Retro Rides Gathering 2012 - 19th August

[Lucky]

Still haven't got Facebook . Put them on Photobucket and paste the links, lazy boy

[Lucky]

Right, since I ain't lazy I'll put up a proper report with like proper photos in it then, innit then , shall I? Hahaha, actually I'll cut and paste the one I put on Exile lol Don't hate me, it's enough work editing 500+pics and writing all this drivel out the once. Plus I suppose I'll have to tone the thing down a bit before putting it on RR Anyhooo....


Shall I start with the most awesomest stand in the place, wot was of course the Exile/FB.com stand? Despite no-one else on RR apparently understanding what they were looking at, or indeed taking any pics of it at all. Heathens, I'll have to get in there and educate them a bit lol

MR TOOL's inspired rotor display should have gone some way to drawing them in, and certainly a lot of people came over and peered at it forlornly lol


I reckon it was the pink blanket wot made it really pop though hahaha. Maybe we need to set up some interpretation for people to get to grips with what they're looking at next time. Or have some friendly type (if we can find one) standing about to answer questions haha. I definitely think like a few guys suggested already that a nice banner is essential if we're gonna actually keep having enough cars working to make up a stand, we were a bit anonymous in the field and need our identity out there.


Right, cars then. Think we have to start with Timmers' new beast really, simply because it's most excellent and it's the first pic I came to









I haven't got many of Steve's in here cos most of the full-car shots I took were on the hillclimb, which'll come later. Here's a couple of detail pics though




Rexi84's Series 2 confused me until I realised it was supposed to be a different colour to mine, didn't realise Mazda went to the effort of making two almost identical blues


Want!


Loving the rotor heartbeat graphic, too


By now the punters were hopelessly confused, they'd looked at Tim's turbo FC engine, then Steve's one-off throttle bodied lump, then come to the Weber downdraft setup and they'r elike "gahhhh, all these cars look the same but every engine's different..... in fact, which bit is the engine?". Good job I kept my bonnet shut, or they'd have been "but this one's just a huge blue box"


Marc and Karissa (when they could be bothered to turn up after spending the previous day at some little-known show no-one ever goes to lol) completed the line up of not-quite-matching blue FBs


Gotta admit, those Celica-Supra wheels do look well! It was great to meet the pair of you, and thanks for keeping us laughing till the very end! Ooooh, patination;


What are the odds, eh? Don't see another FB from one month to the next and then three blue ones come all at once


Just to prove we're not all about RX-7s some funny fella turned up with one of these


MR TOOL's less good RX-2 (yes, jealous...) travelled a few miles further than the rest of us as he had to detour around every bump in the road higher than 5mm to avoid twatting the mid-box




When Dom (Fisco) turned up with the luxobarge Cosmo we certainly should have had enough of a mix of cars to bamboozle most passing punters. Maybe they just didn't know what the hell they were looking at. Great to finally meet you anyway, dude, and this is a hell of a lot of car for the money. If I could manage to get another daft rotang in without the missus actually having me buried in four counties I'd 'ave this like a shot


Not a bad turnout then by any standards


One of Marc's 323 mates sneaked on the end but I thought it fitted in quite well, being a dilapidated Wagon on minilites


Is it wrong to like it? lol


...and as for Ian's new purchase, sorry dude, I thought I'd taken some pics of the exterior but I apparently didn't. I thought it was quite funny that Ian confessed he'd kept quiet what it was in case he got thrown off his own forum hahaha. I thought it was a pretty cool little car myself, and that's despite having been traumatised by owning one of its later sister models. Anyway, since I didn't get any photos of the outside, the secret's safe... unless anyone works it out from this sneaky shot of the bonkers "every manufacturer did it in the late 80's" experiment with rotary switchgear randomly strewn around the dash

[Marc S]

Still haven't got Facebook . Put them on Photobucket and paste the links, lazy boy

yeah yeah...

I will get the photobucket album sorted as soon as I can...my laptop is deader than A-line flares with pockets in the knees, so I have to borrow K's pc...I'll sneak on at the weekend and sort it out


nice pics by the way...

[Lucky]

Lol, Marc brings the funny Again. Get it sorted then


Right then, on with the rest of the paddock. I'd read the threads on RR saying that the non-clubstand carpark was just as interesting as the "proper" displays and not necessarily believed, but they weren't exagerrating. Any car under the 1990 cut-off can park in here rather than the public carpark, and the range and quality was simply breathtaking. I haven't bothered separating these pics from those of the clubstands, cos the cars were simply equally good in both. So, in no especial order of anything...

