Most memorable drives

All over Europe in Transit vans for weeks on end roadying. Youth, no responsibilities, £20 PD and free beer (and smoke in the more civilised countries). Tales to tell the kids that I know I can never tell 'em ;)

Is that where you get the nickname 'UncleFista' from?

All round Tayside Police's rural stations doing a network survey for Orange. Dead easy; pitch up to part-time cop shop in my car, grab phone with engineer mode enabled, take cell and signal dB data and move on to the next, for two days.

Ok, my choice of weapon was a mk4 Astra SRi which argueable could have been better, but I had a right laugh doing it. I'd just got Tom Tom Navigator 2 and thought it was cool that I (thought...) I could see what the road ahead was doing so I drove the whole lot like a complete dick. I remember screaming into a village T-junction with the brakes on fire...

I had to have the disks replaced after this one due to warpage, which led to some interesting questions from the lease company, as I'd just had them replaced three months beforehand. Due to warpage...

Genuine massive LOL here :-D

Picking up the Vee, in a huge rain storm, that lasted half of the drive home. My first solo RWD that as well... The fear made it more exciting.

Home to Stoke and back with a mate in the 206 to pick up an RC car. We got back in some obscenely quick time, and at one point were seeing indicated speeds over the 206s top book speed... And proceeding to get away from an M3 down a twisty road.

And obviously, the first virgin drive after passing my test, in the ice on the 18th of December 2000 :-)

"Pete M" wrote in message news:fglup2$glv$ snipped-for-privacy@registered.motzarella.org...

Mates C15 van from Cambridge to Austria, pause for 6 weeks, then to the far end of Slovakia, then back again. UKAustria done with a trailer which was dug out of a pile of chicken shit the morning we were due to leave when we realised that the huge pile of stuff we had to take just wasn't going to make it. Towbar attached in a hurry, roofrack with some other stuff, and everything went in. Memorable moments included teaching copilot how not to crash on the motorway (when it starts swerving, don't try to correct), a RH turn taken just after overtaking a lorry a little quickly, 2nd gear full revs in the middle lane of the autobahn crawling up hills, overtaking even slower stuff than us, arriving at a the bottom of an Austrian pass to find a red traffic light and letting out an awful lot of smoke from the brakes (not the tyres, the brakes...), collecting water from a dark mountainside for the leaking radiator in the middle of the night somewhere in slovakia, seeing it start after what seemed like 10 minutes turning over producing clouds of smoke after said radiator had been brazed up, squealing tyres all the way round a service station slip road, the owner of the car in the one behind me saying "oh no not again" (the previous van had been rolled the year before), towbar almost falling off in Luxembourg on the way back (tied on to the roof rack - we had about a mile of rope with us, it having been a caving expedition) and getting searched by French roving customs who made us take everything out - took bloody ages getting it all back in again.

All in a 1769cc NA diesel :-)

cheers, clive

Seagate Bigfoot. I had two fail - one new one, and the second one was the warranty replacement. I didn't bother getting a second replacement...

WTF did you do to an E30 to make it do 180mph? I reckon you'd need something like 350-400 horses to push one of them to that speed.

Caning the f*ck out of the Ka on various occasions - keeping up with whichever's the fast Saxo and an S3 around some lanes I knew well up above Leeds, upsetting a bloke in a 330 on the way to Norwich who couldn't shake me on the twisties around Newark, doing the same to a bloke in an Elise and another in a Pulsar on the local lanes. I know all this sounds highly improbable, but this was before I put the car on its roof and realised that I am in fact mortal. I did some 360s in the Ka one year when a local industrial estate was iced over, which was nice. And hooliganing round the car park early one morning when I was still at college and it was iced over was hilarious.

Taking mates out in the Volvo 340, sidewaysness on roundabouts, caning Novas off the lights around Norwich, shooting past people on the local lanes again, this time in a Volvo, wearing a trilby and smoking a pipe... That and driving out to go mountain biking and marvelling that even a Volvo with cart springs and f*ck all power has lovely balance through the bends.

Going for to Nottingham in the Mondeo, complete with knocking big ends, catching the bumper on some armco in a car park. Bumper dropped off, took the exhaust with it, drove it round like that for another week or two.

Finding out that I am in fact not Marcus Gronholm and that I can't control a Golf 16V up an ice covered lane after I've yanked the handbrake. Has to count as the most pointless bump I've ever had, as I drove to work to find that nobody else had bothered due to a consumate lack of bollocks. Thankfully I only needed about £80 quids worth of bits from GSF to put things right.

