The Trip isn't helping my Range Rover infatuation

REAL ale, good food, uncannily accurate Michael Caine impressions and ABBA's The Winner Takes It All.

If that sounds like a familiar celluloid combination then chances are you are - like me - a fan of The Trip, the excellent comedy Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and the BBC teamed up to make a couple of years ago. In essence, it takes up the two-blokes-on-a-trip-to-Cumbria format employed so elegantly in Withnail and I, chucks in some sidesplittingly funny improvisation from two of the country's best known comedy actors, and then leaves to simmer in some of the finest restaurants the north of England has to offer.

The Trip is probably one of the most worn-out DVDs in my collection - car chase movies and Bond films aside - so it delighted me no end to discover from a friend that plans are in the pipeline to make a second series, this time moving the restaurant-based action from the Lake District to Italy.

I mention The Trip in a motoring blog, however, because it did such a wonderful job of showcasing one of my favourite cars, the Range Rover, in the Lake District, which is one of the places I love taking a car most. In fact, AF59 WEC almost became one of the characters, seemingly featuring in almost every shot which didn't involve Steve and Rob exchanging Roger Moore impressions over a glass of white wine. Somehow, in the cold, muddy, grey Lakeland vistas, the Range Rover just looks right somehow, even if it doesn't actually venture off road once. Repeated viewings haven't helped my Range Rover infatuation at all!

I can only hope, however, the new series retains part of what gave the show a distinctly petrolhead whiff - shots of suitable set of wheels wafting serenely through whatever sublime scenery there is to offer. It'd probably be right, therefore, for the second series to feature an Alfa or a Maserati strutting its stuff in the Italian countryside.

Getting the comedy balance just right is something I'm really looking forward to with The Trip's second outing. Until then, however, savour just some of the stunning Range Rover shots the series' creators captured in the Cumbrian countryside...

New Porsche 911 Turbo ups the supercar ante

If you’ve won the lottery lately and fancy showing up your neighbours with a shiny new supercar, then the latest in a long line of turbocharged Porsche 911s might just fit the bill.

The new Porsche 911 Turbo, based on the current ‘991’ generation of the evergreen German sports car, packs both a rear-mounted 520bhp flat six engine and four wheel drive into its £118,349 price tag, while the Turbo S version ups the stakes, offering up 560bhp for a cool £140,852.

Porsche GB said of the new arrival: “In the forty years since the first prototype appeared, the place of the Porsche 911 Turbo at the technological summit and peak of dynamic performance has never been in doubt. “Now, with the unveiling of the new ‘Type 991’ generation 911 Turbo and Turbo S, the car’s reputation as a technology showcase combining the virtues of a circuit race car with those of an everyday road car reaches new heights.”

If you can afford it, the first right-hand-drive 911 Turbo and Turbo S models arrive in Britain in September.

The MGB GT gets its fifteen minutes of fame!

As originally published in Classic Car Weekly, 17 April, 2013

The sprint at Aintree reminded me why I miss the North

THE other day my sister posted on Facebook a list of things that I – as a Sandgrounder now ensconced in Peterborough – would be missing about T’North.

Among the suggestions it offered up was coffee served in mugs rather than cups, chatting to chirpy Scousers on Merseyrail trains rather than sitting in silence on the London Underground, and quaint pubs in the Lake District serving dark ales named after poets and fell walkers. What I miss most of all, though, are our car events.

That’s why I found myself in Aintree last weekend, a town well known for its connections with horsepower and racing – yep, part of the old Grand Prix circuit was being used for a sprint event. It’s a surprisingly simple formula for motoring fun; just bring your wheels of choice to the start line, put your foot down, hold on for dear life and hope your engine doesn’t pack in. Which, in the case of one Caterham which left a half-mile of blue smoke and a similarly sized oil slick down the final straight, it definitely didn’t!

The best bit, however, wasn’t watching everything from an E-Type to a Lotus Elise being nailed around the historic circuits corners and chicanes; it was being able to wander around the paddocks and get up close to this mouthwatering machinery and have a bit of a chinwag with the owners. There is something wonderfully egalitarian about the whole event, because it doesn’t matter whether you’ve brought half a million quid’s worth of classic racing machinery or a Renault 5 GT Turbo. At Aintree, all that matters is getting the fastest time in your class.

The one thing that summed that up more than anything else was clocking a lightly abused Renaultsport Clio 182 parked up next to an Aston Martin DB6. The two couldn’t be more different, but both of their owners were the epitome of loveliness and were there not to show off, but because they enjoyed putting their cars through their paces (and, without wanting to offend either, I bet their lap times weren’t dissimilar either).

So the smorgasbord of car shows across the region which always get into their stride at this time of year is something I can add to my list of things I miss about The North. 

Next week; gritty movies directed by Ken Loach, people who insist on lolly ices instead of ice lollies and Brian and Michael’s Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs. Only joking!

Why I might just go and see Fast & Furious 6

A CONFESSION. Despite being a keen connoisseur of car culture I haven’t seen the last Fast & Furious movie. In fact, it’s worse than that. I haven’t seen any of the Fast & Furious movies.

