Woodvale Transport Festival 2013

SOMEHOW it was appropriate a replica of that great wartime symbol of British optimism – the Spitfire – stood proudly at the heart of last weekend’s Woodvale Transport Festival.

I could sense a bit of Battle of Britain spirit at Victoria Park last Saturday morning, when the elements did their best to dampen everyone’s spirits for this year’s events. I’ve seen many a show – even the bigger, most lavishly funded ones – turn into a bit of a damp squib on account of typically British summer weather, but a bit of stiff upper lip meant the show carried on. Right on cue, it brightened up as Saturday morning got into its swing.

To say I’d been looking forward to this year’s Woodvale Transport Festival is an understatement. Even though I’ve been to hundreds of different car shows for as long as I can remember Woodvale is my ‘home’ show and the one I’ve grown up with. From my days as spotty boy scout picking up litter to more recent years when I’ve displayed my own classic on the club stands, it’s always been the one show I’ve put in my diary to get along to. That’s why I convinced Classic Car Weekly to let me come home, get the camera out and immerse myself in this year’s event.

It’s because of my fondness for the rally that I left feeling both slightly sad, but more importantly, optimistic. I thought this year’s show suffered slightly, mainly because of the weather, but perhaps also because the name still links it to the airfield extravaganzas of previous years. Smaller shows can and do work – you only need to look at the classic car gatherings in Lydiate and up at Bank Hall each summer to see that – but the reactions I got from speaking to visitors last weekend was that a bit of a mixed bag.

The Woodvale Transport Festival had some great ingredients – a great venue (as the Southport Flower Show proves), keen exhibitors, a host of classic car owners, model plane owners and other enthusiasts who can’t wait to bring their toys along, organisers committed to its success, and a whole town keen to support it -- but I can’t help feeling this year’s event was an opportunity missed.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say the show’s had its ups and downs over the past few years – through, it must be said, no fault of the organisers or those who support it – but I think the show’s future as a top draw event for Southport, not an airfield just outside Formby, is a bright one.

Every cloud – even the literal one that lingered over the show for much of last weekend – has a silver lining.

Originally published in The Southport Champion, June 26, 2013

Why I'm looking forward to the Woodvale Transport Festival

A celebration of classic cars, bikes and other means of transport gets underway in the heart of Southport tomorrow (June 22).

The Woodvale Transport Festival - the newly rebranded Woodvale Rally – takes place in Victoria Park in the seaside resort, and will be welcoming enthusiasts from across the North West from 10am on both Saturday and Sunday, with admission for adults costing £5.

 I’ll be there too, donning my best Classic Car Weekly-branded jacket and taking pictures aplenty of owners proudly showing off their old Triumphs, MGs and so on. So far I’ve already been to a smorgasbord of shows for CCW, including the Bristol Classic Car Show, Manchester’s Passion for Power, the Donington Historic Festival and most recently the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power, so what made me so keen to make the journey to a much smaller show, held in a park in a northern seaside resort?

 Put simply; it’s my home show, and the one I can remember going to for as long as I can remember.

One of the earliest existing photographs of me involves me standing next to an E-type at the Woodvale Rally, as a pre-pubescent car nut who wandered around the airfield with his dad. Then I spent years litter-picking with the scouts, followed by a stint of helping Mr Simister Senior with the displays at the Red Rose Land Rover Club, and then finally the day came when I could start showing off my own classics at the show. It’s also the first show of any kind where I’ve displayed my own classic, when my old Mini coughed into the venue way back in 2009.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say the show’s had its ups and downs over the past couple of years, but I can’t wait to see what the organisers are going to do with this year’s event. A change of name, a change of price, and a venue, don’t forget, that hosts one of the country’s best known flower shows.

Can’t wait!

Keep an eye out for David’s report on the Woodvale Transport Festival in Classic Car Weekly.

Cholmondeley Pageant of Power 2013

THE sight, sound and smell of supercars strutting their stuff at a stately home in Cheshire proved a bombardment for the senses last weekend.

It’s that wonderful time of year when the sun tries its best to break through the cloud, scores of mouthwatering motors emerge from hibernation, and enterprising petrolheads bring them all together in fields and parks across the north west. It is, if you’re really into wandering around looking at automotive exotica, entirely possible to end up at a car show every single weekend because there’s so many of them across the north west, to the point where you have to start being picky about which ones you go to!

The Cholmondeley Pageant of Power, however, is one I’ll always put down in my diary, because it’s a bombardment to the automotive senses. If you haven’t been – and you should, because it’s only an hour away in the car, in the greener bits of deepest Cheshire – then you’re missing out on a treat. In a nutshell, it involves taking over the grounds of a stately home, turning it into a sort of improvised racetrack and then setting off some of the world’s most exciting cars around it to see how fast they can go. Not only can you get up close to Ferraris and Bugattis and scary Group B rally cars, but you can watch them burning rubber and going flat out too.

