The neighbour of the beast returns.

Heheh, no point now. He's made his oddball anti-fashion statement bed and he'll have to lie in it, especially now what was briefly the world's worst garage has (hopefully) fixed it.

For the record, I am currently seriously considering a Honda CR-V as my snowy runaround.

Can't see much powersliding happening there. )c:

Well it probaly won't break and it's not a truck either. Do the locals have them up there ?

The L200 semms to be the sheep farmers' weapon of choice.

The tweed britches and hunter welly set still like Discos and Range Rovers.

2 Doors down has a 911 which he seems to drive in all weathers, despite the paving slap width rear tyres.

I see plenty of Jap soft roaders, many Foresters among them. I suspect a CR-V with winter tyres will fulfil my needs.

I test drove an Isuzu/Vauxhall pickup yesterday, I think the Turbo wasn't working as it was utterly dead in the water. It was quite comfy but rather alarming in the corners. A CR-V can only be better in this respect. The Disco can be driven relatively fast but it takes commitment.

There's a time and hassle factor of finding something non-local which hasn't bothered me for a couple of years. Pesky Jobs. I suspect I'm going to have to pay a little over the odds to get something from the area.

~£2ks worth of soft roader isn't going to be a terrible investment I don't think.

what about a rav4? not the 2 door there a bit gay i mean the 4 door ones. there quite a nice drive and pretty cheap

That's awesome dude :-) If I'm honest, I really didn't think they'd fix it and assumed it was a long fight ahead for you, I'm happy to be wrong hehe! As for the paint, I think expecting an 8 year old motor to have no stone chips is a bit much, and I'm not sure you can really expect a proper blown over spray job.

Those red, white and green Toyota ones are cool hehe :-)

I forsee a small pocket money earner for you and your mate ;-) He posts them to you, one at a time, marked as gifts (you give him the money and he buys them so he has invoices and is just a real nice guys ;-) ) and you and him skim a few quid off the top :-p

I reckon just over 30mpg.

I used to just undertake. I was naughty. I don't feel bad about it.

In the 197 I had this challenge to get over 90 on the twisty, very bumpy up and down road into the village - no other car I had or indeed had ever driven down there would get to even close. The only problem was that when I had to change it to 100 cos 90 was easy I had to disable the ESP because the bumps at that speed confused it a bit and it tried to scrub a few mph off which ruined my speed runs. It seemed though that the longish 90 degree, uphill left hander, with huge bumps on the inside of the corner and a big huge crater for a drain as well, probably shouldn't be taken at 100mph as if you want to avoid the crater you go quite a bit onto the wrong side of the rather narrow road, which is a blind crest at the top of the hill about

15-20m after the corner. And, if I'm deadly honest, I didn't really like that after the time a lorry (one of them medium big ones) came over the crest, also a bit on the wrong side of the road as well and must have missed me (totally like his fault *ehem*) by like, one billionenth of a gnats hair...

There's no way it sounds better than the 197 did at 7,lotskrpm with the shift light flashing away like a mentalist mini xmas tree - that used to pop and scream in awesome ways and just sounded so good as it came on cam (I don't know if that's what it did at all tbh) around 5andabitkrpm and pushed you back into the Recaro as it used its new found burst of power :-p

Bet that was a bit of clenching moment... Did it end ok or in the barrier?

At least she didn't say you were anything bad :-)

Can you get a nice one of them, that's not like starship miles for the money he spent on the Lexus? I know they're ok with miles usually, or they used to be, but I wouldn't fancy dropping 4k on something with 180k on it...

You can in the snow :-)

What type of 4x4 is it? Haldex or, erm, whatever name you call the other full time old skool 'better' way?

Been there, heard that. Every time I get in the car with erindoors I close my ears. She expects me to stop at every junction to wave out little old ladies and then to sit behind them for ten miles as they putter along at 15mph. Apparently this is "nice".

VTEC just kicked in, yo!

It's FWD normally and it's got some sort of hyraulic clutch which engages the RWD when the front wheels start to slip. It's Jap so I don't know if it's actual Haldex, but as I understand it, thats how it works.

It wasn't me who said anything bad about the garage, I was just prepared to be just as awkward if they got arsey about it.

They didn't.