Get ready for the Lydiate Classic Car Show

A GROUP of charity fundraisers are getting revved up for a classic car show set to take place in Lydiate next weekend.

The organisers of the Lydiate Classic Car Show, which takes place next Sunday (July 8) are urging fans of all things automotive to help raise funds for Cancer Research UK by checking out an eclectic variety of cars, motorcycles and buses owned by enthusiasts from across the north west.

Alongside the vehicles visitors will be able to peruse charity stalls at Lydiate Parish Hal, where the show is being held, and pick up snacks at a variety of refreshment stalls. It also the first time the annual show includes an autojumble, with traders offering spare parts at the show.

Entry to the show, which takes place between 10am and 4pm, costs £1 for visitors and exhibitors alike, with no need to prebook display vehicles. All proceeds from the show will be donated to Cancer Research UK.

Ormskirk MotorFest 2012 attracts hundreds of entrants

HUNDREDS of classic car and bike owners have entered their machines into this year's Ormskirk MotorFest, the event's organisers have confirmed today.

Aintree Circuit Club said that it had received more than 250 applicants from enthusiasts keen to exhibit their machines at the motorsport-themed event, which takes place in the centre of the West Lancashire market town on the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Club spokesperson Mike Ashcroft told Life On Cars: "Once again Ormskirk is looking forward to the MotorFest. Over 250 entries from all classes of competition cars and motorcycles, classic cars and supercars have been received so far.

"Last year's event was a resounding success with spectators enjoying the static displays and exhibitions and the various themed parades around the town centre, and this year there will once again be static displays of vehicles in Ormskirk town centre on Aughton Street and Moor Street, with more in Coronation Park."

Among the entries expected to take part in this year's event are a Metro 6R4 Group B rally cars, MG racing and rally cars, historic F1 cars, and the return of the 1950s bubble cars which proved an unexpected hit with visitors at last year's event.

The club also reiterated that the event, which it is organising in partnership with West Lancashire Borough Council, will remain free of charge for visitors, with both organisations keen to top last year's inaugural event, which saw more than 10,000 people pack into the town centre to see the exhibits and a series of car and bike parades around the town's one way system.

The MotorFest's organisers will also be helping to support several charities on the day - the Ben Gautrey Foundation, who will be leading a motorbike parade in tribute to the Southport superbike racer tragically killed during a race last year, the North West Air Ambulance, one of this year's West Lancashire mayoral charities, and Claire House Childrens Hospice.

This year's Ormskirk MotorFest will take place in Ormskirk town centre on Sunday, August 26. For more information visit the event's website.

How to pick up a classic luxury Rover for peanuts

YOU DON'T park a Rover P6. You dock it, like a luxury liner.

A luxury liner, as it turns out, that my mate's just sailed into port for less than a grand. He was going to buy a brace of Triumph Spitfires long past their sell-by-date as a job lot, but decided at the last minute he'd rather go for the leather-lined barge from the Sixties instead. I don't blame him, because what the old girl lacks in sportiness and open top thrills it makes up for in style and caddish character.

Naturally, at that sort of money it needs a bit of work but it was still in good enough nick for me to take a pew in the leather-lined captain's chair and fire it up, treating both us to one of motoring's greatest soundtracks - the baritone burble of Rover's 3.5 litre V8. The car door Vinnie Jones used to such brutal effect in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was a P6's, so Guy Ritchie obviously agrees with me that the old Rover's got a geezerish swagger to its style, but that engine note and the laid-back performance it brings is undoubtedly the P6's best feature.

It's also the reason why I wouldn't - no, couldn't - buy one, because one of my all time favourite saloons has also got an unquenchable thirst for the jungle juice. The only P6 I'd ever want is the V8 version, but because I can't afford to run something that struggles to get 15 miles to the gallon the ocean liner Rover is out of the question. Helpfully, the Government's agreed to suspend its plans to raise fuel duty, but for P6 perusers it just isn't enough.

I hopped back into my own Rover, the rather more realistic 200 Series of Hyacinth Bucket vintage, and quickly realised there is a way to blend the reliability (don't laugh) of the later cars, engineered with BMW and Honda help, with the Midsomer Murders looks of the old ones. You might laugh now but the Rover 75 is motoring's bargain of the moment.

It's got all the style and comfort of the old P5s and P6s but thanks to Rover's turbulent tumble towards extinction and the car itself having all the street cred of a pensioner's bus pass good 75s can be readily picked up for less than a grand. Trendy it isn't but it's a lot of car for the money.

More importantly, the 75 is tomorrow's P6 - I'll eat my own shoes if collectors aren't fighting for the good ‘uns in 15 years time. Get yours now while they're still peanuts...