I tried totting up the value of the various bits of automotive exotica parked up in the paddock but I lost count when I got to the trio of Le Mans-winning Bentleys – and instead just immersed myself in how stunning these bits of motoring beauty were. I’d try and listen to the loudspeakers for more information for the commentators, but every 30 seconds or so he’d be drowned out by the sound of a Ford GT40 roaring past. Then, if you trapsed past the food stalls and hunted down the rally sections, you could decide whether you’d prefer a Ford Escort RS1800 or a Group B Audi Quattro in your dream garage!

The spectacle of seeing, hearing and even smelling these incredible machines makes the Pageant of Power of what it is, and it was great that thousand of people were enjoying it alongside me, even when it was chucking it down with rain. If you managed to make it to Cholmondeley last weekend, you’ll know why I rate it as one of the best motoring events not just in the north west, but in the whole country. If you didn’t, make sure you jot the dates of next year’s event down in your diary.

It really is that good.

For more pictures and a full report from the event, check out Classic Car Weekly on Wednesday, June 19.

Get set for the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power

Petrolheads can check out some of the world’s most exciting motors at a full-throttle show taking place in Cheshire this weekend.

The Cholmondeley Pageant of Power, which takes place on June 15 and 16, is being billed as one of the north west’s biggest motoring events and will give petrolheads the chance to see supercars and classics alike in action.

James Hall, event director for the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power, said: “The idea behind the Pageant is simple – to create the UK’s most thrilling day out and to ensure admission prices are incredible value for visitors.

“With some of the world’s most famous, most beautiful and loudest cars, from all areas of motorsport, this year’s Pageant will be bigger, better and louder, consolidating its reputation as a must-attend event.”

Relive the highlights of last year's event by clicking here and here.

Motorway pubs could prove the saviour of a Lancashire motoring landmark

SHERLOCK Holmes might have called it a two pipe problem. For me, a clash between two of my favourite things – real cars and real ale – is a two pint problem.

Until very recently I could enjoy both, but knowing the clear boundary between them. Most of my motoring life, particularly on still, summer evenings like the ones we’ve been having lately, involved a classic car of some sort, a quiet pub in the West Lancashire countryside and a refreshing, but legal, shandy. Similarly, if I wanted to be happy in the haze of a drunken hour, Merseyrail’s finest and a plethora of town centre pubs were my oyster.

That’s why new plans by JD Wetherspoon to start opening pubs at motorway service stations didn’t leave me angry or overjoyed. The idea, like a hangover, hurts my head slightly. On the one hand you can take the view of an old mate of mine who argued vociferously that allowing any pub, anywhere, to have a car park is encouraging driving while smashed.

Motorway service stations are essentially big car parks, albeit ones with overpriced coffee shops attached. What’s more, unlike even the quietest of country pubs they cannot be reached by public transport (National Express coaches don’t count).

The Daily Mail reader in me, therefore, thinks motorway service stations are a menace that’ll fuel a drink-driving epidemic. But then I remembered all those visits to Forton Services on the M6, gazed at the Gerry Anderson-esque architecture of the old restaurant tower and wondered which idiot it was who decided Britain’s motorists would no longer benefit from it. It’s a wonderful bit of Sixties architecture – and, on account of it being a listed building, it seems the powers that be agree with me – and I always feel slightly sad when I see it lingering above the Lancashire countryside, unloved and unused.

The idea of it being a family-friendly pub/restaurant job, albeit one festooned with signs warning the designated drivers not to fill up on John Smiths as well as unleaded, appeals more than seeing it not being used at all.

Last year, I put it to JD Wetherspoon that if they’re serious about opening a pub in Ormskirk, they should name it The Harold Wilson (and if they do, you heard it here first). Now I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest that if they’re going to throw caution to the wind and start opening pubs on the motorway, they might as well bring a Lancastrian landmark familiar to drivers across the North West back to life.

Well, the idea made sense at the pub anyway.

The Lamborghini Gallardo has cost me dearly in the pub bragging stakes

“WHAT’S the most powerful car you’ve ever driven?”

There is, in the days when top speed is considered a bit un-PC, still a certain validity about asking what’s the highest amount of bhp you’ve ever handled from one engine. Well, at least there is if you’re two petrolheads and it comes down to pub bragging rights! If you’ve ever wondered what those strange three letters – bhp – stand for, then wonder no more.

The standard way we Brits measure power goes back way beyond the dawn of motoring itself, and hails from the days when James Watt needed to show the world how brilliant his steam engine was. One horsepower – which was always measured at the steam engine’s brake, hence the b in bhp – was equivalent to the work one pit pony could do. It’s a measure which migrated from steam to petrol and, as a result, has obsessed Top Gear presenters ever since.

