Life On Cars radio show is back!

Regular readers might remember the first two pieces I recorded for the radio spin-off of this blog, but they were unedited interviews to give a flavour rather than the finished product. That's why I'm pleased to present the polished final product, which thanks to some music and an American chap (who I've never met) doing the voiceovers sounds a lot better.

Click above to hear the latest special edition I promised earlier this week, focusing on the glorious Jaguar E-Type, and if you scroll down you'll hear the final versions of pieces I recorded with guests Gareth Jackson and Katie Massam.

So sit back, enjoy the show and let me know what you think....

Life On Cars episode one, featuring Katie Massam

Life On Cars episode two, featuring Gareth Jackson