Fire up the... Renault Twizy

EVER since they cancelled kids' TV favourite Captain Planet saving the world hasn't been the same. Eco-friendliness is all very noble but it's - to my mind at least - a bit boring.

This is particularly true of electric cars, which have at best been dull and overpriced and at worst fatally flawed, but Renault's determined to change all that. With, by the looks of the utterly bonkers Twizy, something that's been styled by Gerry Anderson's production team rather than a car company's design department.

Tall in stance, open-wheeled and equipped with little bodywork other than a set of scissor doors cast in plastic rather than steel, the Twizy (which, by the way, rhymes with easy and not, as I thought, Thin Lizzy) is quite unlike anything I've clapped eyes on. In fact, the only thing that comes close in terms of visual impact is the Morgan Threewheeler I drove earlier this year, and in both instances you'll have to get used to being looked at.

So the Twizy, if you're shy, probably isn't not your bag but - and I really wasn't expecting it - it is mine. It is, if you've been raised on a diet of fast cars with noisy petrol powerplants, not exactly the last word in speed, but it's weirdly thrilling to drive because it's so nimble and because the relatively low grip from the skinny tyres offer up as much fun at 30mph as some cars struggle to do at twice that.

With electric cars it's usually at this point I say it'd be great if it weren't for an extortionate price tag, but at less than seven grand the Twizy doesn't have one.

Think of it as a car and you won't get it - it's too exposed, too impractical not plentiful in the seats department for that - but as a scooter for scaredeycats it's big fun. It's small, easy to park, kind to the environment, and because it comes with seatbags and an airbag and because you can't fall off it, a whole lot safer than taking two wheels to work. In fact, I think the Twizy's only real failing is that, with it being an entirely eco-friendly effort, Renault won't offer you one with a perkier petrol engine.

The Twizy is odd and impractical but it puts a smile on your face and has a definite ‘want one' factor. Which for me makes it a landmark in the world of electric cars.

The Skoda Octavia is a Czech motoring icon

IT HIT me as I pulled a fistful of Koruna out of my pocket to pay for the enormous glass of Pilsner. Prague, thanks to public transport that’s second to none, doesn’t really need the car.

During my three days in the Czech capital last week it struck me that the central European city’s a cracking holiday destination largely because it’s very pretty, almost everyone speaks English and the beer’s very cheap. However, the added bonus is that everything is linked up to everything else using a mind bogglingly comprehensive spaghetti of trams, buses, boats and underground trains.

Praguers, then, don’t really need to drive, but when they do they almost always go for the same car. The Skoda Octavia.

You might think Skoda’s mid-range offering is fairly unremarkable but on the bustling streets of Prague they’re everywhere – the taxi drivers swear by them, every police patrol vehicle is an Octavia vRS and every other parking space for miles around is filled with the Czech company’s finest. True, Skoda offers value for money like few other car companies but you just couldn't imagine Londoners taking up say, the Rover 75, with anything like the same vigour.

There are even a couple of horrors within the pages of this uniquely Czech success story – I couldn’t help but take a picture of a navy blue model some colourblind yoof had decked out with yellow alloys, silver door handles and green bumpers!

The Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy fan in me had secretly hoped every alley in Prague would be littered with Eastern Bloc oddities from the bad old days, but all I found were Octavias. In fact, I had to venture all the way to the city’s technical museum to get a glimpse of the old school Skodas and Tatras – idiosyncratic, rear-engined offerings which you were allocated largely on your standing within the communist party. They’re fascinating footnotes from the country’s industrial past but the museum pieces are just that – exhibits, which looked all the more obsolete because they were displayed alongside decadent, capitalist classics like Jaguars and BMWs from the same era.

In fact, it was only towards the end of my trip I tracked down a proper socialist saloon – a Trabant, which I know is of East German origin but would have been a common sight here a generation ago. Yet just as you’re more likely to see a branch of KFC than a Soviet tank in central Prague in these days, so the Trabbie, intriguing though it was, looked a bit ridiculous in a city that’s long since turned its back on the bad old days.

Naturally, it was parked next to a modern motor I’d much rather drive. A Skoda Octavia.

Czech out these stunning classic cars from the Prague Technical Museum

TODAY'S Life On Cars treat comes all the way from Prague, which is fascinating for all sorts of reasons if you're into car culture.

There are all sorts of reasons why you'd enjoy the Czech capital if you enjoy things with wheels and engines - some of which I'll go into tomorrow - but above all I'd reccomend a trip to the city's Technical Museum, which is a bit off the beaten tourist track but is off the petrolhead scale in terms of exhibits.