Follwing a bloke in a 206 GTI in my Golf, again up the local B roads, and having him let me past because I was going a lot faster than him. I was most pleased when I found out the big difference in power between the 206 and my

And the time I borrowed my Dad's old 4 litre Jag back when I had the Mondeo and insurance on any car. Took the mountain bike out in the back of it, and made some very long black lines when I a) overdid it turning out of a T-junction on my way home, and b) Wondered how fast it'd launch if I held it at 3K against the brakes at the traffic lights... First time driving a RWD car with some power and an LSD. The other bizarre thing was stamping on the kickdown and thinking that the car didn't feel very fast, then noticing that despite the fact that the car still didn't seem to be moving, the world seemed to be passing by very quickly

It was the 2.5 Evo engine, turbocharged to 1 bar. 360 HP at the wheels,

We never got the M3 really to topspeed: we always ran out of road, even in Germany. At 280 the acceleration was gone, but the needle kept creeping up.

That was the first test and I had promised a top around 300 kph. Then the customer started begging for prove. The road to Namur was a bit of trichery because it's a longish descend.

We were very quickly down and it didn't really slow for the hill up. And then the heli-pilot decided to land in front of us. 15 m closer and I would dented a freshly tuned M3 and buggered up his chopper. ;-)

On the way back to Brussels the pilot couldn't catch the M3 anymore (the highway is about straight). I did not enjoy the lift back: I saw myselve in jail, the car confiscated and handed at least a major licence revoke.

The colonel waited for us at Caserne Van Halen. "Good work, chaps, never do it again!" He gave us the keys and walked off. I simply couldn't believe my luck. I invoiced the car on arrival home, got paid on the spot and went partying. Don't remember the night but had an enormous headache in the morning. :-)

Tom De Moor

Quite jealous of your life.

Don't: in retrospectif it was always a balancing act. Long hours, not very much paid and no reserve.

We did everything from testdrives to teaching cops how to drive their Saabs, from wrecking cars to building rollcages. We enjoyed it because we were young, time was free, a weekend had 48 hours and risks were fun. All money went into racing but racing has but very limited spots of glory and glamour. Harder still: pricemoney was close to non-existant.

We taught we made our break after winning some championships but the only things we received was jealousy and a more than strong hint from a few constructors: "Never makes us look silly again or we will run your ass".

Laughed at it at the time but next season our car got crashed 4 times during practice when somebody ran into in. Car broken, money gone.

Big problem for mainland Europe is that no tuning is allowed on public roads and if detected there are severe penalities. That means there is a good as no market. Then came the M3-close encounter and a mayor client who killed himself (in a not-modified car).

Got a bit fed up, did want to beg for sponsors nor borrow money for that "big break". Some of my "friends" (you do not have friends because everybody is fishing in the same small pool) took the gamble: 100.000 Eur (70 KUPD) for one WRC-rallye (3 days).

Most of them are still paying their debts today, a few are dead and some are in jail. Two or three landed a constructor-contrat, only one made big money (he wasn't exactly poor when he started)

Tom De Moor

What do you do for a job now just a matter of interest?

When I bought the GTM, me and a mate flew to Bristol, got a train to Didcot and then drove the car home. a GTM Rossa K3 is narrower than a Metro and the roof height is a full 4 inches lower than an MGF. I'm a big bloke and so is he, but the car was a dream. Fantastic fun.

Also memorable was the first time I drove the Locost. It was pouring with rain and I had no roof - just a helmet. That car would wheelspin in third gear - had a 1640 xflow on weber 40s. By the time I got home I was soaked through to the skin.

Another good one was when I went to visit a mate in Helensburgh with my first Robin Hood. There's an old military road over there which has bends like you wouldn't believe. We took it in turns to drive the car doing flypasts as the other stood at the side and watched. Superb fun.

First drive on my first Sylva was great - such a small car, yet just enough room to get comfortable. After we fitted the Zetec it was even better.

Haven't really driven the current Sylva very much yet. Winter titivation then some hills and sprints next year :-)

I am a self-employed mechanical engineer with a company with 5 technicians in building automatisation (automatic (garage)doors, access control, CCTV, etc), another company in computer/networking/consulting and I still have the tuning company which started it all.

The strange thing with me is that hobbies always have grown into professions. I think that this is because there was no other way to pay for them or maybe because I always wondered at the price: for what that costs, I can do that myselve. :-)

Tom De Moor

That's about my view. Racing is alright if you've got the cash to throw at it or are content throwing a lot less cash (but still a lot) at a far less glamourous class. A few folks are very lucky and get full sponsorship, or are well off enough to not worry, but most end up paying for a fair proportion of big £ out of their own pocket.

How do you make a small fortune out of motor-racing?

Start with a large one.

Will you give me a job?

That would mean moving to *shudder* Belgium....