Plenty of cool old Datsun Z-cars around


I guess like most I prefer the lighter earlier models but even the 280s look pretty good


This blue one was a modern twist on the oldskool with big new wheels and that




for me, it's hard to improve on the stock body, little wheels look though


A rather more modern Datsun, not 100% what this was doing there but at least they had a sense of humour




There was a bewildering array of Fiat 126s on show. This is my personal favourite (and most people's, judging by the number of pics of it on RR)


Turbo Volvo Amazon blew my skirt up rather, especially larruping up the hillclimb (more on that later)


Mmmm, linear speedo FTW




....and this one too. Gotta respect any car that wears a purple sunshade


Murder Death Kill matty Anglia looked like it should be murdering women in Death Proof or something


well tuff


Speaking of Anglias, this one seems to have these fellas intrigued. What, you mean they didn't come with head-size turbos and humongous Jenvey plenums as standard, then?


Unbelievable the amount of work people put into old things like this Astra nowadays. My good lady had one of these back when we were impoverished students and that was only because it was the cheapest car we could find. It was terrible, too. This one is rather less terrible lol


dedication to....


...the cause of Shiny!


Madame le Jo's favourite car I think. Well, she insisted I take some photos of what she kept calling "the baked bean" lol. So I did. And here they are;


Funky Supertrapp exhaust on it, too. No, not those annoying twats from the Sound of Music...

[Lucky]

Plenty of almost pathological dedication to shiny wheels on show. Anyone who's willing to rock gold bolts on their splitties gets my repsec




Slight change of tack. Plenty of Beetles around, a car I've had a love/hate realtionship with pretty much my entire life (we used to have them as a family car when I was a kid). Mostly I love them more than hate


This fella had a good sense of humour on the stickers too (look closely lol)




Sadly the demo car Beetle had issues after its first run and spent the rest of the day like this


This is the one for me, looooooooow enough that I couldn't even get to see if it was on air or hydraulics or if the owner was simply very, very hardcore






Shall we be kind to this Bimmer and say this is a homage to the old Roman SPQR banner? No? OK, Nazi it is then. Still made me chuckle though


There's a lot of funny camber strategies going on nowadays


More cool old Datsuns (in fact, there was a bewildering array of Datsuns, never knew so many had survived the inevitable return to the soil!). Bluebird wagon;




Here's something you definitely don't see every day, a Nissan Cedric. Best car name evarrr?


See? Not kidding!




I'm a bit hopless on Datsun names, mostly because they didn't tend to have any. Who the hell can remember all those letters and numbers, why can't they have proper names like errr...RX-7?
Think this is a 120N?


140Y?


Brown is a colour perhaps surprisingly coming back "in" it seems, who'd have thought back when this was new?


the obligatory Tokyo Metro hanging loops...

[Lucky]

Yeah, alright, I'm reading them off the side of the car. Sue me. What's this one, then, clever sods?


Oldskool motor deserves odlskool photo styleee


Lovely li'l old Fairlady looks excellent in bronze


Open top J-tin motoring without having to go all menopausal and buy an S2000 lol


That's enough Datsuns *ED* OK, OK, moving on... Ihave a lot of love for this wee black beastie


Properly nice Jap coupe, an early Celica


riding on some properly nice oldskool Jap wheels




It just looks proper from any angle


and gave me a chance to try and up my artiness quotient with some wheelage porn


Again, don't see one for ages then.... here's one in white, for contrast


Featuring "those" rear lights that had Ford in such a lather about the Mustang's brand identity


and while we're on cool Toyota Celicas, here's one;


Is it a Celica? Is it a Supra? Errr...


oh, it's both. I think technically it's the first of the Supra brand. Correct me if you want lol. Nice wheels anyway


Quite a few Corollas about, too. This purple one was well finished, to put it mildly. I'm not 100% about the origami-style hovercraft skirts, but it's a properly immaculate car with some nice touches....


....like the crystal replacment controls


...and a huge dildo knob lol

[Lucky]

I suppose this sort of thing is inevitable...


