It was a lovely day, made less lovely by the guy at the gate wanting 26 sodding quid to let me in, but immediately improved by the display of McLarens just inside the entrance. Look at that, from the days when the sponsors were incidental to the race car and the power adder and limiter rules weren't drawn from a hat before the season.
Now this really took me back - when I was a kid I was well into rallying, and my favourite driver was Tony Pond. I remember seeing him tonking about in a TR7 V8 like this in the late Seventies. My dad took me on a trip to Belgium to watch the Ypres Rally in 1981, a rally that Tony Pond won in one of these the year before. No such luck in 1981 - it was won by a sodding Ferrari, I think!
There was loads of old rally tackle floating about, some of it slightly less likely than others. This Rover Vitesse can't have been too handy on a forest stage, but it looked terrific.
Now these were mental - the 6R4, that surely owed bugger all to the Austin Metro they were based on. Mid-engined, insane, and worth a small fortune now.
Ah, talking of small fortunes, was there ever a more gorgeous rally special than the Lancia Stratos? I remember watching them on the RAC Rally in the Seventies where, somehow, they still got beaten by bloody Ford Escorts!
The Sunbeam Lotus... possibly the most non-descript hatchback in the world until Lotus started dicking about with it. What was the last little rear-drive hatch in production? The Sunbeam only managed to hang on until 1981, while the Chevette and the Starlet lasted to '84. Was there anything after that?
Of course there was one car that changed the whole damn game and rendered shonky little Escorts and Sunbeams obsolete almost overnight, and it was this fine piece of German engineering. Amazingly well-built, blisteringly fast and on the very cutting edge of the latest technology, it dominated the world. And parked in front of it is an Audi.
Another car that was surrounded by a reef of slightly sweaty men with tented trousers was this, marked up as having been driven by Jimmy McRae. Behind it is a Subaru, marked up as having been driven by Colin McRae, a car from back when Subaru were best known for building those little rust-while-you-wait four-wheel drive pickups, rather than cars for people who think that even though everyone knows a flat-four sounds atrocious, they should fit an exhaust that amplifies it.
No matter how shiny and valuable the classic race machinery is, you can't beat a good old unfinished project to draw the crowds in. This old Wolseley 1500 was the classic rally project for some university.
I think it spoke a volume about me that, out of all these classic rally cars and race cars, the thing that really made me go 'wow' was a MkI Transit beavertail. I must have some gyppo blood in me somewhere.
Even so, this beauty was hiding a 2.9 fuel injected Cologne V6 and five-speed manual. He only lives just up the road from me, too. Never mind using it to haul a race car around; I'd be inclined to race the transporter!
This old sixpence-cab Austin was a treat, too.
Meanwhile, the 'Sheep In Wolf's Clothing' Mustang Pinto project continues apace. Well, 'bloody slow' is a pace, isn't it? It's all bolted in - using actual bolts, now, not just the tent pegs that have held the transmission crossmember in for a few weeks - and the PAS is plumbed in, the cooling is plumbed in, and the fuel lines are plumbed in. Just ... well, everything else to do now.
It's the NSCC Driver's Meeting this weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it, though I have so many bits of car and other stuff to bring along that I should probably have considered chartering a cargo aircraft. Or just buying that V6 Transit.
Eugene
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