Not only do you get all the automotive oddities you'd expect to find in a distinctly Czech museum, including plenty of Skodas and Tatras, but all sorts of stunning machines produced long before the Iron Curtain went up. I'm not sure how a Jaguar SS1, an unrestored Mercedes W154 Grand Prix car and a Bugatti Type 51 ended up in Prague, but I'm glad they did. However, even they couldn't play fiddle to what, for me, was their most prized possession of all - a MKIX Spitfire, which was flown by Czechoslovak fighter pilots who served with the RAF in the Second World War.

Here are just some of the cars offering a handy distraction for any car nuts who fancy giving the Charles Bridge a miss...

Read more of Life On Cars writer David Simister's motoring reflections on Prague tomorrow (June 24).

Fire up the... Jaguar XF 2.2D

FIGURES. There were all sorts of fantastic ones involved with the Jaguar XKR-S I drove recently but with this rather more realistic big cat just one matters - 133.9. The going price, in pennies, for petrol at the moment.

That's why any executive car maker worth their salt has got to have a decent diesel at its disposal, because while the slippery stuff costs a little bit more you get an awful lot more for your gallon. Look through the sales figures of any swish saloon and it's no longer the silky straight sixes and the thumping V8s that are the big sellers. It's the ones you fill up with the black pump.

Jaguar's been lucky to have a superb diesel - the 2.7 litre, Citroen-derived V6 - to call on in recent years but it's this smaller, 2.2 litre unit that really matters for the XF. Finally, more than four years after the saloon's introduction, it's got an engine that can actually hit the 5-Series, the A6 and the E-Classs where it hurts. The 2.2 XF diesel could and should be the firm's biggest seller.

The improvements aren't just limited to the engine room, either; you might have noticed the XF got a facelift last year, meaning the slightly-clumsy headlights are gone in place of some much sharper, XJ-style ones. I can think of few cars whose looks actually improve after the now compulsory midlife makeover, but the XF's one of them.

Anyone venturing inside won't find the church pew dashboards and acres of cream leather you got in this car's ancestors but what you get instead is Jaguarness with added modernity. The way the rotating gear selector for the slick eight-speed auto rises out of the centre console, for instance, is very Gadget Show, but the use of wood, leather and tech make the cabin infinitely more interesting than the wall-to-wall black leather you'll get in BMW's 5-Series.

 So would you buy one over the Beemer? Both cost £30,000, both will prove cosseting and comfy companions and both come with all the toys any thrusting middle-management type demands, but it depends on what you're looking for. The BMW, by a whisker, is the more refined of the two and will go ever so slightly further on a gallon, but the Jag's better looking, more characterful and more fun when it strays off its natural habitat of the motorway's outside lane.

I'd take the Jag.

Southport mechanics restore couple's classic Morris Minor wedding car

Pictures by Martyn Snape, Champion Newspapers

A COUPLE who used their beloved classic car as their wedding transport have just had it lovingly restored to its former glory by a West Lancashire firm.

John and Jean Fagan, of Snape Green in Scarisbrick, told The Champion this week they were delighted that Molly, their 1963 Morris Minor Convertible, had been restored by mechanics working at the Southport branch of West Lancashire car repair specialists Karl Vella.

The car holds a special significance for the couple because John originally bought it for Jean in 2008 as a wedding present, and the couple used it as their wedding car at a ceremony at Briars Hall in Lathom.

Jean told Life On Cars: "She made an excellent wedding car - the little car has given us so much pleasure and happiness. Wherever we go in her, people wave and smile and want to know her story.

"Molly was in good condition when we bought her but more recently we noticed a bit of rust and some of her paint was starting to crack. We made the decision to have her paintwork completely renewed, and some of the metalwork has been replaced. She looks absolutely magnificent now thanks to the work of John, Peter, Darren and Kieran at Karl Vella in Southport."

Jean, a lifelong Minor enthusiast, added that although she didn't drive at the time she learned and passed her test just so that she could use Molly as her own car after the wedding. The couple brought the car into the company's site on Cemetery Road last December, and during quieter periods at the garage the car has been brought back to its former glory using new paintwork, improvements to the metalwork and a restoration of the interior.

Karl Vella MBE, Managing Director of the Karl Vella Group, said: "I'm delighted John and Jean are happy with our work. The lads have done a cracking job - I was really impressed at how they pulled out all the stops to ensure the car was restored to its former glory."

 Do you have a story you'd like to share with Life On Cars? Get in touch by sending an email to david.simister@hotmail.co.uk or leave a comment below...

Cholmondeley Pageant of Power 2012 - Part Two

LIKE the buffet at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, it's all too easy to gorge yourself silly with all the car shows on at the moment.