Naturally, I’ve got my most powerful car to date clearly jotted down in my mental notebook – the Jaguar XKR-S Convertible, which I drove last year. Its 5.0 litre, supercharged V8 churns out no less than 542bhp. Which, in pony terms, means it's enough to keep a discount supermarket supplier in business for several months.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been enough to stop me getting outhorsepowered by my mate. He was treated to one of those ‘try a supercar for a day’ presents for his birthday and, as a result, got given a Lamborghini Gallardo to play with for a morning. I’ve been outgunned – by eight piffling brake horse power – and he hasn’t let me live it down since.

There are, of course, less childish ways to express a car’s oomph. If you want to be intelligent about it there’s the issue of power-to-weight ratio, which is why said mate is hard at work cramming no less than 170bhp into an old Rover Metro, which in theory, should give it the same sort of punch – if not cornering prowess – as a Porsche Boxster. Then there’s the mysterious world of torque, which would take the next three weeks of motoring columns to explain properly but is why so many not-that-powerful turbodiesel cars are so good at overtaking.

Raw power, however, has a certain mine’s-got-more-than-yours childish appeal which still appeals to petrolheads (and probably explains why I like TVRs so much). The best thing about horsepower, however, is that you don’t need to be a motoring journalist to outgun Yours Truly.

All you need to do is get given a certain birthday present, turn up at your nearest racing circuit, and have a blast!

Why the Honda Civic won me over

IT WAS in the wee small hours, long after you’d gone to bed, that a humdrum diesel hatchback stole my heart.

You would’ve found your petrolhead friend in unfortunate surroundings at precisely 00:32am the other Sunday night. A long drive across the country which had already started late was going from bad to worse, because while part of the M62 being closed off for overnight roadworks didn’t frustrate me a subsequent decision by another motorist to have a crash on the Highways Agency’s preferred alternative meant being diverted off the diversion, and what should have been a quick blast over the Pennines had turned into an agonisingly long crawl through Bradford city centre and then around Leeds at stupid ‘o’ clock.

Desperately needing to stay sharp and still the best part of 100 miles away from my destination, I pulled into what must qualify as Britain’s loneliest service station, somewhere near Pontefract. It was somewhere I’d suggest as a shooting location for anyone thinking of a filming a Brit adaptation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, because it was just one semi-shut petrol station in a sea of unlit blackness, with a single, bored cashier and the distant rumble of a passing lorry every ten minutes to break up the inherent creepiness of my late night calling point.

Caffeine-crammed energy drink aside, I had just one weapon to hand should the road-horror-movie-in-the-making have got real. Fortunately, it was a good one; the 2.2 diesel version of Honda’s Civic.

Having driven one last year, I already knew the Civic had improved in quite a few crucial areas over the old one – namely, the redesign of the rear doors to stop people banging their heads as they got in and out – but at the expense of its wonderfully daring design being watered down a bit. A good car, then, but not as good as a Ford Focus. That was, however, until it decided to stop being a good car and start being a brilliant one, by using its turbocharged diesel whallop to devour the darkness over the rest of that journey.

Honda have always been good with engines but the 2.2 turbodiesel is, if munching through motorway miles is what you’re after, an absolute gem. Not only is it quiet, economical and smooth enough to win it friends in austerity-obsessed 2013 but it has so much mid-range whallop on offer that it makes easy work of overtaking just about anything.

With it being 1am on a quiet, unlit motorway, there wasn’t much call for being frustrated by the Civic’s chief niggle – the spoiler cutting right across your rear view – but the Blade Runner vibe of the digital dashboard, the build quality and the comfort completely won me over.

No, it wouldn’t be as much fun as a Focus on a windy country lane but in the freakishly early hours of the morning, when all you want to do is get home quickly and quietly, I know which one I’d rather have.

The MINI owners with 25 million tunes choose from

IF YOU’RE the sort of motorist who can never make their mind up about what music to listen to then you might be interested in a new optional extra for the MINI.

The company has joined forces with music download gurus Deezer to make their downloadable iPhone app link up with MINI models, meaning owners can have access to up to 25 million tunes while at the wheel.

A MINI UK spokesperson said: “Using Deezer in-car is secure and intuitive using the MINI joystick, steering wheel buttons and high-resolution colour display of the on-board monitor, where functions are displayed in the familiar MINI style.

 “The addition of Deezer to the MINI Connected line-up is yet another example of MINI’s future-proof and intelligent interconnection between driver, automobile and outside world.”

 The car must be fitted with the Radio MINI Visual Boost or the MINI navigation system to be able to use the service, and you must have an iPhone to access the tunes.