Panda Levin homage to that tofushop delivery car


Got camber (part 324)


Movin on from Toyotas for a bit then, here's an arbitrary camper van in the best factory paint evar


....which is more than you can say of this one, which barely has any paint left at all hahaha


the orange flashing light is the only shiny bit on it lol


Still, we all like a bit of rat-look don't we, and speaking of which;


I've got a fair amount of love for the Karmann Ghia anyway, who can fail to love a car that even the manufacturer touted as the slowest-accelerating sportscar on sale? This rusty one was mega though


well, it's not entirely rusty. Some of it's filler


Hardly a luxurious place to spend time


Excellent. Want one


There wasn't just Euro and Jap rides there, there was some Americana too. Sneaky peek;


Oooooh, it's like a little sliver of suspender peeking through lol. The original bonkers roadster






"that" pert, curvaceous rump


and at the opposite end of the American car spectrum, an Oldsmobile Cutlass (I think, seems to be the same body as a Monte Carlo so I guess an 80s model? Let me know if you know lol)




Spokes and dice caps. Lot of it about, doesn't make it bad

[Lucky]

A bit of English Americana (if that makes sense?). Cortinas were basically 2/3-scale muscle cars after all, weren't they? This V6 is a bit tuff


As for different reasons was this red 'un that appeared to have been brush painted


The Dark Horse Mustang was sitting looking mean. I've got a load of pics of this wheelying like a mad thing, it looks just as evil sitting still


it even kills the grass where it stands lol. Death by fire!


Sequeing seamlessly from one side-exit drag bus to another (damn, I'm good) comes this very English analogue


Dunno whether this was one of the official demo cars or not, but massive respect for the driver


...because frankly you couldn't have picked a car that was further from it's purpose-built comfort zone than the incredibly nadgery narrow track up the hill, and the dude wasn't exactly holding it back


immaculately presented as well, top bombing, sir!


a car that was perhaps closer to its natural habitat was this bespoke mid-engined Silvia. I'd have liked to get more in-depth pics of this but never got round to it. It was epic watching it doriftuu around the toight-like-a-toiger hairpin though


RR Car of the Year?


Hell, yeah! You have to ask, you wouldn't understand




More cool Beetle strategies. More camber weirdness (part 475)


Nice to see kerb feelers still out and about. This one came out a bit errrr.... green


Wolf and Castle ....errr, that'll be Wolfsburg then... motif I remember so well from our cars when I was little. We had a later model that was embossed on the wheel and my brother ended up with it embossed in his sternum backwards when he stuck the car into a tree lol


I rarely feel motivated to take pics of Bimmers, they just don't rock my world, but this one is undeniably a bit special


Plenty of groovy Golfs abound


More BBS righteousness, unsusprisingly


I love this graffiti job, not only for being bold and different...


...but also for actually being pretty good

[Lucky]

Moar graffiti;


Blimey, a Hillman Hunter wagon. Lovely job, so clean. I'd forgotten these things even existed




Impish Imp with just the right amount of distressed look patination


Excellent well used C-Type Jag




with that Punisher/the Scream motif out front lol


And in contrast, a proper gentlemen's express Jag


Judging by the plates this one had come a fair old way!




Not your average Reliant Kitten! Not often you see a Cossie lump taking up quite such a big percentage of the car it's in!


The demo-car Lancia is a bit of a bloody thing. Awesome piece of rolling motorsport heritage


It's a tool. No, not that sort


Strange beauty


One couldn't help but notice this thing, even in a field full of arresting cars


for when your "normal" Landy just isn't manly enough


Loving the method of blocking off the frame tubes, dunno if this was intentional but it made me chuckle

[Lucky]

This made me think, I didn't remember any Lotus Cortinas being four doors though I've a vague recollection of some sort of dress-up package being offered


and the twin-cam badges don't relate to what you'd have first thought


Ain't too shabby a job by any standards though. Nice mix of ancient and modern




A brace of Matras. Can't remember the last time I even saw one, let alone a breeding pair lol


Mini plus Chopper equals cool?


Bit of local colour, made me happy to see this. Not often you see a Milsteltoe this big nowadays, times are tough even for saprophytic parasite plantforms. Rare to see one at all these days, let alone a damn great huge one. No, I'm not weird


You have to be confident in your product to name any car a "Monarch". Managed to forget to take any full-car pics of the big Mercury though. OOps


Ian's wasn't the only nicely preserved first-gen MR2 there. I like this Panda one very much


especially from this angle


the wheels suited perfectly too. Is there any Jap coupe that doesn't suit a panda paint?


This kept me entertained. From here it just looks a nicely sorted old Trumpet


...but there's hours of fun to be had comparing your musical preferences with the roof. Me and Tim decided the dude had reasonable taste, on balance hahaha


Inevitably there were a few of the "other" famous Mazda around. This was one of my favourites, low and sleek




....and this one; low and errrr, not sleek