I think it must be to do with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the London Olympics and Euro 2012 having a head-on slap bang in the middle of summer that the run of the region's motoring events have been shoehorned into the few wet weekends when we haven't broken out the bunting or adorned our cars with En-ger-land flags. Which is a pain if you all you want to do is drool over shiny supercars in a field.

Over the past weekend I've had the choice of watching Audi win at Le Mans for the two millionth time, watch steam trains and classics meet at the Ribble Steam Railway, watch old racing cars doing burnouts in the grounds of a castle in Cheshire or chat to some classic car enthusiasts at an event in Hundred End, just outside Hesketh Bank. In the end I went for the latter two and while Hundred End proved good fun it's the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power that'll stick out in the mind most.

Think of it as a sort of automotive Glastonbury and you won't be too far off - an impression, thanks to the relentless sheets of rain, made all the more real by the soaked visitors trying to create ponchos out of binbags. Headline acts included Jaguar D-Type and the Le Mans racers of the Fifties, gritty live performances from the Group B Audi Sport Quattro and the Lancia Integrale Group A car, and a deep-throated solo session given by the a vintage Bentley special with a 42-litre Packard engine. Yep, you read that right; 42 litres and more power than a Bugatti Veyron!

It was automotive overload - with so much on offer, where do you start? At the tent where a Lexus L-FA, an Aston One-77, a Nissan GTR and a V8-engined Ariel Atom competed for your attention? At the big screen, watching a superbike ace going sideways on two wheels? Or at the start line, watching a BMW M3 racing car shred its way through a set of tyres in a burnout? Even though I missed out on the chance of getting up close to a McLaren F1 pretty much every other significant fast car, bike and boat was there somewhere, pulling in the crowds.

There are all sorts of motoring shows on across the north west this summer and they'll all be a great day out, but I think what gave Cholmondely the edge was that the cars weren't just museum pieces - you could actually see them being driven, in anger, by people who love them. Yes, I got soaked and my shoes got ruined but it was worth it just to see the Rothmans Ford Escort RS1800 strutting its stuff at the start line.

In a smörgåsbord of car shows stretching right out to the end of the summer, Cholmondeley's proven a bit of a feast in itself...

To see more photos from the event, click here for Part One.

Hundred End Festival of Transport 2012

 

A FEW pictures from the Hundred End Festival of Transport, which is taking place near Banks, in Lancashire this weekend:

If you've got a motoring event or bit of news you'd like to share with Life On Cars get in touch by sending an email to david.simister@hotmail.co.uk or simply leave a comment...

Cholmondeley Pageant of Power 2012 - Part One

WET but worth it. That's the conclusion you'll probably have come to if you clocked an Audi Sport Quattro, a Napier Bentley and a Lexus L-FA strutting their stuff at Cholmondeley today.

The Pageant of Power, which has been held in the grounds of the Cheshire castle since 2008, has grown into one of the biggest celebrations of horsepower, history and handsomely-styled machinery anywhere in Europe, with the added thrill of actually getting to see hundreds of cars and bikes in action on a specially-created test track.

 Here are just some of the photos of the mouthwatering machines which took part in the event, come (mostly) rain or shine:

For more pictures, a video and a full review of the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power 2012, check back tomorrow (June 17) for Part Two...

Events: Lancashire Classic Car and Bike Show 2012

FROM the organisers of the Lancashire Classic Car and Bike Show, taking place at Hoghton Tower on Sunday, June 24:

The Lancs Classic Car and Bike Show will be a stunning gathering of classic vehicles assembled at Hoghton Tower near Preston, Lancashire.

There will be an array of vehicles ranging from pre 1950 Singer, Morris, Riley, Rover & Humber to modern day classics such as the MG, Porsche,TVR, Mercedes & E-Type Jaguar with BSA and Velocettes in the Classic Bike Section. Hoghton Tower is a well known local venue ideally suited for a classic vehicle show.

Vehicle events have been running there continuously for almost two decades and continue to be a very popular feature on the classic vehicle calendar in the North West. We always get around 400 classic cars, a good turn out of classic bikes and around 25 autojumble and trade stands. There are 14 clubs booked in to the show, travelling from the surrounding area such as Wigan, Cheshire and other parts of Lancashire these include the Stag OC, Cheshire Classics OC, Merseyside MG Club, Liverpool and Cheshire Capri Club to name just a few.

In addition to the 100+ Club vehicles on display, there is a further 200+ private entry vehicles booked in that will display in categories divided by decade. Visitors can enjoy the show and have the opportunity to walk around the beautiful house, grounds and gardens (entrance by separate admission). There will be an all day concours competition with live commentary and prizes plus catering options within the show, providing an enjoyable day out.

For more information visit the Andrew Greenwood’s Classic Shows website at www.classicshows.org or call 01484 667776.