Question is, should I put this silver screen oversight right when the latest instalment in the full-throttle series, the imaginatively-titled Fast & Furious 6, when it arrives in my nearest multiplex later this month?

It’s not as though I don’t enjoy a cinematic helping or two of power oversteer after all. I revelled in Ronin. My full-throttle tastebuds were sufficiently tickled with both the Taken movies, and while Nicolas Cage’s overacting might have ruined the remake of Gone In Sixty Seconds for me, I wasn’t too bothered because it offered up plenty in the way of automotive pornography. And don’t get me started on the automotive appeal of the Bond films.

 Weirdly, though, I’ve always managed to avoid the one current film franchise which doesn’t just feature car chases and carefully-executed drifting, but makes them its raison d’etre. Why? Partly because the automotive actors vying for top billing are predominantly heavily modified Japanese and American actors, and when the first instalment came out way back in 2001 it just didn’t interest a 15-year-old car bore looking longingly at pictures of Triumph Stags and TVRs. It also didn’t help that it starred Vin Diesel, who less than a year later I saw making a complete hash out of being a skater-turns-secret-agent in Xxx. The Fast & Furious films, by extension, I’ve avoided for fear of being a bit crap.

 But the new one, even for someone who works for Classic Car Weekly rather than Fast Car, looks faintly promising. For starters, one of its stars is MK1 Escort, the trailer’s packed with shots of gritty bits of London and Jensen Interceptors, and there’s plenty in the way of pointless cinematic explosions.

Naturally, the more cynical cinema buffs among you could reason that the Fast & Furious franchise has got old and boring enough to appeal to a classic car fan, but I’m going to pretend instead it’s me who’s got more, er, street for a film about modified cars and explosions to suddenly look interesting.

I might just be tempted to venture to the nearest multiplex on this one...

The MG CS doesn't add anything to the crossover party

THE saloon is dead. Long live the sort of hatchback-meets-people-carrier-meets-off-roader!

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last year or two you won’t have failed to notice that your nearest car park isn’t crammed with Mondeos and Vectras anymore; increasingly, it’s Jukes and Countrymans you’ll encounter.

Ordinary hatchbacks masquerading as off-roaders – or crossovers, as the estate agents of the motoring world would rather you and I call them - have been around for ages, as anyone familiar with the Talbot Matra Rancho (well worth a cheeky Google, by the way) will testify. The recent renaissance really took off when Nissan dropped saloons entirely and replaced the Primera with the Qashqai, following it up with the weirder but usefully smaller Juke. Since then Skoda, Renault, Chevrolet, and MINI are among the car makers vying for a chomp at the crossover cake, with Vauxhall and Peugeot set to join the party later this year.

The only problem with crossovers is they essentially fall into two categories. There’s the deliberately trendy, lifestyle-orientated offerings like the MINI Countryman and the Nissan Juke, which like Justin Bieber downloads sell in their shedloads but somehow make your mind ache slightly at their very existence.

Then there’s the likes of Toyota’s Urban Cruiser and Mitsubishi’s ASX – crossovers which do everything you could ever ask of them but are so mind-numbingly dull to behold you wonder why they bothered in the first place. Because crossovers are so style-driven, all you have to do to work out which camp yours belongs in is to have a long, hard look at it.

I worry, just a little bit, that MG’s gone for the wrong approach of the two – if their proposed offering, the CS is anything to go by.

Last year they brought a design study for a crossover, called the Icon, which divided opinion because it looked like someone had managed to take an old MG BGT, ram a bicycle pump up its exhaust pipe and pump it full of air. It might have divided opinion but the important thing is that at least people had an opinion on it, unlike the new car, which isn't a bad looking car but suggests to me that MG’s Chinese owners have chickened out and gone for the most derivative approach possible. Even the name’s boring; MG CS sounds like somewhere you’d buy a three piece suite in a Bank Holiday sale.

To summarise crossovers, no matter how many of them are being bought, are either annoyingly in-yer-face or duller than a wet weekend in Northampton, and MG isn’t helping.

In fact, I only like one; the Skoda Yeti.

Car clubs urged to get involved with Ormskirk MotorFest 2013

THE organisers of a motorsport-themed extravaganza in Ormskirk are asking the region’s car clubs to help make this year’s event a success.

Aintree Circuit Club, which for the past three years has teamed up with West Lancashire Borough Council to host the Ormskirk MotorFest in the historic market town, is calling for members of car and bike clubs to bring their vehicles along and display them to visitors on Sunday, August 25.

If you're a member of a car club which wants to show off their cars at this year's event, you can fill in a special application form to get a club stand on the day by filling by clicking here.

The MotorFest’s organisers have also given the event’s website a revamp, to help give participants and visitors to the event more information about what they can expect from the both the displays and the parades around the town’s one-way system. Aintree Circuit Club is also calling for residents to volunteer as marshals to lend a helping hand to the event’s safety and logistics, and urged anyone interested in offering their support to get in touch.



To find out more about this year’s Ormskirk MotorFest and to find out about how you can take part go online to www.ormskirkmotorfest.com