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The Joy of Motoring

I love cars. I always have since I was a bairn. I have fond memories of sitting on my father's lap at a rather young age as he let me steer his car (on a disused piece of land of course), of standing between the seats and watching him drive, asking what did what and why, of loving the noise his Triumph 2500PI made when he kicked down the overdrive. The memories go on. I made model cars, I read about cars in magazines, I was taken to cars shows. It was inevitable. When I came to learn to drive at age 17 I pretty much knew what I was doing and nothing was going to prevent me from realising my dreams of driving, and drive I did. Mistakes were made of course, we're all young and dumb once. But ultimately the car offered a level of freedom that was quite a step up from a push bike to say the least. I drove for the sake of it. I explored. I went out to drive because it was fun.

Fast forward a little and after a few hot hatches, I discover sports cars and have the means to purchase a new MX-5. Within weeks, a group of us hired an old airfield from a farmer, took some old tyres and cones to make a track and started having fun. It was the birth of the affordable track day scene, a new chapter in my automotive love affair. Another that would have mistakes being made, but ultimately would mark a huge chunk of my free time and be my passion for many, many years.

The saying of course goes that nothing good ever lasts, and indeed track days evolved, and me with it. Ultimately into a sports prototype racing car and running around some of Europe's greatest circuits. But even as we ran it on a shoestring, it was becoming increasingly expensive. To the point that people dropped out and you'd arrive knowing few people there. It evolved into what existed before; an affluent gentleman's hobby. Something I am not. The Italy trip essentially ended track days for me. 5 star hotels and staggering costs weren't what it was about for us. Running around in a borrowed camper with a 2nd hand race car running hand-me-down slicks could only save so much, so I made the decision to stop. There was a brief foray into rally navigation, but again, costs put paid to that more than anything else.

But it's ok, there's Scotland. A few of us had done the first BERT on a whim and it was epic. We brought it closer to home for the second and discovered the beauty of the land up north. Scotland was magnificent. Stunning scenery, well sighted sweeping roads, and once you got beyond Glasgow, it was pretty much ours and a few other's to enjoy.

Then the dark times came. Lockdown happened. People looked to places closer to home and camper vans infected our secret paradise like a virus. Clogging up its arteries with clueless numpties piloting machines they were not used to on single track roads they hadn't been bothered to work out the etiquette of using. But it wasn't just the campers, some bastard let the secret out and created the NC500. An invasion of petrolheads you might think is a good thing, but anyone who's been on any owners club run will tell you, there's always someone who spoils it for everyone else and brings attention to you.

The net result is that the north is now getting busy. Local councils have started putting pay and display carparks in areas of outstanding natural beauty. A blight on the landscape that works to attract even more people to stop there and clutter the place up. Creating a modern eye sore in what was a relatively unspoiled landscape. I cannot express enough how much I hate this 'progress'. But tourisms gonna tourism I suppose.

Bringing me to now. There's no other way of putting it, our roads are fucked. Decades of neglect and substandard bodging have left us with roads that have broken the suspension on two of my cars and bent multiple wheels. 'Smart' motorways exist seemingly to frustrate by randomly changing the speed limit (enforced of course digitally these days) and make it a potential death sentence to break down now. Most cities and towns are a succession of traffic lights and poor planning, seemingly to create congestion so that they can bill you for the problems they created. Finally there is a plague of 'safety' cameras and vans that operate mostly as cash machines for the local Police authorities and, I suspect, as a handy way to easily up conviction stats without actually doing anything.

I don't know at the time of writing if I'll get a course or 3 points and a fine, whatever happens I'm not particularly bothered about that. What really pissed me off was I was actually having a good day. I'd picked up an awesome second hand telly for a mate, and he'd paid me back with an equally awesome BBQ burger. Then I got home to this. What annoys me was that I didn't see it. It was a new, smaller and taller camera on the other side of the road and from my point of view it was probably partially obscured by the tree you can see in the pic. I'm usually more observant with this. I don't take the piss in towns and villages because I know these fuckers are everywhere. Indeed no one does anymore. No one speeds like they used to. The cameras worked. But they've got to make money, so my bit of speed creep where I wasn't fixated on the speedo results in this.

It's almost as if they want to make motoring miserable. The tax on fuel (then the VAT on that) means we have some of the most expensive fuel on the planet. Road tax, explicitly stated that it is not used for road maintenance, not that we needed the statement to know that, increases steadily year on year to the point that even a little MX-5 that barely covers any miles, costs far more in tax than it does in insurance. I honestly believe that it is no longer possible to enjoy driving in England. We have some stunning places here, I don't have to go far from the local shithole that is Wakefield, to get to some truly magnificent places. Indeed that's what I used to do, but there's no joy in it anymore. Every aspect outside of the car itself is collaborating to make the whole experience miserable.

As I've said, in the scheme of things, the ticket is nothing, but it's a day later and where my anger has passed, it may be the straw that broke the camel's back as I consider my future retirement. I've already ruled out the Jaguar because of potential costs. The Boxster, though expensive now, was still a possibility, but ultimately the MX-5 works better here and always has. Driving the Cayman locally was uncomfortable. So maybe I do just reset the clock with a minty, garage queen 25th Anniversary NC MX-5? No, after this, I'm even considering letting the current one go and stepping into the Ronda.

The Ronda is a Japanese import Rover 416 automatic sat in the garage beneath me. It's been in there a couple of years now. It's an interesting car, a made in Japan Rover that's actually a Honda Civic in a Rover dress as far as I can tell. All the mechanicals are Honda. It's spotless, it still had the wax in the engine bay when we got it. It needs under-sealing to make it UK ready, but it barely does more than a couple of hundred miles a year at the moment. It's something my dad plays with, but ultimately has said I can have when I move on from the MX-5. It's actually a bloody good car. But it's no sports car, and no sports car to me means driving is no longer for pleasure (an old Merc 190E would be an exception to this, but the minty ones I find are all silly money).

Anyone who actually reads this shite will know that this is just spleen ventilation. It happens, I get things out of my system by writing it down. It's a coping mechanism. I usually delete it after it's sat on my machine a few days and I read it back and realise I was just overreacting. We shall see if this episode makes it onto the website, and if it does, whether it's the last entry in this blog. Time will tell.

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